Helldivers 2makes you feel joy in death. The act of dying is a fleeting one, because all that’s required to bring you back from the brink is a handful of button presses. Playing as one of a million soldiers just like you, to perish is ultimately meaningless, because there will be another unfortunate soul to take your place whether you like it or not.
You die, you come back, you die again. Rinse and repeat until you’ve completed the goal or are forced to retreat because you just weren’t good enough. When death is such a constant, the way in which your execution is carried out ceases to matter. You were going to bite the dust anyway. Crushed by a bug? Cool. Torn to pieces by an evil robot. Sick. Shot in the head by your friend? Amazing. Nothing is off the table, and that’s part of why Helldivers 2 rules.
Developer Arrowhead Studios recently saidit has no plans to remove friendly fire, or offer a mode where the feature isn’t included. Its logic is that if the weapons you fire can damage a bug or robot, why wouldn’t it do the same to your friends? That, and actually hurling a deadly airstrike at your team, is hilarious. Removing friendly fire would drastically reduce how much fun I have with Helldivers 2, because its presence informs how you approach every match.
If you hate friendly fire so much, why not just play matches all on your lonesome? I promise that definitely won’t be more frustrating.
Whenever I drop into a game, friendly fire is always on my mind, but not because I know it’s going to ruin my day. The friends I play with have awful trigger fingers and a habit of hurling explosive stratagems in our general direction, meaning I will walk into wild airstrikes or mines on multiple occasions in every match, sending myself to hell and back before I even get time to figure out what happened.
Yes, I might scream in brief frustration, but this is quickly taken over by laughter as I bask in the absurdity of it all. In a game this chaotic, killing one another is going to happen, intentionally or otherwise.
Knowing I’d be safe from their gunfire, explosions, and equipment if I decided to run in front of them or into a horde of bugs they’re currently tackling would undercut the tension, giving me a safety net that Helldivers 2 doesn’t need, and would actively make the game worse. It would turn it into a very different game, one where danger no longer waits around each little corner, and I was given room to breathe. I don’t want that. In fact, give me the polar opposite.
Moments where I scream at my friends that they almost shot me or that they need to watch where they’re aiming would vanish entirely, as would the laughs and jokes that come from trying our best to survive increasingly dire situations.
Friendly fire also influences player positioning and how you approach each firefight, because it’s impossible to stand in certain positions on the map if you want to avoid being completely melted by your team. Drop pods also won’t kill you anymore, and we can all agree it’s objectively hilarious whenever that happens.
I think the majority of modern multiplayer games have conditioned us to a one-sided feeling of danger, where we need only fear the enemy and can count on our friends to save us, even if it means firing through our avatars or planting a well-placed grenade at our feet.
In most of the games we play, these things won’t harm us, but Helldivers 2 isn’t afraid to bake that brief facet of realism into the full experience. It makes the game better in so many ways, both with its thematic intentions and the mechanical brilliance it brings to completing objectives.
Nothing about Helldivers 2 would be the same if only bugs and robots could kill me, neither would it be as successful. It makes you feel joy in the act of death, even as you inflict it on your closest friends — all because you know it’s being done for the greater good. Or just for the inevitable banter. Either way, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the third-person shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios. This time out, the Helldivers are deep in the Galactic War, and it’s up to you to bring Managed Democracy to the masses.
