This Week In Helldivers 2: Certain Doom And Major Bugs

Helldivers 2 Game Master Joel has been throwing unexpected developments at us for the last couple of weeks, and fortunately (or unfortunately), this week has been no different. Here’s your weekly dispatch of what’s going on not just in the Galactic War, but outside of it.

Say Goodbye To Liberty

At this time last week, the Automatons had unexpectedly returned from their alleged extinction to kick our fleshy butts back to Super Earth. We held the Menkent Line (Menkent and Lesath) against them long enough to halt their advance and establish orbital defences, and then moved on to Operation Cassiopeia. That Major Order was to hold Marfark against the Automatons, ‘no matter the cost’. The bots, at this point, had started deploying Factory Striders, which we’d seen in battles before. These Striders are massive, mobile Automaton fabricators, heavily armed and armoured.

Here’s how best to take down Factory Striders, if you struggle with them.

Operation Cassiopeia was a success – we successfully held the planet against the Automatons and their massive Striders. A dispatch from High Command shared on the official Helldivers 2 Discord server told us that the cost of our success was that “many brave and committed Helldivers gave their lives, many registered voters were tragically murdered, and our E-710 reserves have been critically depleted”.

Before taking the fight back to the Automatons, we had to farm Terminids extensively, killing two billion in order to supply our upcoming counter-offensive. We were given several days to do so, and in an absolutely shocking twist, the Major Order took a mere 12 hours to complete. Who says Helldivers can’t work together?

If You Want Melee Weapons In Helldivers 2, You're Wrong

Unless your goal is to die a lot, then you’re right!

This brings us to right now, and our attempt to complete the current Major Order, Operation Enduring Bulwark. Both the Terminids and Automatons have launched assaults, forcing players to fight on both fronts at once and defend at least ten planets in order to succeed.

This is almost guaranteed to fail – the weekend is over so people won’t be playing as much, and there’s too much to do with too little time. Community manager Spitz said in the Discord that this Major Order is meant to force us to lose ground, and that players will “have to choose which front they want to fight on, but it's unlikely that you'll be able to hold them all."

Too Many Bugs

Unfortunately, everyone’s go-to tactic of heading to whichever planet’s closest to liberation isn’t going to work this time, because there’s a serious bug in the game that the developers are hard at work trying to fix. Player activity isn’t being tracked or displayed properly, which means it’s unclear if any of the missions we do until a fix arrives will even count towards planet liberation. Arrowhead announced this in character, saying that the Automaton horde knocked out long-range communications on Vernen Wells, but it seems like a genuine glitch.

While this is very annoying, I have quite a lot of empathy for Arrowhead here. Arrowhead CEO and game director Johan Pilestedt commented on a Reddit post explaining that the studio has to balance adding new content and fixing bugs, and there’s a lot of pressure to do both in order to stay relevant in the highly competitive game industry. Combine that with the need to add functionality to the game so that Game Master Joel doesn’t have to manually update Galactic War progress, the need to retool fire damage, explaining to players why they can’t have things like transmog, regular patches, and having to fix exploits, and Arrowhead has its work cut out for it.

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.