Major Orders, reporting for duty
It turns out that helldivers don’t just rain from the sky when needed, but live on a spaceship in between missions. On that spaceship, you and your co-op buddies have a space map where you can look at different planets on which battle is raging, and different battlefields upon those planets. The galactic war is synchronised for all players in such a way that sorties undertaken by you and your pals are contributing to the overall war effort.
To guide players, you’ll be presented with Major Orders - these are directives from on-high about what planets to deal with - and personal orders, which are little missions to, say, kill a particular beastie that you and your friends can complete for rewards. The actual fights you undertake are called Operations, which are split up into multiple missions, with harder operations having more missions. A mission might be to defeat a “high value target”, to retrive certain resources, or to overwhelm an enemy stronghold, according to apost on the PlayStation blog.
I’m a sucker for this kind of macro context stuff. Where Helldivers 2 starts to lose me again is in some of the progression mechanics shown above, where resources must be retrieve from planets in order to upgrade your spaceship, unlock new equipment, and so on. They don’t look like bad ideas, but theydolook like systems designed for people who are going to put dozens or hundreds of hours into Helldivers 2, and I already know that’s not me anymore.
Still, this is the coolest Helldivers 2 has looked to me since it was announced - and just in time, given it’s out in two weeks.
