Trivia / Helldivers II

• Breakthrough Hit:
  • While the first game was modestly successful, the sequel was a runaway hit, topping the charts on Steam almost immediately. The general popularity was so great that the servers were jammed full for the first two weekends after launch even after Arrowhead expanded the server capacity, and logging in at the crossover hours of US Afternoon + European Evening was basically impossible. To put things in perspective, the first game had an all-time peak of 6,744 concurrent players on Steam. The sequel? 458,709. And that's just Steam players - not counting those on consoles!
  • Memes about the game suffering from success abounded, but by the second weekend in-game events ^note Right before the second weekend, 'coincidentially' when the Automatons began launching offensives against Super Earth-held planets had people blaming the server issues on the Automatons Breaking the Fourth Wall as part of their efforts to sabotage Super Earth.
• Colbert Bump: One of the reasons the game became a breakthrough hit. Helldivers 2 received a glowing recommendation on the extremely popular podcast Distractible (although one of the hosts of the game initially had trouble getting it to run). It is also highly praised by several Youtubers and Twitchers.
• Content Leak: Players have been vigorously datamining and hacking the game's files ever since launch day, and sharing the results - ranging from blurry smartphone camera snaps of warbond pages all the way up to live gameplay footage of work-in-progress vehicles and weapons, or embedded videos from the Super Destroyer's news screen - on various sites and platforms. This typically reveals the name and contents of the upcoming warbonds before they're officially announced, but has included a great deal of content for the otherwise conspicuously absent Illuminates. This - combined with intermittent sightings of cloaked warships - lead some players to theorize the Illuminate would be behind the Automaton front and that a surprise switch of factions was on the horizon, but this was proven false as the main Automaton armada arrived and reclaimed Cyberstan instead.
  • The Illuminate in particular, in spite of having no official acknowledgement and almost no foreshadowing, are pretty much an Open Secret by devs and players as many of their enemy units, models, props and decorations, animations and battle themes have been found in the game files and posted publicly.
• Dear Negative Reader: When it was announced in an update post that the game would require a Playstation Network account to continue playing on PC when it was previously optional, it was met with heavy backlash for a variety of reasons. A community manager responded to a user on Twitter/X about it by claiming that the sole reason is so they could ban people. On the official Discord, another community manager dismissively responded by saying it only takes two minutes to create an account and told a persistent user that "[they] thought you were refunding and leaving," although the manager soon apologized and admitted they got heated.
• Demand Overload:
  • One of the more infamous cases of such in video game history; the runaway success of Helldivers II resulted in a far, far greater number of players attempting to play the game online than the game was ever designed to handle, which, according to the developers, is the fault of backend code and cannot be easily fixed. It got to the point where the devs were forced to hard cap the maximum number of concurrent players to 450,000, causing the queue to back up for weeks and players to complain about how incredible of a game it is... if they could actually get to play it. The cap was later raised to 700,000, as the developers appear to have resolved most of the issues with playercounts and matchmaking, but some functionality remains spotty - plus some fairly significant bugs remained unresolved and even new ones have popped up to simply due to the effort of getting the servers and code able to handle the playercount.
  • After two back-to-back major orders succeeded— the liberation of Malevelon Creek and the defense of it, Draupnir, and Ubanea— several players reported not getting the medals that acted as a reward from completing those orders. The developers clarified that due to the overwhelming amount of players who played during these orders, the "shipment" of medals was delayed by anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Rollout of the Malevelon Creek Memorial Cape was similarly staggered; the servers are evidently still struggling to handle the demands being placed on them, even two months later.
• Executive Meddling: It's been stated by Twinbeard, a community manager, that the patch which forced players to register to the Playstation Network in order to keep playing the game even on PC was mandated by Sony as they own the IP and wasn't Arrowhead's decision to do so.
• God Never Said That:
  • There was a rumor that Arrowhead Studios shot down a request to add LGBTQ+ pride flag Helldiver capes into the game as a way of satirizing Rainbow Capitalism while also being inclusive. As far as can be discovered, this statement was entirely made up, as there's no evidence that such a thing ever happened.
  • After some fans mistakenly took a Tumblr fan account's statement that Pelican-1 and Eagle-1 were married as Word of God from the devs themselves, plenty of people were quick to ship the two pilots together. Even after it was revealed by devs that they don't have an official Helldivers Tumblr account and that the info was false, it hasn't stopped people from shipping the two and forming all sorts of headcanons around their relationship. As a matter of fact, the ship seems to be slowly becoming more and more popular as it's spawned plenty of fanart that's gained quite a lot of traction within the fandom.
