Helldivers 2 wants you to make sure virtual citizens don’t wet the bed, and also here’s another free cape

You need to buck your ideas up and start doing better. No, it’s not what your parents say whenever you tell them what you’re up to for a living, it’s what Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead are basically telling players with the shooter’s latest major order.

Get out there with those stabby flags and murder-death millions of the enemies Super Earth’s citizens are most afraid of, in order to restore their faith in your ability to protect them by murder-deathing things. It’s not all tough love, though. There’s also another free cape for folks who helped solve a puzzle in May.

“The relentless assault on Managed Democracy is taking its toll on our citizens’ sense of well-being,” reads the fresh order that just gone live in the game, “Surveys indicate that citizens fears of invasion, disenfranchisement, and dismemberment of loved ones is at an all-time high.” I mean, given the divers’ efforts to defend the Democracy Space Station from the Automatons in the previous mission ended in defeat, you can see how we got to this sad state of affairs.

So, Super Earth’s bigwigs have ordered the creation of three new “Maximum Security Cities” dubbed Fort Union, Fort Sanctuary, and Emeria. The names aren’t quite as catchy as gun, but you can’t have everything, I suppose. That’s clearly not enough thinly veiled and chuckle-worthy satire, though, so this latest order tasks folks with killing millions of the enemies that “arise most frequently in citizen nightmares”, as part of a galaxy-brain PR campaign.

Break out the Big Smoke memes, because the order calls for 20 million Shriekers, 12.5 million Impalers, 6.25 million Factory Striders, 7.5 million Fleshmobs, and 3.75 million Leviathans to be splattered across space. It’s a big mix of bugs, bots, and Illuminate squids to murder-death, so even a player base that’s notoriously efficient at racking up big kill numbers might struggle.

Lucky then that Arrowhead gifted another free cape to players this morning. Rather than commemorating some review bombing, this one’s dubbed the Ingress-81 cape and is a reward for folks who took part in the Station-81 alternate reality game Arrowhead ran via Helldivers 2’s Discord back in May. Basically, it was a tease that helped tee up the Illuminate invasion of Super Earth later that month.

The new cape’s a vibrant purple and has some braille patterns on it that players look to have already worked out read “DCON DCON”, a reference to the ARG featuring the word Defcon more times than a chat with NORAD in the Fallout universe.