Arrowhead CCO Johan Pilestedt corrects player who thought he'd griped about Magicka being review bombed, says 'we got so-so reviews' in 2011 because of bugs—also, it was 'released without our knowledge'

Helldivers 2 is—look, we all know this game is stuck in an eternal 'it's so over/we're so back' patch cycle at this point, and if I say it's going through a rough period one more time, I'm going to lose it. There are problems and bugs again, Arrowhead's dedicated to fixing them again, the game will be good again at some indeterminable point in the future, you get the picture.

To vent some of this steam, Helldivers has—as a lot of Reddit communities do—a discussion sub where harsher, critical takes are encouraged. It goes by the name of HelldiversUnfiltered and, in an impressive display of taking it on the chin, Arrowhead's CCO has been browsing it.

That's per a recent comment Johan Pilestedt made regarding Magicka, another game that Arrowhead studios developed over a decade ago. One user by the name of Far_Reindeer_783 wrote: "I still remember how they say Magicka was review bombed when most of the reviews are about how it runs poorly."

Not wanting to let something go un-corrected, Pilestedt has understandably hopped in to mop things up: "That's... made up. Review bombing as a concept wasn't a thing—we got so-so reviews because Magicka was buggy and wasn't optimized."

As to why, it is absolutely a matter of public record that Magicka was "released without our knowledge—we just saw it on the front page of Steam and we were like: 'wtf is going on?'—publisher had hit the release button while we were still fixing bugs—made us release patches every day until it was decent."

By public record, I of course mean PC Gamer. Here's an article from 2011 covering the 24-hourly update cycle, and another where we spoke to Arrowhead founder Emil Englund, who told us at the time: "It's kind of stupid, but we thought it was released the day after or something. And all of a sudden someone says, 'It's live!' And we were working on the Day One patch already. We're like, 'What!?'"

As for the 2024 post that the misled Far_Reindeer_783 paraphrased? Pilestedt was just upset that Helldivers 1 was being review-bombed for the sins of Helldivers 2, before rhetorically asking: "What's next? Review bombing Magicka and Gauntlet as well? Other PlayStation titles?"

In a follow-up comment, Pilestedt states: "There was collateral on Helldivers 1 from the review bombing which I thought was unjustified, and I then tweeted about it being the same as review bombing Magicka—which some people then took like an instruction."

While I don't think browsing subreddits where everyone's being harsh on you is necessarily good for the psyche (lord knows I've had my fill of executives getting into slapfights on social media recently), I do empathise with Pilestedt here. Having to clean up falsehoods from angry game communities with understandable gripes and less-understandable rumour milling must be exhausting.