Late last year, Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt briefly teased on social media that Arrowhead had put together a prototype for a roguelite mode which would fundamentally change the shooter. Months on, the studio have properly pulled the cover off said system. It’s dubbed Planet Warfronts and is coming as part of a raft of changes/additions to Helldivers 2’s intergalactic perma-conflict.

Following up on last month’s blog post promising galactic war changes this summer, June’s post from Helldivers 2 game director Mikael Eriksson offers a bit more detail as to what the studio have in store for the coming months.

Planet Warfronts won’t be the first of these additions to arrive, but it does sound like it’s got the most potential to substantially shake up the helldiving experience. “Before we launched the game, we experimented with dynamic warfronts on planets, where players needed to make strategic community decisions on a planet level in order to liberate it,” Eriksson explained. “While it was promising, we realised we didn’t have the content needed to do it justice at the time. We feel we’ve now added enough content to realise the vision we had for Planet Warfronts, and it’s going to be the next big thing we’re working towards in the Galactic War.”

Once these warfronts go live, missions will automatically classified as either defensive ops in liberated territory, frontline skirmishes, and behind the lines ops in enemy territory. Through completing these, you’ll fight across the surface of a planet as part of more intricately detailed offensives designed around reaching key strategic locations like cities, where different enemy variants might lurk to keep you on your toes. Planet liberation goals like liberating an area within a set time limit or taking out specific foes to unlock “crucial operations”. So, an extra layer of war within the wider conflict of the galactic war, which usuall tasks players with conquering or holding planets, but doesn’t get as lost in the nitty-gritty of how it’s done.

Before the curremtly release windowless warfronts arrive, Arrowhead are rolling out Galactic War Campaigns to replace Major Orders. The latter are the community goals in the game’s war and they typically last about a week at a time. With the introduction of campaigns, these goals will run for between one and three weeks at a time, allowing for some deeper storytelling and the rolling out of more rewards. Personal Orders, the shooter’s goals for you as an individual player, are also morphing into a new system dubbed Personal Campaign Progression at some point this year, with the goal of tying the new campaigns to personal rewards that’ll keop folks going even if all is lost collectively.

Finally, Arrowhead are working on a revamp of the ships divers drop into battle from, with the ship module system getting an overhaul to encourage more customisation to fit different playstyles. An entire new ship is also coming, with the studio planning to offer the choice between an entire fleet of vessels with different pros and cons down the line.

These and the other minor tweaks listed in the post aren’t “an exhaustive list” of what Arrowhead have up their sleeve, Eriksson noted. Regardless, it’s a beefy rundown of changes that certainly seem like they’ve got potential to give hardened veteran divers a reason to keep plugging away and maybe drag in some new recruits now the studio have spent plenty of time holding off on too much change while they dig into key tech tweaks.