Helldivers 2‘s Galactic War has come to Super Earth and it’s going very, very badly. Players have lost every major city on the planet save for two, but are making a triumphant last stand against the Illuminate as fans from across the real world band together to hold the line.
Players have spent the last week tackling Major Orders that have tasked them with defending Super Earth’s Mega Cities from squids (the nickname for the blue alien invaders). Things haven’t been going well, though, as one city after another has fallen, from York Supreme to Remembrance. The rain forest was turned into giant airfields and Super Earth’s remaining natural wonders were liquidated in a break-glass effort to reverse the tide. Throughout the chaos, heroes were made and new bonds were forged among fans, much of it around finding unique and clever ways to take out massive Leviathan spacecraft flying over the urban battlefields.
The last remaining cities are Prosperity (Stockholm) and Equality on Sea (Shanghai). With reported swells of players from China helping to hold back the advancing Illuminate, fans have been swapping memes about geopolitical harmony. Think Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” but about U.S.-China relations and conceived of by meme-pilled Redditors. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for division within the ranks to start poisoning the new ties of friendship.
Players managed to push the Equality on Sea defense percentage up to 99.9783 percent but not beyond. No matter how many players flooded the battlefield, the odds seemed stacked against them. Negative reviews seemingly written by Chinese players started flooding the Helldivers 2 Steam page. The phrase “99.9783″ was spammed over and over again. The confusion, amplified by the language barrier, has sowed dissension within the Helldivers 2 community.
This internal conflict may involve a translation issue with the Mandarin-language version of a current Major Order. According to some fans on Reddit, instead of saying “percentage held” it reads something like “defense success,” potentially implying that Chinese players are supposed to hit 100 percent in order to achieve the objective rather than just hold the city until the onslaught subsides. It’s become an oddly unexpected mess.
The tides also appear to have once again started turning against Super Earth’s remaining defenders. Why? One likely reason is that tons of players in China have now gone to sleep. Helldivers 2‘s concurrent peak on PC tends to occur at around 10:00 a.m. ET. That means there’s currently a long night ahead for players in later time zones. The only question now is whether there’s still a chance to halt the Illuminate advance or if the total destruction is all part of Arrowhead Game Studio’s endgame for the current phase of the Galactic War.
What then? Maybe Super Earth will be detonated into another black hole. Maybe other weird cosmic anomalies will come into play. Or maybe players will discover some technology that lets them go back in time and fight over the fabric of reality itself. I wouldn’t put it past Arrowhead to do something completely unexpected, though how players respond to whatever transpires will likely remain the most entertaining part of the ongoing drama.
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