Arrowhead reveals the Helldivers 2 ideas left on its cutting room floor, from 5-player squads to low-gravity planets and a whole new armor system

Arrowhead Game Studios' first swing at a big live service shooter was pretty much a homerun - Helldivers 2 was not only was it one of last year's best-selling games, it was also one of the most uncontroversially fun shooters in ages, despite some wonky updates. But Arrowhead still has even more cool ideas it had to leave on the cutting room floor.

Head of product testing Patrik 'Fluffy' Lasota said as much during the game's first anniversary livestream, where he revealed that developers toyed around and then shelved planets with lower gravity. So, theoretically, our divers could be floating around and long-jumping away from flying bugs.

Around 85% of the game's systems can apparently handle low-gravity planets, according to Lasota, but implementing it would require a ton of extra work from animators. Arrowhead would also need to rethink how jetpacks and presumably enemies would behave, meaning low-grav is technically "possible" in the future but maybe not "feasible."

What's perhaps more juicy is that Helldivers 2 "was originally designed for five players, actually." Arrowhead found that when a fifth player joined a squad, "the teams would split unevenly, and suddenly you're a three-stack and a two-stack, and it creates this unbalance." Arrowhead also found that one player was almost always "just standing around, not really participating in the action," since four-player squads can pretty comfortably spread democracy in most game modes. The other major problem with a five-player squad was that teams could just equip every viable Stratagem build between them, so "you really didn't have to make any choices" or sacrifices.

The only other scrapped idea Lasota mentions is an alternative armor system that "didn't play well" - and that Arrowhead didn't have time to fix before launch - though, he doesn't go into detail on how different it was exactly.

Arrowhead isn't just cutting stuff, though. The developer teased it has plans to fix Helldivers 2's endgame problem, but it can't tell us how otherwise our expectations will be too high.