Helldivers 2 Needs A Codex ASAP

A couple of days ago, I booted up Helldivers 2, intending to finish up the day’s personal order and contribute a little to the Terminid Control System effort before bed. My personal order was to kill 15 Devastators. That sounded doable enough, except I didn’t actually know what a Devastator was or where to find one. It turns out it’s one of those big, scary Automatons that show up on Challenging difficulty and above, but I only figured that out from looking it up. Nothing in the game was able to tell me, which is a problem.

Right now, Helldivers 2 doesn’t give you a lot of information about the game’s world – or galaxy, as it were. I don’t know what any of the enemies I’ve killed are called unless I’ve seen them named in an article online, and without guides on the internet, I’d be hard pressed to name any of their weak points or the best way to eliminate them. Unless they’ve gone viral for hiding Mechs, I don’t know anything about any planets in any sectors, apart from the weather conditions my Helldiver would be subject to if they did a mission there.

Possible weather conditions include meteor showers and tornadoes made of fire. Fun!

It’s the same with weapons. If you go to your armoury, weapons have four listed statistics and brief descriptions of traits, which don’t always make it clear what specific weapon would be ideal for a mission. If I want to know what guns will actually penetrate a Charger’s armour, I’m going to have to look it up, and that’s if I even know that I need armour-penetrating weapons or how strong the armour is, something even the game’s director doesn’t seem fully sure of. And don’t get me started on the absolute lack of lore from the first game.

I think this might be by design, as it forces players to form communities and discuss weapons, tactics, and builds. After all, Helldivers 2 is an extraordinarily community-driven game, perhaps uniquely so. Without widespread cooperation and knowledge sharing, failure is assured. And within the game’s fiction, it makes sense – Helldivers don’t need comprehensive knowledge of their enemies, they’re there to kill, die, and be replaced. Why waste time telling them how to kill a Bile Titan most efficiently when you can just throw bodies at something until it stops fighting back?

But from a player perspective, it’s a bit of a pain. I like that this encourages players to communicate with each other, but I hate that I have to google everything. If a comprehensive codex with analyses of enemies’ weak points, vulnerabilities, and good strategies against them would violate the rules of the fiction, I understand that. And I doubly understand that revealing revelations from the first game might defeat the whole purpose of the government’s propaganda, so lore summaries might not be feasible or logical.

But could I at least have a brief guide that helps me identify different types of enemies and tells me how heavily armoured they are? Could I have some instructions on how to use a railgun, because I don’t know how and I’m scared? Could I capture lore drops I find in the wild so I can read them on my ship, instead of having to miss them entirely because I’m too busy fleeing a robot trying to stab me? Please, Arrowhead, I’m begging you. I’m sick of having to turn to guides and Reddit threads. I just want to be able to figure things out for myself.

Helldivers 2

Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the third-person shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios. This time out, the Helldivers are deep in the Galactic War, and it's up to you to bring Managed Democracy to the masses.