Helldivers 2 has human game masters who tweak your co-op fights in real-time
For better and worse
Helldivers 2 pits co-op players against swarms of computer-controlled aliens and robots in the context of a vast, ongoing galactic war. There might be someone else in battles with the power to tip the scales, however: an omniscient game master, employed by developers Arrowhead, who can monitor the fight and drop in buffs and debuffs to change the flow of the fight.
In a recent interview with PlayStation Access, deputy game director Sagar Beroshi talked about the influence they have taken from tabletop games, and how that influence extends beyond Warhammer 40K-style cape-wearing super soldiers.
"In a lot of tabletop gaming you have a dungeon master or a game master, right? We also have a game master in this game. It's very hard to achieve exactly what you get at a table, but we wanted flavours of that in this game. This is not a minor part of our game, this is a significant feature that we've designed," says Beroshi.
"We have a suite of tools and a suite of real life human beings, not just AI bots, that are doing this. That are observing the gameplay as it's happening and responding in real-time."
An example is given of a 500kg bomb, one of Helldivers 2's "strategems", being dropped from the sky for one player to pick up and use.
"One of our team members was observing your play style, and debated what to do, and was like, I'm going to drop them this extra strategem. You were playing with us at the same as you were playing with each and against the bad guys," says Beroshi. "So we have this game master functionality where we can drop in more or less things like buffs, but sometimes it's debuffs will happen too.
"A good challenge sometimes can be really valuable. Imagine how tight it was towards the end of some of those missions. What if you had to hold and defend the extraction zone for twice as long as you did? Especially at the higher difficulty levels, those marginal differences could be the difference between success and failure."
I'm dying to know more about the practicalities of this system. The practical part of me says that having human game masters is a tough thing to scale, so you can't have them present in every game, and so you have to make their influence marginal just to stop the experience being substantially worse when a human game master isn't present.
I sort of want the practical part of me to shut up, though, because on its face this sounds cool. As does Helldivers 2 hanging its simple bug hunts off a much larger, dynamic Galactic War that should ebb and flow over months or years.
Helldivers 2 launches in just a couple of days, on February 8th.