Helldivers 2's latest major order has everyone so curious about a mysterious interplanetary battle station, 4/5ths of all online players are handling it as I write this headline
Helldivers 2 is, as stated by the devs, slowing down the pace of its updates after its initial gold rush, which saw player concurrents in the hundreds of thousands. It's still got a healthy community at present, though Arrowhead seems determined to avoid another Polar Patriots fiasco and tidy up its bugs.
Still, that's not to say it hasn't been hard at work. There was a big patch recently that saw balance tweaks to the entire game, and despite recent frustrations, Arrowhead seems to be getting more experimental with its major orders, too.
Nothing's right around the corner, though—as clarified by Twinbeard on the game's Discord, quite a few developers at the studio are taking vacations for a month and change: "Sweden in many ways goes into a semi-siesta mode during [the] 'Sweden industry summer break', which is typically early July to mid August," though there's still a small crew working to supply the game with hotfixes and sundry.
Which makes the recent major order all the more intriguing. As an in-game announcement reads, the lab players are charged to save was "working on development of a powerful interplanetary battle station", which is highlighted for emphasis.
Players are, uh, a little hungry for it, to say the least. According to Helldivers.io, around 20,000 of the 25,000 Helldivers 2 players at the time of writing—which is about 10,000 players short of the 24-hour peak, mind—are trying to capture the planet in question for lady liberty.
The prevailing belief on the game's official Discord appears to be that this'll be some kind of clan system, which tracks. If Arrowhead is mostly away until August, it's unlikely that a large-scale content drop is planned—it's reasonable, however, that the studio has been working on the server infrastructure for that sort of thing earlier in the year.
The game's subreddit, meanwhile, has theories ranging from new weapons to, as one player suggests, new super weapons: "There were voice lines that accidentally played early during the Meridia MO about using an unreleased sample type to unlock new super weapons, this is probably it." Alternatively, "it's gonna be f*cking anti-tank mines after all."
Judging by the sheer, ravenous hunger with which Helldivers 2 players are capturing (and likely to maintain) planet X-45 over the next few days, I think this Major Order's in the bag. At the same time, it begs the question as to whether Arrowhead would actually tuck a mainline feature behind a Major Order—stratagems are one thing, this is another. Let's just hope they don't ban sex as punishment, again.