Highlights

  • Dark Fluid missions in Helldivers 2 challenged players with teamwork, forcing them to think strategically and coordinate effectively.
  • Players had to defend drills while dealing with friendly fire, showcasing the need for inventive tactics and coordination in the game.
  • Arrowhead should continue to encourage teamwork in missions to keep Helldivers 2 fresh and exciting for players in the long run.

If there’s one thing Helldivers 2 has excelled at thus far, it’s emergent storytelling. Players' actions or inactions in-game have a real effect on the narrative unfolding in the Second Galactic War. When the Helldivers destroyed Meridia and left a gaping, dangerous black hole in its wake, it was hard to see it as anything but a massive attempt at foreshadowing something sinister on the horizon. But even before any horrible, democracy-threatening alien menace can come from it, the campaign against the Meridia supercolony forced the Helldivers 2 community to grapple with a challenge more terrifying than any bug or bot: actual teamwork.

In order to destroy Meridia and the massive terminid colony on it, the game introduced a new mission type to players called Dark Fluid. Essentially, the mission entailed installing planet-destroying devices on the doomed, bug-infested planet. This dark fluid, which would eventually make Meridia collapse into a giant black hole, was called in by Helldivers, placed into drills, and then seeped into the planet’s surface. The tricky part was defending the drills, which tested how players worked together like never before.

Helldivers 2 Squad Wallpaper
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Helldivers 2 Needs More Missions Like Dark Fluid

While it’s seemingly unlikely that players will be destroying more planets anytime soon, the dark fluid missions were a breath of fresh air for Helldivers 2’s gameplay loop. Players were met with the usual onslaught of endless terminids, but they were also faced with the unique challenge of their drills being susceptible to friendly fire in addition to enemy attacks. This meant that they were hard-pressed to deal with the insectoid alien menace while avoiding using some of their most effective and explosive strategies for fear of destroying the drill themselves.

This was the first instance of the game forcing players to think outside the box and use team-based tactics to complete the mission. In most other mission formats, there’s no real penalty for spamming orbital or eagle strikes on a target, running for cover, and letting air support rack up kill after kill. Additionally, the spread-out nature of most objectives has given rise to a Helldivers 2 meta where some players find it more effective to split up to cover more ground, effectively turning what’s supposed to be a coordinated squad of soldiers into four standalone sci-fi Rambos.

The most effective Helldivers were coordinating with each other in the pre-game lobby, deciding who was going to bring what weapons and strategies, and opting into less popular tools that eschew outright damage for more subtle crowd control. In favor of the popular and destructive Eagle 500Kg Bomb and railgun strikes, successful players were thinking outside the box and bringing the EMS strikes/turrets and the massively underrated Patriot mechs to slow the bugs and hold the line while avoiding errant explosions. The punishing difficulty of the mission itself meant that only teams with intense coordination and cooperation had any hope whatsoever of making it to extraction.

Helldivers 2 Should Encourage More Teamwork

The community loves the chaos that an average helldive can escalate into, but for big, story-moving missions like the dark fluid operation, Arrowhead should keep testing the Helldivers 2 playerbase by making them come together and galvanizing into the cohesive squads they’re meant to be. As punishing as the dark fluid missions were, completing one felt like a true accomplishment unlike anything in the game to date. If a team extracted from Meridia, they knew it was because of their individual skill and teamwork that made victory happen.

Helldivers 2 features stratagems and weaponry that often fall to the wayside in favor of whatever is topping a tier list on any given day. If Arrowhead stays the course and keeps making players continually evolve strategies and work together (and avoiding non-terminid related bugs in future missions), it can keep the Helldivers 2 experience fresh and exciting for a very long time.