The secret sauce with Helldivers 2, outside of the excellent moment-to-moment blasting, is the game's overarching galactic war. Controlled by developer Arrowhead and game master Joel, this sees the Helldivers marshalled to various spots across the galaxy to fight for key objectives, with success often resulting in some sort of in-game reward (like mech suits) and failure setting back the cause of democracy an unspecified amount.
This is a top-down narrative, with the objectives set by the developers and players along for the ride. Well, mostly: The community did band together over the player-authored "Martale Gambit", to the extent even Joel had to acknowledge what was happening. The Martale Gambit ultimately didn't come off, though it got within a whisker, and now some foolhardy Helldivers are eager to try it all again.
Announced on the Helldivers subreddit and Discord, a whole bunch of players and prominent community figures have come together to form the Freedom Alliance. The goal is to bring together players for "recurring, large-scale events that last a few days," and basically the Freedom Alliance is going to set its own community major orders, with the first relating to the official ongoing effort to build the Democratic Space Station.
Operation Vanguard Horizon will see the Helldivers tasked with breaking Automaton supply lines that threaten the construction of the DSS. The organisers provide an "Alliance Orders" sheet in the Helldivers style, and leave the choice of specific planets to individual squads, instead setting targets for high-value items and objectives that will inevitably assist with the "official" major orders.
In a particularly nice touch, the various objectives range across difficulty, with the addition of "Brasch Tactics" for those seeking a challenge. The latter is themed around the beloved General Brasch, fearless defender of democracy, and gives players a suggested loadout alongside some warm words about splatting the foes of democracy.
The Freedom Alliance says it's not a clan or a strictly defined group, but "an open idea that anyone can build on, participate in, or write their own stories about." There's a whole bunch of community art and cheery propaganda to go along with the effort, and even a video trailer to get everyone jazzed-up about managed democracy. Brilliantly, it's just clips of Helldivers blowing up the bad guys set to excerpts from Kenny Rogers' The Gambler:
Operation Vanguard Horizon runs from now until Thursday 24 October, alongside the current major order that has seen the Helldivers deployed to Matar Bay to battle the "socialist toasters". October 26 will then see Liberty Day, which in the original game Arrowhead tended to mark with special in-game events: The current thinking is that this is when the DSS may be completed, just in time for the Illuminate to finally appear and blow it up.
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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."
