Getting Serviced (Live) in Helldivers 2

     I did not grow up in the Call of Duty lobbies. As a child, I wasn't really allowed to play shooters, and the closest thing I ever got to a proper multiplayer match was hotseat games of Sid Meier's Civilization with my dad, Unreal Tournament with my uncle, or the occasional match of Halo on the school computers (or the PvPvP mode of Batman: Arkham Origins when my parents weren't home, but they don't need to know about that). Even as an adult, games like Titanfall 2 and Battlefield left me feeling hollow. Fantastic co-op shooters like Deep Rock Galactic and Left 4 Dead (and more ok ones like Vermintide 2), I would just pick up and then eventually put down.

    So why can't I stop playing Helldivers 2?

If you haven't seen the opening cinematic, I highly recommend it. It's both a great intro to the Helldivers universe and also hilarious.

A Quick Rundown

    For those of you on my blog who haven't played Helldivers (1 or 2), this section is going to serve as a quick explainer so that way the rest of what I'm saying makes sense. Helldivers 2 is set in the distant future of the 22nd Century, in a Starship-Troopers esque political cartoon universe where the Federation of Super-Earth is a fascist dystopian nightmare dedicated to spreading Managed Democracy throughout the galaxy. Players are the titular Helldivers, elite* troops who drop into an area in groups of 1-4, complete a mission, and then (hopefully) extract. The three enemy factions are the insectoid Terminids (bugs), the rogue Automatons (bots), and the high-tech Illuminate (squids).

    In addition to the firearms a Helldiver brings with them into the field, they also pack somewhere between one and four Stratagems, supplies and weapons dropped from ships orbiting above. This can be anything from a machine gun, to an airplane strafe, to sustained heavy bombardments, to (most recently added) an honest-to-goddamn tank, and you'll be needing those supports, because the enemies of liberty are manifold and extremely heavily armored. 

Jolly Cooperation

    I'm going to be brutally honest for a moment: I'm pretty bad at video games. In Player vs. Player contexts, I'm much more likely to be on the receiving end of a killstreak, because I'm the kind of person Aim Assistance was made for. Plus honestly when it comes to competitive contexts I get really sweaty and angry extremely quickly, and frankly with all the actual fascism going around I don't need that kind of stress in my life. While it's not as good in the matter as DRG (whose community have actually developed, like...manners), Helldivers 2 does a lot to ensure teamwork makes the dream work.

    Regardless of who you're fighting, enemies tend to come in three flavors: Light, Medium, and Heavy, and while one person's loadout of Primary, Secondary, and Stratagems can handle each type, more often than not there are going to be tradeoffs made and gaps left that other players can fulfill. The most obvious example of this is the Team Reload: if one player is holding a weapon like a rocket launcher, and the other has a backpack full of rockets, it is faster for them to reload together than to just have one person reload alone. Now this doesn't happen often because it requires coordinating with randos online, but it's still, ya know, nice.

via Reddit, three players working together. The one on the left carries a heavy-duty Autocannon, the one in the middle is keeping it constantly reloaded, and the one on the right is using their Supply Pack to keep them both topped up. That green goo used to be a Terminid of some kind.

    This kind of little thing is all over the place: you can place turrets to cover people, someone with a healing Stim Pistol can heal someone with the Double Sickle, a laser rifle that gradually sets its bearer on fire. More than once I've thrown down an automatic turret behind our group to cover our escape. Even going off on your own to do side objectives still helps the team because the resources you gain are shared by everyone. It's extremely difficult to not contribute something to the group. Now a lot of this kind of interdependency is found in co-op games all over (see, again, Deep Rock Galactic for a master class of this), but then we add Helldiver's special ingredient into the mix: narrative!

The Galactic War

    In your Calls of Duty of Battles Field, the war you're fighting in the multiplayer are silly pretend wars, even when they're invoking real-life atrocities or just actually being set in real, historical wars and battles. It ultimately does not matter how many casualties your Italians took at the Battle of Caporetto, or even if you won or lost, in the grand scheme of things. You and your fellow World War 1 Soldiers are here for an evening's recreation, and after the battle is over you can just line up and do it again. Helldivers 2 does not do this.

via the Wiki, enemy territory on February 8th, 2184 (launch day). Super Earth is in the center, Orange is Terminids, Red is Automatons.

    The Second Galactic War was officially declared on the 15th of May, 2184, and has been going on ever since. The lines have shifted and twisted, the Creek fell, the planet Meridia was destroyed and is now replaced by a wormhole that you can visit, the Illuminate was patched in as a third faction and then invaded Super Earth, which we only managed to hold because all of the Chinese players rallied to defend Future Shanghai. 

    In the time since I started we undertook Operation Valid Pretext and marched on the Automaton homeworld of Cyberstan (during which the bots hacked our comms and told us to defect), only to run out of reinforcements and need to abandon the offensive. Now we're in a bit of a lull period as the Illuminate have started digging up their old artifacts and unleashed something called "The Void." No one knows what it does, but when Super Earth scientists put a frog in it and then got the frog back, the frog later exploded.

