Helldivers 2 players might have managed to stop the Illuminate from totally destroying their home planet towards the end of last month, but it still got pretty badly trashed. Enter the game’s latest mission – kick off the Super Earth rebuild by securing “reparations”.
How are those funds being secured, you ask? This is Helldivers 2, so it’s by killing a bunch more baddies.
“The monumental effort to rebuild Super Earth is underway,” confirms the order’s briefing from devs Arrowhead, “A full damage assessment has concluded, exhaustively detailing the incalculable wounds inflicted upon our sovereign homeworld — and their monetary cost, adjusted for inflation.”
In order to pay those bills, players have been ordered to secure reparations by enacting some “compulsory asset forfeiture”. Basically, they’ve got to kill 290 million Illuminate enemies and 2.9 billion bugs in just under a week.
Now, these sorts of ‘kill a big number of things’ orders have often been the most stark showcases of HD2 players’ terrifying abilities when it comes to getting stuff done over the past year and a bit. Since they end as soon as the targets are reached, a number of them – especially those that target the squishable Terminid swarms – have ended early.
This time, though, the sheer size of the bug kill total does look to be presenting a tough challenge thus far. As of writing, the game’s unofficial Galactic War tracking apps say 223,303,766 Terminids have been terminated, putting the divers on track to overshoot the deadline of three days or so they’ve got. On the other hand, things are going great with the Illuminate, with players 41.3% of the way to their goal and looking set to hit it tomorrow.
Looking at Reddit, there might be a bit of fatigue regarding Illuminate major orders setting in at the moment, with some players wishing they’d been sent after the Automatons instead for this mission.
Outside of that live-service grind psychological insight, the interesting thing about this latest mission to me is that, assuming Super Earth does eventually get rebuilt, one would assume another battle for it might be in the cards down the line. It’ll probably be a ways away, but I’d be intrigued to see how Arrowhead would go about trying to outdo the first big battle for the planet.
I’d think it’d maybe have to involve a new faction folks have spent less time fighting than the three in the game right now, and some sort of twist on the sequence of fights to hold different mega cities that we got first time around.
Anyway, I’ll stop speculating before I get to the point oftrying to guess what the second battle for Super Earth’s commemorative cape might look like.
