Arrowhead Game Studios just handed the mic to game director Mikael Eriksson in a lengthy Steam post titled “Progressing Progression”, where he addressed one of the most persistent complaints from the Helldivers 2 community head-on: the state of progression in the game. No vague promises, no corporate speak, Eriksson broke down exactly what’s broken, why it hasn’t been fixed faster, and what’s coming to change it.
The studio has been receiving consistent feedback around endgame content for a while now. Players have been asking for things like a higher level cap and more meaningful ship upgrades.
Eriksson acknowledged all of it, but made one thing clear from the start: slapping a level cap increase on the game without fixing the underlying systems wouldn’t address the problem at a foundational level. What Arrowhead is planning goes much deeper than that.
The way Eriksson frames it, there are two broad categories of progression in Helldivers 2, Community Progression, which is everything tied to the Galactic War effort, and Player Progression, which is your personal journey through the game. Both are getting reworked.
Major Orders are out, Galactic War Campaigns are in
The biggest community-facing change is the transformation of Major Orders into Galactic War Campaigns. If you’ve played Helldivers 2, you know Major Orders have always been the heartbeat of the shared experience, those large collective objectives that rally the entire player base around a common goal. The problem, as Eriksson openly admitted, is that it was never really clear whether what the community actually did made any difference, or whether the outcomes were predetermined behind the scenes.
Galactic War Campaigns fix that. These are structured one-to-three-week objectives with clearly readable goals, visible outcomes, and guaranteed rewards for players who show up and contribute. The first campaign reward already confirmed is a new Fast Reconnaissance Vehicle. Campaigns are expected to launch in June 2026.
Running parallel to that is a feature Arrowhead has been quietly building toward for a while: Planet Warfronts. This is essentially a dynamic frontline system that plays out across individual planets in three different modes, Defend, Frontline War, and Behind Enemy Lines.
Each mode comes with its own challenges, and completing objectives within them, like capturing a city or disabling enemy artillery against the clock, will have real, gameplay-altering consequences on the planet you’re fighting for. It’s the kind of system that makes the war feel like it actually matters rather than just a rotating backdrop. No confirmed release date has been given for Planet Warfronts yet, but Arrowhead confirmed it’s in active development.
Personal progression, level cap, and ships are getting overhauled
On the personal side, the existing Personal Orders system is being retired and replaced with Personal Campaign Progression. The issue with Personal Orders, as Eriksson explained, is that they could put individual player goals in direct conflict with what the squad or the broader community was trying to accomplish, if your personal order required 100 Bile Titan kills and your team had other priorities, you were essentially incentivized to go rogue. The new system eliminates that tension by tying your personal reward track directly to whatever Galactic War Campaign is currently active.
That means even if the community falls short of the larger campaign goal, you can still earn personal rewards for your contribution. Eriksson confirmed the personal reward track won’t be available at the launch of Galactic War Campaigns but is planned for deployment later in 2026. And yes, the level cap is going up to 300, something veterans have been asking about for a long time. No specific timeline beyond “it’s coming” was given, but the confirmation alone is significant.
Ships are also in for a serious overhaul, and this might be the most exciting long-term announcement in the entire post. Since launch, every player in Helldivers 2 has been piloting the exact same Super Destroyer with the exact same progression path, very little personalization, very little agency.
Arrowhead didn’t sugarcoat it, acknowledging the current ship module system hasn’t lived up to its potential. The overhaul will expand what players can unlock and customize significantly, and beyond that, a dedicated ship team has been formed at the studio and is already working on the first new Super Destroyer variant.
Future ships will have their own unique progression paths, specializations, and customization options, meaning two players’ ships could eventually look and function in meaningfully different ways. A release window for the first new ship hasn’t been announced yet, Eriksson said more details will be shared later this year.
Rounding out the update are a handful of quality-of-life improvements worth noting. Assisted reload is being adjusted so that only one of the two players involved needs to have the matching backpack, removing a small but frustrating point of friction. Emote slots are doubling from four to eight. And both stratagem bouncing and Hellpod steering are being actively prototyped for fixes, with the team targeting a solution by the end of the year.
What makes this update feel different from past communications isn’t just the scope of what’s being announced, it’s the honesty behind it.
Eriksson didn’t dance around the fact that progression has been a problem, and he didn’t dress up incremental fixes as something bigger than they are. The Helldivers 2 Steam page has been sitting on mixed recent reviews for a while, with a growing portion of the community frustrated by the pace of meaningful updates. This post reads like a direct response to that frustration, with specifics instead of platitudes.
Helldivers 2 sold over 20 million copies and crossed $700 million in revenue, numbers that reflect just how much this game resonated when it launched. Whether this progression overhaul can reignite that energy is still to be seen, but the roadmap Eriksson laid out is the most concrete and ambitious thing Arrowhead has put on paper since the game came out.
So, what do you think, is this enough to bring you back to the front lines, or are you still on the fence? Tell us in the comments!