Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios has got a lot of attention over the past year for their game master-driven plot. To commemorate the first anniversary of Helldivers 2's release, extremely private game master J.O.E.L. is doing his first real public appearance in a video talking about the game master's favorite moment of the first year.
In the video, Joel outlines the early-war defense of swampy Mort as their favorite, most nail-biting moment in the war. Amid an onslaught of Automaton attacks against planets in the galactic southwest, 48 hours of robotic onslaught was turned back at Mort—but just barely, and as the enemy closed in, Steam maintenance crippled the Helldivers' forces by disconnecting every Helldiver on PC.
"The only ones left on the ground of Mort were the PlayStation Helldivers. They held the line long enough for the Steam maintenance to conclude and the PC Helldivers to come back in. And with three minutes left the Helldivers turned a projected defeat into the most nail-bitingly close win that we had seen up to that point and still statistically speaking is probably the closest win we've seen. Three minutes left on a 48-hour event that's like 0.01% left in terms of time. That moment was one of my personal favorites simply because it proved to us that we're onto something special with the galactic war," says the shadowy figure representing J.O.E.L. in the video.
Keeping up with the antics of Joel and the game community's reaction has been a delightful experience over the past year—especially if you're someone who enjoys the tabletop roleplaying roots of a game master. It started with the revelation that, yeah, they had a person in charge of running a dynamic meta-story. Late last year Arrowhead said that the job of Joel had smoothly evolved into a multi-person team in charge of those events.
Arrowhead's dynamic and interesting approach to a live-service, cooperative game has worked for it. Helldivers 2 was the best multiplayer game of 2024, according to the good people here at PC Gamer, and it even featured a gun so fun as to earn a gun of the year award.
For their part, Arrowhead is thrilled to keep supporting the game. Director Johan Pilestedt says that if they can keep the game going for 10 years, they'll do just that. Meanwhile, in-game, Joel is going to have the evil aliens dunk a black hole into Super Earth like a cosmic basketball.
