Liberty’s greetings, Helldivers! Welcome to a new series of community-focused updates on Helldivers 2! Our hope is that we can use these to tell you about the Galactic War happenings, our favorite moments and events, and some of the development plans we have for the game. [h2]THE WAR REPORT[/h2] Let’s recap the last couple of months on the warfront. May marked the moment that Helldivers met the Terminid Supercolony on Meridia. The first major order involving the spore outbreak was a hard lesson learned for us all, and we saw the Terminid infestation spread to more planets, interfering in the lives of good hearted Super Earth citizens. The Helldivers briefly turned their attention to the Automaton front in an attempt to secure resources and decommission a whopping 2 billion bots. This operation did not succeed, and Helldivers were again denied access to the MD-17 Anti-Tank Mines, making the ensuing conflicts an even bigger challenge. Taking advantage of our weakened condition, the Automatons stepped up their invasion, and the Meridian Supercolony kicked into high gear spreading Terminids in greater and greater numbers. This has been called The Second Galactic War, and Helldivers now had to protect our new recruit training facilities to help us get enough boots on the ground and secure our enduring liberty on both fronts. In addition to new recruits, we also liberated a new exosuit: The EXO-49 Emancipator. A Helldiver is nothing without good tools of destruction. Armed to the teeth and with fresh meat in our ranks, the Helldivers were finally ready to take on the Supercolony with Operation: Enduring Peace, a two phase order in which our heroes deployed a new, experimental substance called Dark Fluid–a permanent solution for the Terminid Supercolony on Meridia. The Helldivers secured enough Dark Fluid to stop the spread of the Terminids. But this meant also destroying the planet in the process, with the Dark Fluid triggering planetary implosion and creating a black hole. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44156989/2ff9b4386f33a8f4cacb2cf29ba2ecd7bbb12f1e.png[/img] Now this ominous reminder sits in Meridia’s place. What does the future hold for the Helldivers? For Super Earth? For the time being, the Helldivers should continue to refocus their efforts on the Automatons. SEAF Cyberwarfare Specialists have discovered that the Automatons are planning a massive terraforming project on Cyberstan. Obviously, we cannot allow them to continue with this plan. Now with the Terminid Supercolony destroyed, it's finally time to launch a counteroffensive against them to dismantle their unjust and illegal occupation. [h2]THE WAR TABLE[/h2] Next up, let’s talk about our favorite moments from the Galactic War. We chatted with Game Master Joel about some of the amazing feats of strength and determination from our players, and while it’s hard to narrow it down to just a few highlights, we definitely have some standouts. Here are a few of our favorite moments from Helldivers 2 in the last month: [list] [*] [b]2 Billion Bots[/b] Helldivers were tasked with killing 2 billion bots and they made it 78% to that goal. You might wonder why we’d include a failure as a highlight, but it’s important to remember that our failures light the fires that forge our victories. Besides, it was still an impressive display, and gave us valuable data on how our Helldivers accomplish goals together. This also marked the official start of “The Second Galactic War,” setting the stage for the events that followed. [*] [b]Varylia 5 x Angel’s Venture[/b] The Helldivers liberated Varylia 5 in order to secure the new EXO-49 Emancipator exosuit, but the seriously impressive part of that display was that our players managed to hold their ground on Varylia 5 and Angel’s Venture at the same time, splitting their efforts nearly half and half between the two, pushing just a little harder on Varylia 5. Incredible coordination across the player community! [*] [b]Meridia Supercolony Event[/b] Operation “Enduring Peace” drew to a close in spectacular fashion: the Helldivers destroyed an entire planet! As Meridia imploded and the black hole emerged, the entire community looked on in… awe? Terror? Shock? This permanent change to the Galactic War map has the community buzzing about what comes next. For now, the eerie black hole serves as a reminder of all the hard-won battles that brought us here. We’re loving all the speculation the black hole has caused, too. Keep it coming! [/list] [h2]RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT[/h2] Our last major update included some exciting additions to the game, including some very big wishlist items for the community. However, this big patch was a significant change of pace for us. Previously, we released weekly patches and hotfixes, and in May we abruptly slowed down. We issued a brief statement about why we slowed down, but for a little more context, we spoke with our production director, Alex Bolle, about the details. “We see our relationship with players like being a showman, and [we want to] delight them with regular updates.” With Helldivers 2, we have regular content updates with large-scale improvements and additions, and in between we typically issue hotfixes, which are more of an emergency solution when new issues arise that we couldn’t predict during our internal bug hunting. “But we noticed that those hotfixes became too usual for us to focus on bigger content. Rethinking our cadence helps us reach the quality expected, and incorporate more thorough bug fixes.” Alex also mentioned that, with the push for higher quality updates, we will be able to use this additional time to test content more thoroughly. “We want to extend our bug fixing periods so that we pick up the biggest flaws earlier.” The change is already making a difference for the team. While it will take time to see the large-scale impact, Alex says we can “already see clearer in how we design, catching our breath and thinking about the design impact of our new content. One thing I personally love is that the teams are even more detail-oriented than before.” [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44156989/520324d8d697069e6e281f9aa071ee972ff4737b.png[/img] The brand new swamp biome from our recent update. Finally, I asked Alex what he’s most excited about for the near future of Helldivers 2. “I can’t tell much, otherwise [Game Master] Joel would hunt me down! But I’m very excited to see the future improvements we want to make to the Galactic War and all the tools we have planned for the Game Master. One of our pillars for the future is to focus on playing with (or against) the community, and what I see so far tells me that we’ll have a lot of fun.” You can already see those Galactic War improvements starting to take shape, because in our last update we introduced something the community has been pining for… [b]Visible Warp Links & Attack Origins[/b] Our primary concern with the Galactic War map at launch was to keep the design elegant and readable, and so we eliminated information that we thought players wouldn’t want to see. Our bad–it turns out you really wanted to see all that information! It took some careful planning and designing, but we’re proud to be able to give players more map data so that they can coordinate on which planets to liberate and where to coordinate their efforts. Let us know how this is changing gameplay for you! The other exciting change we wanted to highlight that we brought to Helldivers 2 this month is another item high on the community’s wishlist. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//44156989/c002a5ef8557de9d0f4170e80d1cd24f4927f169.png[/img] At last, Helldivers can work together! [b]Invite-Only Lobbies[/b] This is what we’d call a change in progress. As of right now, the invite-only lobbies are only localized in English, but we’re working on adding more languages. We will update you as soon as we know when more will be added! We want to give our Helldivers the ability to control how they dive and who they dive with. We’ll be back next month with another community update. Until then, keep spreading Managed Democracy!