Helldivers 2 players hungry to pick and choose which armor and abilities they wield in combat might go starving soon, as Arrowhead Studios chief executive Johan Pilestedt confirmed today the studio is “not doing transmog,” much to the community’s chagrin.
Pilestedt stated transmog was not something the devs were considering adding to Helldivers 2 in an April 12 reply on X (formerly Twitter) to a player suggesting the cosmetic feature. Pilestedt was quick to shoot down any ideas of a cosmetic armor system where you replace the look of your outfit but keep its original abilities. “Equipment looks different because it has different effects,” the CEO explained, “Swapping one for the other is like having an apple that tastes like bacon or the other way around.” The response left no room for interpretation: Helldivers 2 has absolutely zero plans to allow players to look how they want, and the studio intends to keep it that way.
Pilestedt is referring to just the chest and leg pieces of Helldivers 2. Since helmets and capes have no actual stat bonuses, the chest pieces become paramount to your Diver’s appearance. For some players, this means wearing gigantic chunks of metal that are hard to fit into your fashion sense without spending Warbond Medals liberally. And, if you buy armor from the Super Credit shop, you have to shell out another few hundred Super Credits for a matching helmet. A transmog system could theoretically fix the issue of shilling out a lot of currency to complete the look, but it sounds like that’s not on the docket or even in the dev’s thought process.
This opinion lent itself to community outcry, unsurprisingly. The most popular responses have thankfully been civil. One player saw Pilestedt’s argument and agreed but added that there should perhaps be an easier way to see what abilities each Diver is bringing to the fight. Another brought up how the armor is “absolutely not distinctive enough” to tell what bonuses a player is getting from it alone.
Considering that, as of right now, there are only eight armor perks you can have across several dozen chest plates, this is a fair argument. Several pieces of armor look entirely different from one another, yet sport the same armor and benefits.
However, it’s not the stats that matter in this case. “It doesn’t have to make sense,” said a particularly Democratic Diver. “Let us look how we want to spread managed Democracy, it’s not that deep.” While less analytic, it gets to the heart of the issue: Transmog would make the community happy, something the Helldivers 2 team has been great at doing so far.
Let’s hope Pilestedt and the rest of the Arrowhead Studios team see this backlash and consider adding armor cosmetics of some kind in the near future.
