As Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead looks to address long-festering technical issues, it's also working to adjust several internal processes. According to production director Alex Bolle, that includes giving the "last step in the development process before release" more elbow room, seemingly to avoid adding to the game's pile of problems.
Bolle's role is the focus of the first in a new series of blog posts from Arrowhead, dubbed "Diving Into the Development Team." The goal, it seems, is to help players understand how the various moving parts of the team work together to make a good game.
"While our engine team is working on both the engine and another blog related to the tech we use, our Production Director, Alex Bolle, wanted to share some of the processes the development team undergoes at Arrowhead," the post reads.
One standout section covers the "hardening" stage of development for an update or patch. As Bolle explains, "hardening is our last step in the development process before release, and it’s been something that we’ve pledged to take as a main priority moving forward. We are currently addressing the issues and looking for more before we release more goodness for the players."
This lines up with Arrowhead's previous verbiage on what the studio needs to triage instead of just shoveling more content into Helldivers 2 like coal into a broken engine. Game director Mikael Eriksson recently said the game is "starting to break at the seams" after putting content before technical processes for too long.
Bolle points out one way this can happen. "For the longest time our features would be considered ready and implemented in the release build at the very last minute," the production director says. "We’re working with the teams to stop that.
"We use the term 'functional' as a minimum standard for when features should be in the game," Bolle continues. "For example, the Hive Lord, as functional, was a very rough version of what players experienced."
Without a fly-on-the-wall view of Arrowhead's processes, we can't reliably point to this "last-minute" implementation as a smoking gun for issues X, Y, and Z. I've spoken to enough live service game developers to know that having your back to the wall on deadlines or checks isn't at all uncommon.
Hearing this from Bolle, I don't know if fellow devs would gasp in horror, nod in commiseration, or simply weep into their hands. One thing's for sure: Arrowhead doesn't like cutting it this close either, and any understanding of game development will tell you that more available time, or more rigorous checks, is almost always good.