    This narrative of ongoing war even extends back to the game mechanics; you don't respawn when you die, someone else calls in a reinforcement: while you maintain continuity of control, the Helldiver you previous played as is dead, as is everything that they ever could be. This is how we know that, for example, in February of 2186 Helldiver casualties finally reached seven billion. It helps make the game feel a bit less like I'm just grinding away at my Battle Pass or whatever, and actually taking part in a grander thing. Sure, we failed to take Cyberstan, but I Was There, just like people fought at the Creek, or Oshaune, or Super Earth. And part of that is thanks to Joel.

via the Wiki, enemy territory as of April 1, 2186. The new Purple color is the Illuminate.

    Joel is an employee at Arrowhead Studios with the title of "Game Master." He is, for all intents and purposes, the guy behind the ongoing narrative of Helldivers 2. We don't know precisely what it is he does, but he's presumably behind deciding what Major and Minor Orders everyone gets, the Liberation Resistance of planets, whether things invade or not, and so on. While there have been times where that's been a bit of a feelsbad (like last weekend, when we got two Terminid Minor Orders while there was an ongoing Major Order against the Illuminate, like come on, man), I can't deny it helps things feel a lot more personal than a given season of Apex Legends or whatever. Sometimes it's nice to have a human who can put their thumb on the scale.

Manufactured Content

    In his video Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite, Canadian media critic Dan Olson describes a lot of the ways that Fortnite utilizes FOMO and other Dark Patterns stuff to keep you hooked, which has really shit knock-on effects when you learn that kids are using "Default" as a slur. This kind of thing isn't new, and has been dominating the mobile space for like a decade at this point, but it still really sucks.

    Helldivers 2 does a lot less of this.

    The first two reasons are pretty simple. For one, while it can be a bit of a pain in the ass, it is possible to earn the premium Super Credits just by playing the game. It can take a while, and you can't do it on every mission type (which I'm salty about because I love the static defense missions with the shittiest rewards but whatever), but it is possible. Second, while there is a rotating store, very little can be permanently missed out on. The battle pass equivalent, the Warbonds, are there forever. You can still buy the very first one and start working on it (lord knows I did). There are a few capes made to commemorate specific events (like the abovementioned fall of the Creek), but for the most part a Helldiver starting today is going to (eventually) have access to almost everything that someone preordered has.

The most recent Warbond as of writing, Entrenched Division, has some absolutely divine vibes. I love its armor and weapons so much. 

   

 There's also lots of little stuff: a free Warbond that everyone gets to start with that includes most of the tools a growing Helldiver will need, as well as most of the premium currency needed to purchase another Warbond of their choosing. The theming of the game means its less vulnerable to pressures to express yourself in the space (though I did splurge for the Enthusiastic Mirth emote, a maniacal laugh I saw people use over fields of lit napalm, which is now broken!!!). Most of the premium stuff, like weapons, can be picked up off your fallen comrades: my friend Kira and I fought our way through a tunnel mission on Oshaune mostly off the strength of her AR-2 Coyote guns she kept dropping. There is absolutely the issue of utility being siloed off into the different warbonds, but given Arrowhead's habit of mostly putting in new firearms as opposed to strategic options, it's less of an issue than one might think. 

    On the social side, the emotes I see everyone using the most (Salute and Hug) are both free and you get them pretty early on, plus you only have four emote slots to, say, Fortnite's six. You even have a basic level of customization for your diver right from the start; a selection of helmets and armors that all look similar, but different enough that you can make decisions, plus some body and voice types to suit your taste.  

Hugging people is honestly one of my favorite things to do in this game.

Fandom

    In the same way I didn't grow up in the COD lobbies, I only got a Facebook account when I was sixteen, at my mom's insistence. Online fandom wasn't really a big part of my life-the media I liked tended to be old, obscure, and possibly both. This isn't to say those conversations weren't happening, I was just never really a part of them.

    The combination of the Galactic War and me finally having a Reddit account means that I can see Helldivers partly as a spectator sport-checking out fanart, seeing people talk about the setting, and so on. Now sometimes this sucks because gamers are terrible, but it also means you get to see cool stories, weird glitches, waking up and seeing a seemingly impossible Major Order complete and be like "Goddamn, we actually did it." It's fun being part of a little subculture, following the war, learning the lingo, like how the blue-clad Super Earth Armed Forces are known affectionately as the Blueberries. They're kinda like the little brothers of the Helldivers, and I've more than once dived in front of one to take a laser blast.  

After it had become clear we weren't gonna take Cyberstan, Arrowhead threw us a bone by letting us rescue the 77th Division of SEAF. It was nice seeing the community all rally behind it after the weeks-long march to that frozen hellscape.

Conclusion+Tips

    So that was a thousand or so words on the video game I've been playing for the past few months. If it sounds like your kind of fun, I'd highly recommend it! I thought I'd leave off by offering a few tips I wish I'd had when I was a beginner helldiver:

1. Get the deluxe edition when it's on sale. It's a bit more expensive, but it comes with a free Warbond Certificate that you can use to get a premium one of your choice (plus the little Stratagem Hero minigame I'm terrible at).
2. Speaking of warbonds, the first one you're going to want to get is Democratic Detonation. It gives you a lot more options on how to close enemy spawners, which will allow you to get fancy with the rest of your loadout.
3. Try fighting the Terminids first. They're by far the easiest faction to get a grip on in terms of Avoiding Damage, and you're pretty much guaranteed to have some groups you can join. 
4. Let me know! Either @ me on Bluesky or Discord! I'd love to help show a new Diver the ropes, the way my friend Kira did for me. 

    Good luck, divers.