Highlights

  • Major orders failing in Helldivers 2 signal a potential drop in player count, risking the essence of community-wide goals.
  • Players may be losing interest in Helldivers 2 due to repetitive content, leading to challenges in completing major orders.
  • Arrowhead may need to adjust major orders and sustainably balance them with achievable goals amidst lower player counts.

It’s a sad day for managed democracy as yet another major order has failed in Helldivers 2, meaning the last few consecutive major orders have failed. Now, ordinarily, this may mean Helldivers 2 players simply aren’t dedicating their combined efforts to whatever the order’s particular goal is, whether that’s the liberation of several planets or the decimation of bugs over bots.

However, this last major order’s failure may be more representative of gauging a dwindling Helldivers 2 player count because it only tasked players with cutting down 3 billion enemies indiscriminately and they were still unable to complete it within the given time limit. Players came close, killing ~90%, but it still presents a problem for Arrowhead to assess because a lower player count would mean a greater chance of community-wide major order failure on a consistent basis, which would unravel the whole major order ethos at its essence.

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Bugs may not put up as much of a fight as bots in Helldivers 2, but what they lack in difficulty they make up for with secondary objective ingenuity.

Helldivers 2’s Failed Major Orders May Be a Sign of Declining Player Counts

It’s possible that 3 billion was too high of a number to realistically expect from players. At the same time, with all of the bugs and bots being killed in each mission it would be absurd if that number wasn’t being reached sooner, at least with the playerbase Helldivers 2 boasted closer to its launch.

Helldivers 2 has had some bad blood recently with its whole Sony PSN fiasco that was thankfully overturned afterward; regardless, the game’s playerbase might be dropping due to the novelty of Helldivers 2 wearing thin for some. New Premium Warbonds may only do so much to keep dedicated players around and unless they have certain goals to grind toward or have peers they enjoy playing with frequently, players are probably hopping into Helldivers 2 for a daily personal order and putting it down again so they aren’t burnt out on what becomes repetitive content, no matter how engaging or fun they believe it is anyhow.

Helldivers 2 wasn’t always going to maintain its peak concurrent player counts, and even a dent in that number shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as Helldivers 2 losing player interest. Still, with major orders being failed back to back it’s tough not to see player count as a direct correlation.

Helldivers 2 Needs to Balance Its Orders in Response to Lower Player Counts

If the reality is that player counts aren’t going to be as high as they once were, Helldivers 2 may need to reevaluate its approach to major orders if there’s going to be a chance of winning the Galactic War.

Major orders are thrilling when they are all-encompassing and rely on the invigorated push of hundreds of thousands of players, but perhaps more digestible major orders should be considered every now and then to ensure that they’re not all failures from one to the next. The issue with this solution, though, is that it would be more difficult to delineate major orders from personal orders. Overall, both major and personal orders only offer medals—this may be a reason why many players might not care to work toward them, especially if they are already at the egregious medal cap of 250 with all Warbond items purchased.

That said, major orders are also intended to progress the Galactic War’s ongoing lore with results impacting Helldivers 2’s environmental storytelling and Arrowhead could still spin players’ failures into a neat bit of world-building. Another route it can take is waiting it out until more sizable content drops are out that may bring its larger player counts back, such as Helldivers 2’s rumored new enemy faction.

In the meantime, it’ll be fascinating to see whether Helldivers 2’s new major order, which would award the dual-Autocannon EXO-49 EMANCIPATOR EXOSUIT, will be enough to sway players back. But while something as monumental as a new foe or a new mech suit could give it the boost it needs, it could be unsustainable to have such immense content updates drop as often as they’d need to in order to maintain a player count that’s sufficient enough for any major orders to succeed.

Major orders should ideally be challenging and require all players to want to collaborate to see them through. If players are continuously unable to reach their goals, not for a lack of trying but because there literally aren’t enough of them to put that work in, then a drastic change needs to be made.