The Helldivers 2 bot faction has been eradicated. What do now?
I've seen Battlestar Galactica, I don't trust what's going on here at all
Exciting news for the future of everyone's favourite co-op shooter that isn't legally an adaptation of Starship Troopers. A few days ago, Helldivers 2 issued a new major order to annihilate the Automatons, who had been pushed back like never before. And annihilate you all did, with players' combined efforts being officially recgonised yesterday on the Helldivers 2 Xitter: Mission Accomplished! The bots have been eradicated!
The question becomes, in the words of Charlie Kelly, what do now? Helldivers 2 is an on-going live campaign against, up to now, two factions converging on Earth, the bots and the bugs. With one piece taken off the board, it would seem the fight to restore democracy in the galaxy has gotten a little bit easier. Perhaps this was done to give Joel, the game master who is basically single-handedly controlling the enemy pieces, a bit of a holiday.
The more likely answer is that the bots haven't actually been exterminated. For one, the government of Super Earth isn't always entirely reliable (treason!) so the Mission Accomplished image has a definite whiff of George Dubya's aircraft carrier about it. For another, if we're meta gaming, it's very unlikely that the devs would just scrap an entire faction that they've made loads of cool assets and animations for. So, like the Terminator, it seems nailed on that these robits will be back, baby.
For now, and as Edwin wrote about a while back, there's a third faction from the original Helldivers game that hasn't showed up yet: the Illuminate. Our pals at Eurogamer have noted rumours popping up on the Helldivers subreddit that these new lads, a highly advanced species of fish people, have already been teased in the game. It's a bit of a mystery, not helped by the fact that there's no official roadmap for Helldivers 2 kicking around (Arrowhead's CEO says they're working on it, but their old one was super out of date).
I'm into it, though! I said just last week that mystery is good. Get's people talking, makes things fun. So it'll be interesting to see what happens next in Helldivers 2, and how the community responds.