The Case for Helldivers 2 to Revist its Scrapped Five-Person Squad Plans

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home March 11, 2025 32 Views 7 Min Read
The Case for Helldivers 2 to Revist its Scrapped Five-Person Squad Plans

Fans of the original game will attest to how different Helldivers 2 is from its predecessor. The simple act of making the game a third-person action shooter rather than a top-down perspective did wonders for the series’ mass appeal by putting the player more directly in the chaos of combat. It’s tangible proof that sometimes changing the established formula can be a good, even necessary, thing. But the perspective change wasn’t the only shakeup Arrowhead considered when making its record-shattering sequel.

Recent reports indicate that early plans for Helldivers 2 featured five-person squads as opposed to the tried and true four-strong teams. The plans never made it past early development, with developers citing problems making the larger squads work with the objectives, enemy counts, and overall difficulty they were going for with the game. But with one full year of Helldivers 2′s live service officially in the books, it may be time to reconsider expanding the ranks of Super Earth’s finest.

Helldivers 2 May Need to Tap One Source for New Recruits to Prevent Another Meridia Situation

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Helldivers 2 May Need to Tap One Source for New Recruits to Prevent Another Meridia Situation

Helldivers 2 experienced a devastating loss after a Major Order failure, and rallying fresh troops may be the key to future success.

Arrowhead Can Still Make Five-Person Squads Work in Helldivers 2

Bigger Maps, More Enemies, More Helldivers

Arrowhead doesn’t seem afraid to shake things up with the game’s formula, and players don’t even need to look at the original Helldivers to see it. The surprise addition of the Illuminate in December proved that beyond any shadow of a doubt. The update added a new faction and, arguably more importantly, an entirely new type of biome for matches to take place in: urbanized city environments. But more than anything, the update showed the community that Arrowhead is willing to shake things up in a big way. Helldivers 2 will not always be the same game it was at launch when the developers are willing to go for the big swings.

The best way to add an extra player to each game might just be to expand map sizes ever so slightly and up the enemy count. It would go hand in hand with those in the community claiming Helldivers 2 needs a difficulty buff. Increase the scale of the maps, increase enemy volume, and give players an extra slot on their team to compensate for the upscaling of everything else.

This wouldn’t take too much effort on the balancing front. The enemies are already plenty hardy as they currently exist, so no buffs are needed for them on an individual level. The developers wouldn’t even need to change the amount of reinforcements in a given lobby. 20 lives for a squad of five just means everyone present gets four respawns instead of four, upping the difficulty ever so slightly to reflect the added body on the team.

New Mode Or Mission Type With Five Divers

But maybe Arrowhead doesn’t want to change the core of the game. After all, there are still only four pods for players to enter on the super destroyer. Perhaps the four-man squad is too deeply baked into the core of Helldivers 2 to permanently change anything now. This leaves room for new extreme mission types in Helldivers 2 that require larger than average amounts of force.

When the helldivers descended on Meridia to create the dark fluid and eventually destroy the planet, it was one of the largest in-game campaigns/storylines to-date. It truly felt like a monumental effort by the community undertaking these new types of missions, working toward a very particular, grand scale goal over a few weeks. It was one of the best examples of Arrowhead’s meta narrative storytelling making players feel as though they’re actually a part of the galactic war.

In the future, these types of missions can be made even more special if Arrowhead temporarily increases squad sizes by one player. This would perfectly signify the importance of the mission at hand: the normal show of force of four divers just was not enough, so Super Earth high command needed to requisition a fifth body for the never-ending meat grinder that is their war machine.

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