Now this is how you manage democracy.
Helldivers 2 has gone a little quiet since the end-of-year blowout that saw the game’s third enemy faction, The Illuminate, storm into the galactic war with their undemocratic mind control tricks and chicanery. The heroes kept a-diving and the fronts of the galactic war have kept a-shifting until yesterday: When all of a sudden the liberation started going through the roof.
Arrowhead launched an update on February 27 that, appropriately enough, hid a very nasty bug. Except this one seemed to serve the cause of managed democracy because, in the studio’s words, it caused “an error that is affecting planet liberation rates, causing them to skyrocket.” Arrowhead admitted that “we know this is fun” but as the Helldivers tore through enemy planets with ease it was “breaking the Galactic War mechanic itself.”
The studio quickly took the unprecedented decision to “pause” the Galactic War until a fix could be deployed. The game remained playable over the last day or so, but Helldivers were not able to liberate planets or advance the war in any way. But there was a silver lining regardless:
“This is our mistake and we own it,” said Arrowhead. “We are not going to revert any of the damage done by this error, however, so your major order victory is still secure.”
The reaction to this really shows what an amazing job Arrowhead has done in managing its community because, while you could of course find folk grumbling about the pause, most players leapt into jokey lore conspiracies about Illuminate mind control, special tactics to throw the enemy off, and of course endless jokes about bugs.
And even better, Arrowhead has now fixed the problem and is playing along. Upon logging into Helldivers 2 today you’ll see the following message:
“High Command would like to inform all personnel that nothing out of the ordinary has happened in the past 24 hours. The fight for Managed Democracy has continued in an inspiring—but entirely expected—manner.
Personnel who believe they have experienced or witnessed any sort of anomalous occurrences may be suffering from Illuminate mind influence, and should report themselves for psychological screening immediately.”
All I can say is that I’ve probably never seen a dev misstep go down so well as this has: Arrowhead clearly got it wrong and had to disable a core feature of the game for around 24 hours, but this propagandistic brazening-through of the issue (following, of course, actual information) has the Helldivers cock-a-hoop about how the game can handle such snafus.
“It’s been mentioned in other threads, but this ‘space 1984’ thing they have going on makes it incredibly easy to canonize real world screwups,” says _Strato_ on the subreddit. “Arrowhead made a really good choice. No matter what bullshit they pull and no matter what breaks, they can just do this stuff and it works in-universe. ‘It was an Automaton software update. There was no Automaton software update. Get back to diving.'”
Brilliantly, loads of other Helldivers have replied to this with the classic Todd Howard line: “It just works.”
A brief selection of other responses. “Thank Liberty I’m free of thought”, says JackRabbit323. “Double plus good” says the well-read boilingfrogsinpants. “Nothing ever happens,” says alexfadedphotographs. “Can we make it an official part of the lore that nothing happened on February 27th 2025,” asks BozoTheTaxAttorney, who needs a visit from the democracy officer: Because we all know nothing did happen on that date.
Helldivers is now just over a year old, and in my opinion has had one of the best first years of any live service game yet. Part of that is the game’s quality and regular cadence of updates, sure, but by far the larger appeal for me has been the galactic war and how players have been involved in shaping it: Arrowhead knows its community, listens to them, and plays to them. Players talk to each other using the game’s language, joke about reporting each other for infringements of democracy, and semi-inhabit the fiction outside of the game. You couldn’t have a better example than what happened on February 27, 2025: Precisely nothing.
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