  • Late into the first month Helldivers II came out, Los Angeles area voice actor Kapono Langit began putting together slick, well-produced pieces of Fan Work framed as In-Universe intercepted transmissions from various sources being overheard by a player standing on their Super Destroyer bridge - most pertinently, decoded Automaton broadcasts. Due to the framing, the quality, and the lack of any sort of a visible video description on YouTube Shorts and TikTok, more than a few fans have taken to sharing the videos under the mistaken belief that they're authentic recordings of gameplay containing real Helldivers lore, coloring more than a handful of players' perceptions of the 'bots. This includes but isn't limited to things like the Automatons wanting to reconquer Cyberstan and then be left alone, when they've continued to act aggressively toward Super Earth even after reclaiming the planet (and Super Earth intelligence thinks they plan to Kill All Humans).
• No Export for You: An odd example to say the least, considering it's effectively retroactive. When the PC version was announced to begin requiring a Playstation Network account to play the game, players from certain countries such as Belarus, the Philippines, and Egypt noted they outright couldn't play the game without some kind of VPN due to the fact that Playstation Network itself is a case of this trope in those countries. Without the ability to make accounts in those regions, even players from them who had been able to buy the game on Steam and play it prior would be effectively locked out from then on.
• Sequel Gap: A whopping nine years passing between the release of the original game in 2015, and II in 2024. To put it into perspective, the original game launched on PlayStation 3 and Play Station Vita, with ports to the PlayStation 4 and Steam releasing in the following months. Helldivers II, on other hand, released only on PlayStation 5 and Steam, during a console generation where support for the PlayStation 4 dried up slowly for the first half.
• Sleeper Hit: While promoted by Sony a fair bit leading up to its release, Helldivers II wasn't expected to be as big of a hit as it ended up being thanks to insanely excellent word-of-mouth and exposure from internet influencers^note Especially considering that Helldivers, while not unsuccessful, only sold about as decently well as you'd expect a moderately-promoted indie game to and wasn't some kind of dark horse smash hit, meaning Sony wasn't promoting the sequel to a relatively obscure nine-year-old game like it was the next Horizon game or anything despite it being a AAA release, as seen by the Demand Overload suffered by the game's servers.
• Trolling Creator: Quite a few major updates to the game came to be from the developers purposefully leaking new equipment into public games without announcing themselves, or blatantly shrugging off player reports of new enemies and conditions that were suddenly spawning without any accompanying patch notes.
  • Early leaks of mech suits, armored vehicles and new weaponry that were not yet seen by anyone else found themselves in games with footage existing of who was believed to be the Game Master dubbed Joel joining matches, casually calling in unknown equipment and then leaving players to use then-unreleased strategems well before their official release.
    • Arrowhead staff later stated that no, this wasn't actually Joel joining people's games and spawning things for them — it was just regular players posing as Joel (since Steam lets you change your nickname to whatever you want whenever you want) and using various means to access equipment they shouldn't be able to yet, and that the Game Master doesn't have the ability to directly intervene in other peoples' sessions in this fashion (read: if you're playing with four friends, the game can't just spawn an APC at random). The icing on the cake? They said it was still in the spirit of what they might do, if they could. As long as the hackers aren't griefing other players and people keep in mind that this equipment is unfinished or even buggy to the point it could crash the game, it seems Arrowhead doesn't mind a Playful Hacker or two having some fun.
  • In spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, the CEO would publicly denounce reports of a new species of Terminid capable of flight as mere rumors, outright stating "Bugs can't fly". Once flying Terminids, now called Shriekers, were formally introduced he would then insist that he and the Ministry of Truth have always believed that such a development would be possible, stating "Some bugs can fly". Similarly, inexplicable blue beams of light have been reported and caught on camera to blast unsuspecting players to bits. With Terminids having no access to such attacks and Automatons using red lasers, it's assumed to most likely be evidence of an incoming Illuminate invasion who are currently missing in the sequel, yet the developers blatantly disregard reports of blue beams of light as falsehoods, stating "Blue beams are not real, they can't hurt you".
• Troubled Production: The engine that was used to make the game, Autodesk Stingray Engine (formerly Bitsquid), was discontinued in 2018, right when the game was starting development. As a result, the developers frequently encountered problems that they had to resolve themselves without any support from Autodesk. This engine was also used for the first game, and by their fellow swedish studio Fatshark for both the Vermintide titles and their 40K spinoff Darktide (amongst others).
• Urban Legend of Zelda: With the scale of the game and the events of the prequel being taken into consideration by players, a number of players have reported various rumors that are difficult to outright prove until they're officially unveiled, which is certainly not helped by the fact the the developers are known to speak in character through official channels to gaslight the playerbase and sneakily insert major updates without telling anyone.
  • In spite of the Illuminates conspicuous absence from the game on top of mysterious blue beams of energy suddenly striking Helldivers with no explanation, players report being able to see what look to be stealthy alien warships briefly appearing and then soaring off when viewed at certain times of day, at certain angles and when they're against certain backdrops that allow them to be seen. Almost no concrete footage of this exists save for footage of what could just as easily be Federation jets and ships in the backdrop of the map.

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