Helldivers 2's Illuminate invasion brought players from around the world together, and our defence of Super Earth's Shanghai even made the news in China

Super Earth defenders fighting Illuminate forces across a war-torn city in Helldivers 2
(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

Chinese players and their stalwart defence of Equality-On-Sea in Helldivers 2 made the news on our own humble site, and now it's even made local television news in Shanghai, China.

The last two standing Mega Cities on Super Earth are Prosperity and Equality-On-Sea, roughly equivalent to modern-day Sweden and Shanghai. Chinese players refused to let Equality fall, and plenty of international players jumped to its defense, too.

A clip of a Chinese news broadcast was posted to Reddit, and one commenter who claims to be a native Mandarin speaker has translated what was said. Fellow journalist Lu-Hai Liang confirms the translation is "roughly right." Here's a better version of the clip from Kanaka News.

Battle for Super Earth broadcasted by local TV news in Shanghai, China from r/Helldivers

The male host starts: "When various languages said the same words: 'Keep Fighting, China,' when Chinese and American players cooperated, global players assembled at Shanghai, built the cyber-great-wall through day and night shifts, saved the honor of the Earth."

There were memes on the Helldivers subreddit showing American players logging on to defend Equality as Chinese players went to bed. It was a heartwarming sight to behold.

"Shanghai became the key stronghold of this intergalactic war due to its strategic location," explains the female host, although I don't think its in-game location really mattered. It seems to be just the spirit of Helldivers 2's Chinese community that made it so worth defending.

The male host then repeats a popular fan theory: "After all the other six cities fell, players would assemble at Stockholm to fight the final battle, which is the city where the developers are located. But players didn't follow the script, they fought for their own story in an honorable way."

While Helldivers 2 does have a game master, it's nice to see that we can impact the story in our own way if we all fight together. Rather than letting Equality fall and holding Prosperity, we let the Illuminate go too far into the capital, and the President of Super Earth was killed in action.

The news anchors say, "a magical thing happened, a lot of foreign players decided to back up Shanghai," when it became obvious New York's Mega City was going to fall. They praise the teamwork and state, "This great unity of Chinese and American netizens came to a happy ending on the 30th," when Super Earth won the war.

Isn't it great what we can do when we all play together?

While we patiently await our new Major Order, check out all the best online games you can play right now.

Issy van der Velde
Contributor

I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.

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