Arrowhead CCO Johan Pilestedt corrects player who thought he'd griped about Magicka being review bombed, says 'we got so-so reviews' in 2011 because of bugs—also, it was 'released without our knowledge'

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It was a wild wizard west out there.

helldivers 2 arrowhead CCO johan pilestedt
(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

Helldivers 2 is—look, we all know this game is stuck in an eternal 'it's so over/we're so back' patch cycle at this point, and if I say it's going through a rough period one more time, I'm going to lose it. There are problems and bugs again, Arrowhead's dedicated to fixing them again, the game will be good again at some indeterminable point in the future, you get the picture.

To vent some of this steam, Helldivers has—as a lot of Reddit communities do—a discussion sub where harsher, critical takes are encouraged. It goes by the name of HelldiversUnfiltered and, in an impressive display of taking it on the chin, Arrowhead's CCO has been browsing it.

Not wanting to let something go un-corrected, Pilestedt has understandably hopped in to mop things up: "That's... made up. Review bombing as a concept wasn't a thing—we got so-so reviews because Magicka was buggy and wasn't optimized."

As to why, it is absolutely a matter of public record that Magicka was "released without our knowledge—we just saw it on the front page of Steam and we were like: 'wtf is going on?'—publisher had hit the release button while we were still fixing bugs—made us release patches every day until it was decent."

In a follow-up comment, Pilestedt states: "There was collateral on Helldivers 1 from the review bombing which I thought was unjustified, and I then tweeted about it being the same as review bombing Magicka—which some people then took like an instruction."

Harvey Randall
Harvey Randall
Staff Writer

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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