How rewards and psychology bring the Helldivers 2 community together

It was somewhere between my first tour of duty scrapping bots at Malevelon Creek and nuking Termanids on Turing that it occurred to me that the Helldivers’ secret weapon isn’t their mighty fleet or some fancy new weapon: It’s the camaraderie formed with other players when you’re fighting for a shared goal.

The gameplay in Helldivers 2 heavily emphasizes cooperation between players without the need for an official ruleset. Whether you’re completing an objective or just trying to survive, there’s something powerful about fighting for the person next to you, and the Helldivers 2 community has that in spades. While people just generally enjoying the game is a big part of it, the sense of companionship is the result of some clever and deliberate decisions made by developer Arrowhead Game Studios that empower its players to actively help one another.

The most obvious instance of this is the galaxy map, which shares real-time metrics associated with the “liberation” or defense of a planet. This number goes up with every sequence of missions you complete, which is typically no more than a fraction of a percent, but knowing that your efforts made some small contribution can have a profound psychological impact. And that’s only sweetened by the extrinsic motivation offered by the steady trickle of in-game currency you earn in each mission. This is reinforced with the addition of community goals, which can take place over long periods of time and require players to concentrate their efforts on a singular task for larger rewards, like the successful defense of a certain number of planets. This further emphasizes that in order to succeed, you need to work together.

I’m usually a little on the fence about other players joining me in the game, but Arrowhead made it so beneficial to have other players with you that I’m more inclined to actively seek out or request squadmates. Nothing prevents you from dropping into Helldivers 2 solo (liberty knows I have), and with very few exceptions, a solo player can accomplish everything a group can. However, you’ll finish missions with reduced efficiency, and you don’t get extra rewards if you suffer through the experience alone. In fact, you get fewer XP and requisition points than you would if you had extracted with your whole team.

The second consecutive miracle here is getting players to commit to a mission that may take up to 40 minutes to complete. It must’ve been tough trying to find the ideal amount of time for players to feel motivated to finish a round without making them feel crunched for time. While missions in Helldivers 2 don’t abruptly end when the timer reaches zero, you’re cut off from all logistical support, which can make a successful extraction all but impossible. Even if you run out of reinforcements and fail your mission, you’ll still get rewards for enemy assets you destroy or objectives you complete, so it’s always worth it to continue playing.

Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Currently, there isn’t a penalty for leaving mid-game, aside from forfeiting any rewards you might have otherwise gained. You aren’t even prevented from immediately jumping into a new game and doing the same thing, but at a certain point, you’re only hurting yourself and the rest of your team. There are plenty of games that will punish you for chronically abandoning your team; in Helldivers 2, I’m far more motivated to see things through, not just because you get more in-game rewards for extracting with your entire party, but because I don’t want to leave my team in the lurch.

In addition to just giving you more bodies with more guns to complete your objectives, Helldivers 2 arms players with a myriad of opportunities to give their team a leg up. This is echoed in everything ranging from weapons with crewed reloads to enemies that become easier to take down in groups. There is even a broad range of emotes designed to be shared with other players.

Naturally, this kind of teamwork demands effective communication, but not everybody likes to rely on voice chat (myself included). Thankfully, in Helldivers 2, there’s no shortage of ways to get your point across. In addition to a versatile pinging system, it also features a handful of simple audio barks, text chat, and even speech-to-text communication. If all else fails, calling in an orbital bombardment spitting distance from your team is a surefire way to get them moving fast.

No discourse about Helldivers 2 would be complete without mentioning what is perhaps its best feature: friendly fire. Bemoaned by some, “accidentally” catching a bullet from your friend has always been an integral part of the Helldivers experience. Yes, it’s unintentionally hilarious, but it also actually encourages communication. While you might assume this leads to people deliberately carpet-bombing their team, more often than not, I’ve found that players at least feel a small tinge of guilt when a teammate is caught in the blast radius of their fire support.

Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Exceptions to the generally positive social experience in Helldivers 2 naturally exist — this is the internet, after all — but I’ve found those to be relatively rare in comparison to other online co-op shooters. A great example of this can be found in the official Helldivers subreddit, which is full of posts telling people to reject the meta and enjoy the game instead of booting players for bringing unoptimized loadouts into missions. You can also find plenty of community posts encouraging players to commit to an entire campaign instead of simply farming the easiest missions for quick wins.

Even in the absence of any formal covenant between its players, the Helldivers 2 community has generated its own informal rules, traditions, procedures, and superstitions. For instance, if I’m hosting the mission, you’d better believe I’m going to be the last person on the dropship. Also, can you really call it an extraction if you aren’t diving headfirst into the dropship while dropping a complimentary nuke on the LZ?

Image: Reddit users Ollie_Hoff, The_Good_Guy_Two, Zero_Finite, brew_life

Gaming is no stranger to looking at psychology to drive engagement. However, instead of feeling predatory, Helldivers 2 appears determined to focus on ways to drive cooperation among its players. In a game that has virtually no guardrails around griefing, where friendly fire is a common occurrence, and you can drop literal bombs on your teammates, people mostly choose not to. They share ammo, salute, chest bump, carry each other through losses, and rejoice in their triumphs. Experiences like this are what kept players literally waiting in line to play Helldivers 2 over its opening weekend and have made the frenetic cooperative shooter into a unique social experience.