Helldivers 2 is a game that takes a significant amount of inspiration from Starship Troopers, being basically a satire of fascist propaganda. Players take the role of Helldivers, who fight on the side of Super Earth in a galactic war. Super Earth’s goal is to spread liberty Managed Democracy. Managed Democracy is basically a totalitarian government where an algorithm votes on people’s behalf, allegedly based on a prediction of how they would vote.

But where Starship Troopers is a short self-contained movie, Helldivers 2 is a game that people pour hundreds of hours into. It can’t just be a satire of fascist propaganda. It can’t be any single thing. There are many narratives that emerge from it, some of which are at tension with each other. For example, in the interpretation of Starship Troopers it is possible to argue that the bug aliens did nothing wrong, and the humans are the aggressors. On the other hand, Helldivers doesn’t lend itself to such a straightforward interpretation, because there are many clear examples where the aliens are the aggressors.

So I’d like to explain a grander emergent narrative that took me months to understand. It’s a narrative about how players are kept in the dark, and how this leads to a mismanaged war that wastes billions of lives.

For Super Earth

Part of this narrative is very front and center. Of course the galactic war wastes countless lives! The gameplay revolves around that fact.

Helldivers are elite soldiers that get inserted deep behind enemy lines. They spread democratic devastation, often by calling down strikes from their orbital destroyers. These are basically suicide missions. Every time the player dies, they switch perspectives to a whole new helldiver. So the number of lives lost numbers in the billions. And often lives are lost in comedic, pointless ways, like when you accidentally call an orbital strike down on yourself or your friends.

Helldivers are mythologized by citizens of Super Earth. However, the game’s tutorial suggests that they receive minimal training. After a short training routine, a recorded voice absurdly praises you for being the best soldier he’s ever seen, and then you immediately step into a pod to launch off into space. One imagines that they’ve lowered their standards to keep up with the demand for new helldivers.

At tension with this narrative, is the fact that players may in fact be very good at the game. Helldivers could be seen as comically strong, considering how much you can do with just a handful of them. Of course, a lot of their strength comes from absurd amounts of air support.

But if you ignore how overpowered helldivers are, the narrative seems to be about a bunch of low-information fanatical soldiers who are treated like expendable grunts.

The Galactic War

Now in a fascist satire, you might expect a strict military hierarchy where soldiers do exactly what they’re told. But in a game, of course the player wants to be given a choice in how they set up their battles. You get to choose which of the three alien races to fight, and which planet to fight them on. I don’t think this contributes to the satirical narrative, it’s just what you need in a game.

But there is a single galactic war that is shared across the entire player base. Players are given orders, and though you are not forced to complete them, you are rewarded for doing so. There are “personal” orders which are completed by individual players, for example to kill a hundred bugs with a machine gun. And there are “major” orders that must be completed by the player community. For example, to kill a billion bugs total.

If a major order is completed, then every player receives a reward regardless of whether they actually contributed to it. This can create community-wide prisoner’s dilemmas, where some players just want to have fun fighting their own way, which may be at odds with the major order. And sometimes major orders are at odds with personal orders, so that a player might choose to prioritize their personal order, leaving the rest of the community handle the major order.

On top of the fact that players don’t necessarily contribute to major orders, there’s also the question of strategy. Often there are more efficient and less efficient ways to complete an order. For instance, there was an objective to liberate planets, any planets. But some planets are easier to liberate than others! Each planet has a resistance factor which determines how much progress players lose per hour. The mechanics of how this works are simple but opaque, and barely communicated to players. So as a result, ignorant players ended up trying to liberate a planet with high resistance, while knowledgeable players were dragged along for the ride.

Without getting into specifics, attacking or defending a planet requires mass coordination. If only a few players attack a planet, then their contribution to the planet’s liberation is precisely zero. So from an individual perspective, often the best available strategy is to join whatever everyone else is doing. But once you’re in the know, you can often see that a better strategy exists, but it’s wholly inaccessible because it requires getting everyone to switch.

There’s a sort of comedy in this, seeing strategic blunders over and over, but being unable to do anything about it. And it seems to build on the larger narrative of expendable low-information soldiers.

Managed Democracy

I’ve described an emergent narrative, where Super Earth’s military might is undercut by poor information and poor organization. Is this narrative… intentional?

The orders are specifically chosen by the developers in order to construct a larger narrative. The developers want players to sometimes win, sometimes lose, but it is not predetermined when players should win or lose. So what the devs are doing, is trying to predict what the player community is capable of, and setting objectives which are on the knife edge between victory and defeat.

Sometimes, developers miss the mark, and a major order is far too easy or far too hard. So the devs often make adjustments after the fact. For instance, there was a major that required completing certain number of operations on a planet, but it quickly became clear that players would only reach about 10% of the goal. So the developers came up with a story reason to remove that part of the objective. Other times it seems like players are winning too easily, so the developers create tension by declaring new objectives that spread helldiver forces thinner. Intentional or not, this creates a sense of military disorganization.

Now the downside of all this, is that it seems to generate a lot of community toxicity. Some players basically moralize about contributing to the major order. They complain that players who play the wrong way are actively detracting from the major order.

If you think about it, this toxicity doesn’t make much sense. Hypothetically, if the number of players focusing on major orders decreased over time, the devs aren’t going to say, “players never deserve to win a major order again”. No, in the long run, the devs would just adjust their expectations, and set objectives accordingly.

In my view, community-wide challenges are inherently “unfair”. Win or lose, it’s not really up to you. It’s up to all the players, and you’re just one of them. If the community fails to meet the challenge, I don’t take it personally, because it doesn’t mean I personally failed a challenge. It’s hardly even a challenge, it’s more of a background story.

Of course, it’s worth asking, is a fictional narrative worth real world player toxicity? Watching strategic blunders and being unable to do anything about it is frustrating. Players take out that frustration on other players. That’s not great.

Ultimately, the problem with my interpretation is that players identify too strongly with Super Earth. It’s widely understood that players are taking the role of the baddies, it’s not remotely subtle. But when you’re in the game, you’re thinking of it as a game, not a story. The goal of the game is to win. There are material rewards for winning. The way to have fun with games, is by playing to win. Nothing wrong or unusual about that. But when the community loses a challenge, players don’t seem to see past the game, to see the humor in a story about baddies losing.