Guild Progression Mockup for Helldivers 2

I took a design test where I was asked to design a complete guild progression system for a game that doesn’t have one — I had a lot of fun answering this question so I decided to expand on it here in my portfolio.

Helldivers 2 has a strong collective identity through its live-service gameplay. Let’s enhance this further with a guild-based social unit to create a persistent layer between individual players and the global war narrative — it should feel personal, competitive, and visible.

Overview

The guild system — called Purge Battalions (I’ll call them PBs in this doc as shorthand)

Player Motivations

Overall, we are encouraging pro-social behavior in our player base.

• Primary Motivation: belonging. Players need a reason to care about a specific group of people, not just strangers who happen to be queuing together. A PB gives players an identity to wear, a ship to build together, and a flag to plant (literally). This is what keeps players logging in even when they’ve personally hit progression ceilings.
• Secondary Motivation: contribution. Multiplayer games retain players longest when individual actions visibly move a shared meter. Each mission a PB member completes should feel like a noticeable contribution towards a shared goal.
• Tertiary Motivation: status and competition. Not every player chases leaderboards, but the players who do are disproportionately vocal and influential in communities. A visible PB ranking system — regional, not just global — gives the competitive segment a meaningful ladder while keeping casual players from feeling excluded.

Guild System Components

1 — Purge Battalion Contribution Loop

• All in-game actions taken by the player generate Requisitions (their personal currency) and a new resource called Freedom Merits (FMs for short) — a guild-only currency. FMs contribute towards the guild pool, earning Skull Points (SPs) used to unlock group-based rewards.
• FMs are earned by completing missions with another guild member, contributing crafted stratagems to the guild shared armory, logging play sessions during active guild operations, and interacting with the guild communal ship (guild hall)

2 — Purge Battalion Destroyers

• The PB/guild will have a persistent social space (also a spaceship) separate from the player’s individual Destroyer hub ship.
• This will function as a guild hall where members can go between missions to see each other and celebrate progress, and engage in low-stakes social activities.
• The guild ship is built incrementally through unlocked rewards. The Ship’s visual state is a visible signal of how active and successful the PB is (i.e. a new player can walk in and immediately read the strength and history of the guild from what’s been built).
• The Ship’s social features serve a specific design purpose: they give members a reason to be in the same space when not actively running missions.
  • The Purge Battalion Canteen: guild members can purchase and consume in-game food/drinks (many of which are already in the game/lore) for a small personal requisition cost to receive temporary buffs (increased XP gain, faster stratagem cooldowns, or minor combat stats), and triggers a shared animation. Now this buff is a fun social activity!
  • Minigame Stations: the shooting range (assets can be reused from the tutorial, perhaps), the bug whack-a-mole arcade, the Eagle ship Galaga cabinet. These are all in-game, fully playable arcade games with individual guild leaderboards that when played contribute minor FM ticks. This can aid in belonging and competition within the guild (and allows guild members who don’t feel like queuing for a mission to still log time and contribute to the guild).

3 — Purge Battalion Flag and Territory System

• This is how guilds compete with one another and show off progress. Purge Battalions can design a custom banner using a constrained editor (Super Earth-approved iconography only, naturally) and earn the right to “claim” planets in the mission select screen. (Players can also plant their PB flag in mission).
• Claiming works as follows: a planet is claimable if a PB has completed the most total missions on it during a given week. The claimed planet displays the PB’s banner in the mission select screen, visible to all players globally. This is a competitive mechanic but one where the competition happens through normal play (as in you claim territory by actually “liberating” it, which is already what Helldivers players want to do).
• There is also a regional leaderboard (NA/EU/LATAM/etc split). It shows the top 10 PBs by territory held, seasonal FM contributed, and missions completed, broken down by region.

4 — Purge Battalion Roles and Armory

• Helldivers 2 has no classes, but it has a wide variety of stratagem types (Orbitals, Eagle, Support, Backpacks, Vehicles, Sentries, Emplacements). The PB system encourages loadout diversity by introducing soft specialization through Seals of Extermination (SEs), tracked per stratagem class per member.
• When a member earns enough SEs with a given stratagem class, they can contribute a stratagem into the PB Armory that makes it available to any member for use during PB-queued missions, even if that member hasn’t purchased the Warbond it came from. Thus, new members borrow weapons through the Armory (allowing them to play with weapons they don’t have in their personal loadouts or unlocked yet), fall in love with a loadout, and purchase the Warbond themselves.
  • For example, a high-level guild member has personally purchased every Warbond and has access to the Warp Pack stratagem. They can then have the option to “loan” this to the Armory — which would let a brand new Helldivers 2 player and fellow guild member utilize this item in any mission with their guild mates.
• The Armory has a finite number of slots per stratagem type, which grow with PB reward unlocks. This creates a governance decision and guild thematic missions (“We’re all gonna run flamethrowers this time!”): which weapons get slotted per family? Who decides? Here we can have minor Guild governance roles, the PB Leader and Officers vote on Armory loadout configuration and operation priority for the week.
• The Sidekick System: It’s never fun to have to play lower level content when you’re late-game or get wrecked on higher difficulty missions when you’re new — a sidekick FM buff mechanic can help alleviate this burden and encourage higher-ranking members to queue with lower-ranking members to show them the ropes (or just play casually and talk). Lower-level members queuing on higher-difficulty missions get a PB Reinforcement bonus — a temporary HP and stratagem-charge buff that scales to close the gap without eliminating it. Higher-level members who carry a newer member through a mission above that member’s unlocked difficulty receive Mentor Commendations, which enhances their FM gain.

Seasonal Narrative Layer

• Seasonal narrative events help keep PBs engaged even after they’ve unlocked everything.
• Each season, Arrowhead’s Game Director designates a campaign theater: a cluster of planets where PB performance directly shapes the narrative outcome. The top-ranked PBs in each region earn the right to be named in end-of-season dispatches broadcast to all players. Their banners appear on the campaign’s victory screen. Their PB names appear in the post-season “Super Earth Chronicles” update that recaps what happened that season. This creates an aspirational ceiling that doesn’t require any mechanical advantage. The reward for being the best guild is visibility and narrative legacy.

Guild Progression

I drew inspiration from Helldivers 2 individual player progression curve and Black Desert Online to build the PB Progression tables.

Overview

Play missions with guildmates → Earn Freedom Merits → Guild levels up → Earn Skull Points → Spend Skull Points to unlock rewards

Freedom Merit Sources

Level Curve

I took Helldivers 2 individual progression curve (which is a staircase progression curve) and scaled it up by 8 to accommodate for collective play vs individual. PBs earn 2 Skull Points (alt: sKill Points?) per PB Level. At level 100, PBs would have ~200 SP and they need ~248 SP to unlock every reward offered initially — there’s room to specialize between levels 1 - 100 in what the guild likes and grow as a guild.

PB XP per level = 500 × floor((level - 1) / 5) × 8

What SPs Unlock

There’s room to add additional items to the Canteen for SP cost, as well as additional armory slots.

Wireframe and UI Mockups

Wireframes Link