Helldivers 2 did its first crossover event with Killzone, recently, and it didn’t go too well. That’s mostly because it was composed of weirdly expensive items that operated outside of the typical Warbonds system, leading to a community backlash so strong that Arrowhead released the second half for free by way of apology. The roller coaster ride continues.
Still, that’s just a monetisation problem, and it’ll be easily solved in future updates as Arrowhead experiments—and while the game doesn’t want to become the Fortnite of grimdark futures or anything, there’s one obvious crossover that’d be an intergalactic no brainer: Warhammer 40k.
During an impromptu Q&A session on the Helldivers 2 Discord (thanks, GamesRadar) CEO Shams Jorjani was quick to swat down assumptions that this hasn’t come to fruition yet because Games Workshop, the wargame’s creators, are a bunch of gits who don’t want to share their IP. In fact, quite the opposite.
“I can tell you [Games Workshop] would love a crossover—and we’re huge 40k fans ourselves—but time and resources are finite and we’ve got our hands busy,” Jorjani explains.
Which, honestly, fair enough—we’re talking a game that has a constant, ever-shifting galactic war, a bunch of new Warbond weapons with every major update, and a new faction to worry about. It only just feels like Arrowhead’s found its footing after an unexpected tide of player interest at the start of 2024, let alone fretting about the monetisation of crossovers, which has already proven itself to be a tricky manoeuvre.
Still, this at least groks with a different message Jorjani sent back in December of last year, where he admitted that “GW have been courting us”, and that the team is full of “huge fans”.
As for why it’s such an obvious pick, well, Helldivers 2 and 40k occupy a lot of the same ‘satire of intergalactic fascism’ venn diagram, except one sends it up as a comedic ode to Starship Troopers, while the other puts on its most serious face and tells you that “in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.”
Really, the major issue would be how silly your average Helldiver would look in a set of Space Marine armour—while I would never speak ill of democracy’s finest, they aren’t Space Marines, who are genetically-modified biological tanks with two hearts, three lungs, and a brain that can shut half of itself down to sleep. Most of Super Earth’s cannon fodder are barely of conscription age, and don’t typically make it much longer.