If you've been playing Helldivers 2 since it first launched last year, then there's a good chance you're a veteran of Malevelon Creek. Dubbed "robot Vietnam" due to its dense jungle and intense fights, those early days of the game when our stratagems were weaker and we hadn't unlocked all the ship modules were brutally difficult. But do you remember Mort? And do you know why Gabe Newell almost lost it for Super Earth?
At a recent GDC talk, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt remembers Malevelon Creek and Mort. "Mort was a planet that we just made, and we didn't care too much about it, but the community cared greatly," Pilestedt says. It wasn't essential for winning the Galactic War, we just didn't want to lose the fight there after taking such a battering on Malevelon Creek.
A lot of the liberation and defend objectives for planets are timed, and "the community came down to, like, 20 minutes for win or lose," remembers Pilestedt. "And then suddenly everybody was faced with an image saying 'please wait democratically' and a buffering spinner. The entire PC community got disconnected. There were places calling us, like, 'what's going on with your servers?' It's like, 'we don't know. We can't see anything wrong with our servers.' And it was our friend Gabe N[ewell, the owner of Steam]. It was [a] Steam update."
After the update, there was only ten minutes left to save Mort, so Helldivers had to come up with some clever tactics to win. "Some of the community members, they started promoting that once you're done with the primary mission objectives, that is when the data is sent to the back end [to change the liberation and defend percentage], so you don't have to extract," Pilestedt explains. "So they're like, 'as soon as you're done with the primary mission, you just kill the entire squad over and over. That will be our sacrifice.'"
Freedom isn't free, but we managed to save Mort with just 20 seconds to spare, Pilestedt says. "We were sitting there at the office with popcorn," he says. The way we as a community decide to engage with the Galactic War is one of my favorite things about Helldivers 2. A developer has said the studio is working on how to encourage participation and rebalance the end-game, and I'm excited to see what they come up with.
In the meantime, check out some of the best online games you can play right now.
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