Helldivers 2 has been one of the most polarizing games in recent times. In a sea of battle royales and other PVP games that dominate online gaming, Arrowhead Game Studios brought co-op gaming back by setting players loose on endless armies of Automatons and Terminids.
Despite a rocky first year, from the PSN controversy blocking players in 180 countries, to nerfs taking a lot of fun out of the game, the developers managed to turn things around. Today, Helldivers 2 still maintains a healthy-sized audience that keeps coming back daily to serve cups of Liber-tea to the three enemy factions currently in the game.
With Super Earth’s future hanging in the balance, players have seemingly given up on one of the factions, despite them being highly anticipated for ten months before their eventual arrival in December 2024.
The Helldivers 2 community recently took to Reddit to discuss The Illuminate and the lack of interest they currently face. This is despite the futuristic faction being a key part of the story, with them currently pushing Super Earth closer to the Meridia black hole.
If successful, Super Earth will be destroyed and all of its billions of inhabitants wiped out, in the most crushing blow that the Galactic War has seen. Despite the focus being almost solely on The Illuminate, the iconic Automatons and Terminids still reign supreme.
Out of the 37,598 active players at the time of writing, only 7,705 are currently at war with The Illuminate, which equates to 20.4% of the player base. This makes The Illuminate the least popular faction despite the story’s focus being on them.
Part of this comes down to the lack of enemy and mission variety, with no new content added since the faction finally appeared in the game. As u/CocoNuttyElHomo2 pointed out “there’s only 5 different enemies. Tripods, 2 Overseer variants, zombies & a flying crybaby machine.”
This means that you typically encounter all of the available enemies during every mission, rather than a select few when fighting the Automatons and Terminids. One advantage of this is that you can pre-plan your loadout much better, whereas sometimes you can be caught out when fighting the other factions. However, it also makes each mission feel very similar with little variation.
U/Alex_Everman shared their opinion that “They’re utterly boring with the low variety in enemies, double that with the objectives being the most boring shit ever, and the excessive spawning of voteless to the point the game just does it even outside of horde spawns or critical areas is infuriating,” summarizing their thoughts by saying that The Illuminate is “not difficult, just dull.”
It is a shame to see The Illuminate in such a bad state, especially as the Helldivers 2 community spent much of 2024 theorizing and speculating as to what we could expect when the faction finally made its appearance.
For months, players clamored for any leaks that were posted online, diving into character models, weapons, sound effects, animations, and any other pieces of information that were found in the in-game files.
Despite this, Helldivers 2 is in a good spot and has seemingly found its groove after spending months losing players due to weapon nerfs and enemy buffs that turned many players away. Ever since the Escalation of Freedom update, the game has gone from strength to strength.
