Johan Pilestedt, the CCO of Arrowhead Game Studios, has revealed during a chat at the Game Developers Conference this week that Helldivers 2 took a lot longer than four years to develop as initially planned, partly due to the fact the team decided to skip pre-production altogether.
We were throwing around some ideas, and then we got a little cautious because we’ve been burned before by making games that are a little bit too complicated for what we’re capable of, and then having to crunch. It takes so much energy. So we said, ‘This will be easy. We can probably do it in four years.’
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Pilestedt added that Helldivers 2’s development cycle extended far beyond the four-year mark however, instead taking seven years, 11 months, and 26 days in grand total. While there were many factors as to why the game took so long, Pilestedt mentioned the fact pre-production was skipped over as one of the main reasons.
We already knew where the game was going to go and headed straight into production—it was a really, really, really bad idea,Always do your homework before you start spending millions and millions and millions of dollars in making a game.
Helldivers 2 was released for PS5 and PC in February 2024, and the latest title update was released earlier this week. Read more about the patch here.
[Source – PCGamer]