It turns out that the prophesied Helldivers 2 patch that would make you, erm, soil your breeches(?) was definitely still in the pipeline, no pun intended. Helldivers 2 just got a massive, hefty update that’s shaken up the game’s progression system in a major way and, for the first time, brought Super Earth under threat.
The Illuminate are back, and they’re miffed. After a long, drag-out brawl with a Discord ARG, the Helldivers 2 community finally solved all the satellite’s devious little puzzles, which led to… 11 hours of a static screen showing a slowly approaching singularity. The conclusion of the stream, though, was sick as hell.
After a few moments of blaring sirens, the satellite (which players had been clumsily piloting) focused in on the singularity to reveal the stomach-dropping sight of Illuminate ships dropping out of warpspeed. Or whatever those squid bastards use. Understanding enemy technology is treason, after all.
Major Order and new Illuminate types
Image 1 of 2
The new Major Order is a ‘desperate last stand’ type of deal—three planets are under threat, and as a message shared to the Discord promises, “All three planets will fall”. The objective is to inflict as much damage as you can “while Mega City defenses are bolstered … Battle on Super Earth is inevitable.”
This is a huge deal. For the uninitiated, in Helldivers 1, Galactic Wars operated on a monthly cycle—one where Super Earth was genuinely under threat. This Major Order not only hints at a potential fall of Super Earth, it also suggests further urban city maps beyond the cosy towns we got with the Illuminate’s arrival. That’s pure conjecture, mind, but the namedrop of mega cities has my eyebrows raised.
As per the patch notes, the Illuminate also have three new troop types to achieve their dastardly goals with: The Stingray, “Jetfighters that provide Illuminate support from the sky,” the Crescent Overseer, which can “lay barrages on Helldivers in cover”, and the Fleshmob, which is the rat-king of Illuminate husks. This is fine.
Balance Updates
The patch notes also go into a whole host of tweaks to weapon balance—which I’ve done my best to summarise here, though Johan Pilestedt and Niklas Malmborg of Arrowhead Games have also done a patch summary video which you can view above.
In general, the nuts and bolts of weapons have been adjusted. Weapons mostly have less spread to them, while pistol-caliber (sidearms and SMG) guns are less effective at long range. Sway for primaries and sidearms has been tweaked, with primaries having less and sidearms having more, and melee weapons cost less stamina across the board, making them easier to use.
Major changes have also been made to two other damage types: Shrapnel and Fire. Shrapnel now always hits in a 360 blast, and as such has had armor-piercing values tweaked to compensate.
This means that, broadly-speaking, shrapnel will deal less damage if you punch it into the ground, because a lot of your potential pain will be jettisoned immediately into the earth below. Conversely, hitting a large target centre-mass with a shrapnel blast should hurt it even more.
For the community’s beloved Eruptor, Malmborg believes it’s all good news: “It feels great—it feels powerful as a single-target weapon, and also powerful as an AoE weapon. I think we nailed it.”
As for fire, it now scales with enemy size, as the patch notes read: “the larger the enemy, the more damage they take while burning. However, bigger enemies will also be slightly more resistant to ignition.” Which makes sense. As both Pilestedt and Malmborg put it, the more surface area something has to burn, the more it’ll burn when it’s finally set ablaze.
There’s also a heap of tweaks and adjustments that are far, far too numerous for me to mention here, but you can look at the full patch notes yourself to find out more. Besides, speculation on the correct meta for any given weapon is about to get a hell of a lot more complicated, because weapon customisation is finally here, baybee.
Weapon customisation
A feature so impactful that Arrowhead deemed it worthy of its own explainer video, weapon customisation is finally here for primary weapons. “Who knows,” says Malmborg. “Maybe in the future for your sidearms and melee weapons,” too.
The amount of customisation options a primary will have depend on, simply put, how much like a gun it is. Experimental weapons like lasers and plasma weapons will have less options, whereas bog-standard bullet flingers will have more. Each weapon, however, has potential attachments for a magazine, a muzzle, an underbarrel, optic sights, and even cosmetic patterns.
This feature unlocks at rank 10, though you won’t have access to weapon upgrades right away. Instead, the more you use a weapon, the more it’ll level up—giving you access to purchase customisations with requisitions. The intent is to give endgame players something to chip away at—developing and customising their favourite bits of kit.
You can also save loadouts, and you’ll only be able to select these loadouts from the mission preparation screen—so there’ll be no waiting for your teammates to fiddle with their guns on a granular level.
When asked how many variations there are, Malmborg nearly gets thrown into an existential crisis: “Some weapons will have six to seven optics, you can have maybe three different magazines, a couple of underbarrels … Some weapons are around 20, plus all the patterns. We have 10+ [patterns] can’t remember all of them, there’s a lot.” Arrowhead has plans to keep expanding on the system, too.
There are other things I haven’t even mentioned here—such as the Super Store now giving you access to all purchasable items, rather than having them be on a FOMO-style rotation, but one thing’s for certain: Shams Jorjani wasn’t being facetious. This update is well and truly trouser-browning in scale, and I’m keen to get stuck back in to slay the foes of liberty. Which you can do right now.
