Helldivers 2: A Game That Reminds Us We Can Work Together

A Fascinating Social Experiment on The Unifying Power of Fighting for a Common Cause

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Everywhere you look these days, it seems like people are at each other’s throats. Politics is so polarized you need special sunglasses just to look at the topics. The various fronts of the culture war — gender ideology, wokeness and DEI, immigration, funding foreign wars, forgiving college debt, and so on — are all raging hot across the places where people go to discuss such things (usually online).

All this contentiousness and rancor, all the “imagine thinking X” mockery posts and the endless (and abusive) theological and philosophical arguments, the logical fallacies, the Biden hate and the Trump hate, the slut-shaming of converts to religion, the apostasy-shaming of those who leave religion, the gleeful attempts to doxx and expose ideological enemies, and the constant stream of videos showing the worst of humanity, and the entire experience feels a lot like the meme, but with radioactive cancer-AIDS on top:

In the middle of all of this chaotic, rancorous, competitive misanthropy, a little gem of a video game dropped out of seemingly nowhere and began reminding us of what it feels like to actually work together.

Even if you’re not a gamer, I hope you’ll read on. There’s something very interesting going on here.

That game is called Helldivers 2. It was released in February, launching simultaneously on Playstation and PC. And it has taken the gaming world by storm.

(Arrowhead Games, the developer, is based in Sweden. I’m not sure what’s in the water over there, but all the games I spend the most time in, playing with friends and family — Satisfactory, Valheim, and now Helldivers — are all developed there.)

What I am most impressed with about Helldivers is not the graphics (which are incredible) or the campy humor (it’s darkly hilarious) or the feeling of unleashing a meteor shower of flaming death on the enemy (it’s gloriously satisfying). Instead, it’s the experience of something virtually nobody and nothing else is providing right now: the social euphoria of a spontaneously-generated community of people working together for a common cause. That the cause is fictional should not diminish the accomplishment. First of all, we all need some good escapist fantasy to get our heads out of the crazy events going on around us. But the collaboration itself, happening at scale, creating a sense of common bond among disparate players, is a truly impressive thing.

The game is the sequel to a very different predecessor. I own the original Helldivers, a top-down, bullet-hell, co-op tour-de-force; but I never played it, allowing it to languish in my Steam library for years.

I had no idea the sequel was coming until it was here. My third son asked for it for his birthday last month, and I obliged. And then I decided to get it for myself and my wife and another one of my sons who likes this kind of game, and we’ve been playing it ever since, and having a blast.

The best way to describe it is a 4-person co-op third-person shooter with mission parameters and a timer that feels like what would happen if you got to jump into the events of the 1997 film, Starship Troopers:

Here, for comparison, is the Helldivers 2 trailer:

The game premise is simple: you’re a Helldiver, an elite soldier fighting to “spread managed democracy” in the name of Super Earth. It’s all very salty jingoistic satire, as the opening sequence to the game makes clear:

Some of my favorite lines are those uttered spontaneously by your character as you unload magazine after magazine of sweet release from this mortal plane to your enemies:

How 'bout a nice cup of LIBER-TEA???

For LIBERTEEEE!

GET SOME!

Freedom never sleeps!

Say hello to DEMOCRACY!

How'd you like the TASTE of FREEDOM???

For SUPER EARTH!!!

(My wife and I joke to each other throughout the day, “Is it time to spread Democracy?”)

Your enemy is one of two factions as of this writing: either a swarm of giant, acid-spewing bugs with razor sharp talons and chitinous armor you need anti-tank weaponry to pierce, or an army of zombie robot terminators who wear human skulls as decoration and make use of a variety of weapons, both projectile and melee, to pursue their mission of turning you into human soup sloshing around within a fashionable body armor container.

At your disposal is not only a small arsenal of personal weapons, but an array of orbital “stratagems” — limited-use superweapons that can cause mass destruction when they are called in from your ship in orbit using directional arrow key presses at pivotal moments of the game.

The entire experience is frantic. Chaotic. Overwhelming. It’s absolute mayhem that you somehow sometimes survive. When you win, there’s a feeling of real accomplishment, like you just won the Super Bowl against the undefeated Patriots as a member of a plucky underdog team from New York.

This creates an undeniable sense of camaraderie, which has extended outside the confines of the game itself and into the endless stream of Helldivers memes and humorous videos and related content. Honestly, in my 35+ years of gaming, I’ve never seen a community build around a game at this speed, producing references and fan service at this volume. It’s a cultural phenomenon that is creating a much-needed sense of common purpose among human beings who seem otherwise unable to stop fighting with one another.

