Democracy in action.
Folks, I think we might’ve democracy’d a little too close to the sun on this one. In case you’ve not been keeping up, Helldivers 2 recently introduced the democracy space station (DSS) which, after a brief hiccup where it kept blasting them into low orbit, has mostly served to empower the soldiers of liberty with eagle bombardments and special powers—guided across the galaxy by their vote. The wish for more control over the battlefield is granted, and yet the eagle’s claw curls.
See, the latest major order, Operation Spark of Liberty, has ended in “success”—those quotes are Arrowhead’s inclusion, not mine. While the major order’s conditions have been technically met (to hold Gaellivare while killing 500 million Terminids), you might notice that Gaellivare is currently under automaton control.
This is perhaps the largest case of “mission failed successfully” that Helldivers 2 has encountered so far—and it started with a gambit. In case you’re unfamiliar, these are specific objectives provided by Arrowhead Games that allow players to save planets in one fell swoop. As the dispatch at the time read:
“Enemy forces stage their attacks on our planets from an originating planet. Liberating the originating planet ends the enemy attack immediately. In the current operational context, liberating Mastia would end the current Automaton attack on Gaellivare.”
Things looked pretty good initially—Helldivers voted for the station to head over to Mastia, and surely with their help it’d be smashed. They started fighting, tooth and nail, as the democratic space station… uh… slowly drifted back to Gaellivare when Mastia was at around 70% liberation percentage.
This was, from what I can tell, intended to buy the Helldivers some time, shoring up Gaellivare’s defences while the actual ground troops stayed on Mastia—but it seems like the hive mind (this is a metaphor, I am not a bug-loving traitor) followed the DSS back to Gaellivare in the same way certain kinds of mould navigate their way to the nearest food source. I actually hopped on over to helldivers.io and decided to layer both player count graphs from the two planets so you can see the exact instant everyone decided to mess things up. The red line is Gaellivare.
Mastia’s liberation percentage plummeted and the gambit failed, leading to the following dispatch from Super Earth high command, dripping with sarcasm:
“The Helldivers, in their Democratic direction of the DSS, displayed undeniable tactical brilliance, demonstrating once again why they are known as the Galaxy’s most elite fighting force. Their efforts held the Automaton onslaught long enough to allow emergency evacuation efforts to save many citizens, many of whom aided in the construction of the space station.” If that wasn’t enough, there are air quotes around the word “success”. Ouch.
The community, meanwhile, is somewhere between holding its head in its hands and laughing at the outright satire of the fumble. One player writes on the game’s subreddit: “This game has successfully demonstrated something that very, very few games ever do: The incredible degree to which the average player does not read, and does not care.”
In a separate thread, the aptly-named user CaptainExplosions writes: “SEAF Command handed an orbital battlestation to a bunch of propaganda-hyped, utterly disposable cannon fodder with zero strategic acumen and an average recruitment age of eighteen. Of COURSE it wound up a complete sh*tshow. It’d be like handing command of a fully-laden aircraft carrier over to three classes of college freshmen and telling them to dispense orders by popular vote.”
Things aren’t much better on the game’s Discord server—with many users decrying the “blob”, that is, the apparent phenomenon of the game’s community just following the DSS like a toddler waddling after their collective parents. There’s a quote I’m reminded of from Men in Black, here: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
Honestly, I’d rather this kind of outcome cause frustration than wind up with developer-caused disappointments like the Menkent Line. While this is a clear signal Arrowhead needs to look at how their UI communicates the importance of strategic objectives, it’s also just objectively hilarious. Joel really did give everyone the tools they needed to succeed, but the simple fact of the matter is that we’re a bunch of ants with guns, and we go where the blob bids us.
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