Published Jan 25, 2026, 6:00 PM EST
Jared is a writer, editor, and Communications Studies graduate who loves popular nerd culture (almost anything to do with Marvel, DC, Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings) and the interactive storytelling medium. Jared's first console was the PS1, wherein he fell for Spider-Man, Spyro the Dragon, and Crash Bandicoot.
Helldivers 2 doesn’t feature a rogue-lite mode, but that might be the case forever, with Arrowhead CCO and Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt casually admitting to having a “a prototype of a rogue-lite mode - it changes the game fundamentally!” Ever since, it’s been fascinating to imagine what a rogue-lite mode could look like in Helldivers 2.
The brilliance of a hypothetical rogue-lite mode in Helldivers 2 is that the game is already completely complementary to the tropes of a rogue-lite game. Only, players forfeit the randomness of any selected mission when they equip a loadout and view what terrors and opportunities await in the Galactic War holomap table’s debrief. That said, players aren’t necessarily sure what side objectives will be available, and there is always an element of cinematic improvisation regarding how players traverse a map between objectives.
Random Enemy Factions
Botdivers, Bugdivers, and Squiddivers—three corners of the community who main one Helldivers 2 enemy faction over another due to personal preference. There’s actually quite a lot that is different between Automatons, Terminids, and the Illuminate, from what loadout, stratagems, and weapons will perform optimally to what objectives can be expected.
It would then be extraordinarily fun if players couldn’t create a predetermined loadout and didn’t know what enemy faction they’d be up against until they launched their Hellpods. Having to flee from a horde of Fleshmobs or a pack of Stalkers, for example, would be horrifying if players hadn’t even managed to find a weapon other than a CQC-19 Stun Lance yet.
Plus, what this would do is compel players to know each enemy faction well enough that they can masterfully perform against bots, bugs, and squids alike. Some players would inherently fare better if they were facing an enemy faction they played against exclusively, and those same players might have a bit of trouble battling an enemy faction they never elect to confront ordinarily.
Of course, the RNG of a rogue-lite would mean some players are at a disadvantage if they dive on a planet with an enemy faction that is decidedly more difficult. It wouldn’t be a hot take to say that Automatons can be much more challenging to fight than Terminids, yet players could be highly lucky and stumble on a loadout of anti-tank weaponry and Helldivers 2’s Orbital nuke stratagems.
Each Helldivers 2 mission features a timer that informs players how long they have to finish the main objective successfully and call for extraction before the Destroyer departs from that planet’s orbit. Even Helldivers 2’s Evacuate High-Value Assets defense missions have a timer, despite all rockets launching well before the timer expires.
This provides players with a sense of urgency, and also wonderfully prevents missions from lasting an excruciatingly long time. Players can technically stay longer on more generic missions by calling in extraction and refusing to board the Pelican when it arrives, but there’s debatably no real reason to do so unless squads are having fun slaying enemies or have more glinting points of interest to investigate.
A timer seems like it’d be invaluable in a standalone rogue-lite mode, too. It would maintain that sense of urgency, and, if much shorter, it could ensure that nobody dilly-dallies once they’ve dived into the planet’s atmosphere and landed on its surface.
In fact, players who prefer quicker, in-and-out matches for resources and XP would probably enjoy a rogue-lite mode like this more than the actual vanilla game. Arrowhead may have acknowledged this, after all, as it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that there would be a prototype already if no rogue-lite mode was ever planned to launch in Helldivers 2’s live-service development future.
An Actual Use For Samples Of All Kinds
For season Helldivers who have already unlocked all available Destroyer ship modules with the assorted Requisition slips and samples required, samples of any kind—common, rare, or super—are more or less useless to collect while on a mission. There are really only two reasons to bother scavenging for samples at this point, when progression is complete: donating them to Democracy Space Station (DSS) efforts, and gathering them to help participate in the completion of Helldivers 2 Major Orders that task players with collectively accumulating a certain number of a certain type of samples.
If caches or points of interest were scattered about on a rogue-lite mode map that cost samples, players would suddenly have an incredible incentive to collect them. Caches with weapons, stratagems, and other items would make sample-gathering the utmost priority, and fortune favoring anyone with super samples might have a better chance at acquiring an OP weapon like Helldivers 2’s R-36 Eruptor.
Hades’ Keepsake System Is The Key To Replayability
Hades and Hades 2’s Keepsakes are trinkets players can unlock that give them a certain buff or gameplay benefit. Only one can be equipped at the beginning of the run, though they can be swapped when players transition between regions, and the ones players swap from cannot be equipped again until the end of a run.
Moreover, Keepsakes can be upgraded by having them equipped and completing individual encounters/rooms. It’s a simple system that goes a long way in determining what playstyle or routing players will choose, and the same could be terrific in a Helldivers 2 rogue-lite mode.
For example, Hades’ Lucky Tooth Keepsake, gained from Skelly, allows players to “automatically restore up to 50/75/100 health when your Life Total is depleted (once per escape attempt),” stacking atop players’ Death Defiances, as well. Likewise, Hades 2’s Fig Leaf Keepsake, gained from Dionysus, proposes a percentage-based chance that “a single encounter in 1/2/3/4 region(s) may be blissfully free from foes the rest of this night.”
Helldivers 2’s boosters could feasibly play the role of Hades’ Keepsakes. The problem with this, though, is that hardly any boosters are as valuable as the core four that have undeniably become a meta-strengthened loadout in a full squad of four players: Vitality Enhancement, Stamina Enhancement, Hellpod Space Optimization, and Experimental Infusion. So, it’s easy to see how, once players unlocked these four as ‘Keepsakes,’ they would be the only ones that are ever equipped thereafter, with minor, infrequent deviations purely for the sake of variety.
Nonetheless, a Keepsake system could be fantastic, as it is in Supergiant’s Hades games. If this involved a significant overhauling of boosters, with this overhaul simultaneously affecting the base game, then it could be precisely what Helldivers 2 needs to shake loose the current booster meta.
A Squad That Doesn’t Dive Together
Helldivers 2 has baked-in voice comms. Still, communication is perfectly achievable via in-game text chatting and fully sufficient pings. If players dove into a rogue-lite mode mission and didn’t all land in the same location together, lobbies could be made far more interesting, regardless of whether players are talking aloud to each other or communicating nonverbally.
It might be thrilling for players to not know where they’ll dive, with that uncertainty potentially landing them in the middle of a Terminid Mega Nest or an Automaton Factory Strider convoy. By themselves, players would then be immediately forced to try to regroup with their teammates, or potentially decide to go it alone and clear the objectives that they’ve spawned near.
If nothing else, this could add a bit of a hectic edge to the start of any rogue-lite mission when players must get their bearings, choose where to go, and obtain weapons and items. As a solo Helldivers 2 player, depending on how big the map was and what players would have to accomplish to ‘win’ and extract, it could be nightmarish anyway.
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