Helldivers 2 director says "balance is a myth," and devs shouldn't spend more than 5% of their time on it: "If you balance out all the chaos, you've made an uninteresting game"

Helldivers 2 Ultimatum
(Image credit: PlayStation)

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Helldivers 2 director Johan Pilestedt reckons game developers are🔜 spending too much time on balance and not enough time on fun.

There's no doubt that balance is one of the most🦹 buzzed-about topics in live-service games, with titles like Diablo 4, M💖arvel Rivals, and Overwatch constantly pushing out patches largely dedicated to nerfs and buffs in an effort to make the experience as fair to all players as possible.

Howeve🍰r, Pilestedt argues that a perfectly balanced game is an illusion🌜 not worth chasing save for a small percentage of development time.

Speaking during a Game Developers Conference 2025 panel that Games⛄Radar+ attended, Pilestedt made the case for minimal balance updates in favor of interesting game design.

"Balance is a myth. Fun first, balance later," he said. "Game designers nowadays are obsessed with balance. Balance is 5% of the work that you should be doing. It's the polishing state of game design. If you start thinki♍ng about balance and using that as the method for success, you're an idiot.

"Balancing is not game design. Game design is about experience. If you balance out all the chaos, you've made an uninteresting game. Balance is the polishing of the object, and if you smoothen that out too muc🔥h, it will just be a non-experience."

While Pilestedt sounds pretty unbothered here, Helldivers 2 is am🅘ong the many online games that have struggled to find the harmony between balance and fun sin🌄ce launch.

Game director Michael Eriksson told GamesRadar+ i🐷n December that the game's road from launch was a "rollercoaster" that Arrowhead was nonetheless "privileg💎ed" to be on.

M🔥eanwhile, Pilstedt himself has attributed the game's myriad balance patches to "a leadership issue more than anything."

Despite Arrowhead trying to fix it twice, Helldivers 2 still features a chaotic bug that lets you slide around like a snake, and "it's even more hilarious" after the latest update.

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG ওon the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer i༺n 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.

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