“We want our games to help forge friendships between players all over the world,” says a blurb on Arrowhead’s website. If that’s the case, mission accomplished.

The key lies in the game’s focus: at any given time, hundreds of thousands of players, instead of competing against each other, are all being called to work together towards a bigger goal. That creates instant community. When you're being overrun by giant, acid-spewing bugs or zomboid terminators wearing human skulls for decorations, you don't care about the politics of the random person playing next to you. You just hope they can call in their orbital strikes in time.

There's real social utility in this. It's a fascinating experiment in bringing people together.

When the “Major Order” (there’s a new one every few days) came down from Helldivers command to push the Automaton forces, already on their heels, straight out of the galaxy, players descended on unforgiving worlds like Malevelon Creek (aka “bot Vietnam”) and the moonlike, lifeless Maia, and pushed those “suicide Roombas” right off the map.

Victory felt great for about 24 hours. But as it turns out, the Automaton force that was eliminated was merely a vanguard, and they have returned with a vengeance to a different quadrant to resume their counterattack on Super Earth forces:

Even in this, Helldivers 2 is different. Because Helldivers 2 isn’t following some pre-programmed storyline. It has a live human Dungeon Master named Joel who is actively changing gameplay conditions in real time, in the style of tabletop D&D:

"We have an actual person with the job title of Game Master," Pilestedt told PC Gamer in an interview today. His name is Joel, and he takes his job very seriously.

"We have a lot of systems built into the game where the Game Master has a lot of control over the play experience. It's something that we're continuously evolving based on what's happening in the game," Pilestedt continued. "And as part of the roadmap, there are things that we want to keep secret because we want to surprise and delight."

Pilestedt says Dungeons and Dragons has been a major inspiration for Arrowhead. The studio aims to replicate collaborative, reactive storytelling of tabletop gaming in Helldivers 2, acknowledging the differences between designing a campaign for a small party versus millions of players.

Those twists, as explained by Arrowhead prior to Helldivers 2's release, can be as granular as giving a specific player access to a special strategem mid-mission to spice things up, but it also extends to larger narrativized events in the galactic war. We got our first taste of these events a week after launch, when the offensive campaign against the Terminids was interrupted by Automaton invasions on the opposite end of the galaxy.

Arrowhead says it has "predictions" about how the war will play out and has devised "setpieces" that it thinks will be significant, but in true tabletop fashion, the story will change based on player behavior. In fact, it already has. Game Master Joel has already had to grease the wheels for the enemy a few times when the Helldivers community proved a little too efficient at spreading liberty.

"There have been some sudden moments where maybe one planet was too easy or one was too hard and [Joel] had to get up in the middle of the night to give the Automatons a bit of reinforcements so the players don't take [the planet] too quickly," said Pilestedt.

Frankly, it can be a little too engrossing. There have been nights when my wife, my cousin Jimmy (who lives over 1,600 miles away in Nashville), and I have all stayed up way too late working together on “just one more mission.” As game writer Fraser Brown said in a recent column for PC Gamer:

Though the war has only been raging for a couple of months, Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has positioned itself as the master of live service games. The unrelenting crusade for managed democracy has brought with it an absurd level of dynamism, fulfilling the dream of a living, evolving game in a way that few others have come close to realising. It's what I've always wanted from the model, with its constantly shifting fronts and cavalcade of surprises being dropped onto my head. Sometimes literally. 

It's incredibly impressive and I am completely exhausted by it. 

I don't know how the studio manages it, honestly. Most live service games will dump a big update on players and then let it simmer for a while, but Helldivers 2 refuses to stand still. The pace feels impossible, and I do wonder if it can be maintained. Unexpectedly, I find myself hoping it can't be. The next big change I want from Helldivers 2 is for it to chill the hell out.

It’s intense, absolutely. But it’s undeniably a good time. We laugh, we yell, we swear, and we die - a lot - but even in death, there’s a cooperative aspect. Your fellow squad mates who are still alive have to call a respawned copy of you in from orbit. You can’t get back into the game until they do.

All of this adds up to one of the more profound experiences of teamwork I’ve had in a long time. Whether playing with friends or jumping in with strangers, there is an unspoken acknowledgement that we’re all in this together, and we won’t get the outcome we’re looking for unless we act like it.

At a time when everyone seems to be at everyone else’s throats, this is a powerfully positive experience we could do with a whole lot more of.