Helldivers 2’s Galactic War is under the control of only one person: Joel, the Game Master

Malevelon Creek is lost. The Automatons have taken over entire sectors of the galaxy. The bugs continue to pester the other side of the galaxy, and rumblings of a third faction are starting to bubble up. How will the Galactic War turn out? As it turns out, there’s only one person who knows, and his name is… Joel.

This revelation comes directly from CEO of Arrowhead Johan Pilestedt, who in an interview with PC Gamer casually mentioned how the entire war is being steered by a member of the developer team named Joel. “We have an actual person with the job title of Game Master,” he said. “We have a lot of systems built into the game where the Game Master has a lot of control over the play experience. It’s something that we’re continuously evolving based on what’s happening in the game. And as part of the roadmap, there are things that we want to keep secret because we want to surprise and delight.”

Previously, we learned about how other employees monitor players in real-time, being able to adjust sessions on the fly by granting certain helldivers a powerful stratagem or causing hordes of enemies to appear. We assumed it was this same team that would be steering the actual planning of the war, but as it turns out, only Joel is in charge of molding the narrative of the war with a special set of tools and systems.

Like a table-top game, but bigger

Taking inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons (hence the title of “Game Master”), the studio wants to create a storytelling experience with the help of player feedback. Pilestedt compared how you design a campaign for a small party to the way they’re designing the evolution of the war right now for the many players dropping into invaded planets. “It’s the same format when you build that for millions of players, it’s just that you can’t get as personal with every individual. But you can still do the same twists and turns.”

Player attachments to certain planets like Malevelon Creek, better known by the community as “Space Vietnam”, has also been noticed by the developers and Joel. Which means that they want to start giving each planet a bit more personality for future events. “We look at the individual planets as, ‘There was a planet that we made, that was good fun,’ and we have made so many of them. But the community’s attachment to each planet is significant … So one of the things we’re looking at internally is how can we reconsider these planets to become more of a character going forward?”

How will the war go? We only know that the courageous helldivers will continue to drop into battle in the defense of liberty and democracy. And now we can put a name to the mastermind behind all of Super Earth’s enemies: “Jo-El, The Game Master”...