Arrowhead Game Studios has enjoyed handing down some tough and consequential major orders for the Helldivers 2 community to beat, but its latest might be one of its thorniest yet. You see, major orders tend to focus the entirety of the player base on a single objective or set of goals, such as killing billions of bugs, wiping out the robot Automatons, or liberating an embattled planet. Everyone contributes to a single milestone and gets rewarded for it upon completion. Otherwise, everyone fails, but at least they fail together. Now, for the first time, Helldivers 2 players need to pick between liberating two different planets, and picking one over the other will only unlock one of two stratagems for the community.
To be clear, the latest major order charges players with liberating both Choohee and Penta, but according to Helldivers 2’s narrative, only the stratagem of the first one to be liberated will be salvageable. First, players need to liberate Lesath, a planet in the same cluster as Choohee and Penta, at which point the other two planets will be available for players to fight over. At that point, the real struggle will begin. If the community liberates Choohee first, they will unlock the MD-17 Anti-Tank Mines as a stratagem to call upon in the middle of a mission. If they opt to free Penta first instead, everyone in the game will receive the RL-77 Airburst Rocket Launcher. While the community is rarely fully in tandem and on the same page, this is the first time the developers have ever intentionally split them.
Discussions are already underway across various Helldivers forums, and things are more heated than I figured they’d be. When given the choice between an active and passive weapon, such as the difference between a rocket launcher you shoot and mines you place in waiting, I think most folks defer to the active weapon. Looking at some of the replies to the Helldivers tweet, sentiment seemed to be trending in that direction, but elsewhere, impassioned players are making the case for the alternative, and both have some points.
On one hand, the airburst rocket launcher could be an effective anti-air weapon, which would come in handy against the flying bugs and robot gunships that now plague Helldivers 2 players. On the other hand, mines are really good at taking out heavily armored ground units, which players might need when their focus inevitably swings back to the Automatons and their incredibly beefy tanks and walkers. Having more mines might help when taking out swarms of bugs or when clearing out their nests too, so there’s good enough reason for players to go either way on this major order. Unfortunately for Helldivers 2 players, the choice isn’t so cut and dry.
In a neat gesture, players will be able to drop into either planet and trial their respective “experimental stratagems” to make the choice ever so slightly easier. There’s also a few days on the clock until the major order expires, so there’s plenty of time to bounce between both planets trying out the new stratagems.
As a games journalist, I must encourage you all to do your due diligence and research the products so that you can make an informed purchase. Godspeed y’all. Give ‘em hell down there and remember to choose wisely.