Last Shipment in Game Hell Divers 2 informed players that the Automaton faction had advanced their war efforts to include malicious messages to players. While I’m sure this was a bit of a joke, players have begun to take these sci-fi phishing attempts quite seriously.
We are used to seeing news in games about saving children or fighting for permission to procreate. Hell Divers 2. With this latest tactic, the Automata are trying to break Super Each’s security systems and possibly figure out where we’re going to be sent so they can flank us and take over more galactic territory. The messages we’ve received as examples are humorous and make fun of basic phishing scams from the early internet, but the thing is, they actually work in weird ways.
Helldivers are so suspicious of slot scams that they look at everything suspiciously
Examples of Automaton messages we’ve been given include emails with subject lines like “Check out this patriotic photo,” “Your citizenship has been raised,” and “Dissident talk among your friends.” Any one of these is enough to make a freedom-loving Helldiver’s blood boil and have them pounding their mouse or screen on their shoulder so they can access up-to-date patriotic perks, see real patriotism, or report their so-called “friends” to their nearest democracy official.
I expected developer Arrowhead Game Studios to go somewhere with this in the future. Sending players a series of messages from a up-to-date in-game character who ends up as an Automaton or some similar story told via dispatches over the course of weeks. It turns out that this basic in-game message caused at least one Helldiver to question everything about the last Major Order, and the developer did nothing.
On Hell Divers 2 subredditUser ChingaderaRara wrote a lengthy post about how the message about defending Aesir Pass from the Automatons was actually part of an effort by the enemy faction to disrupt our operations via in-game messages, as we had been previously warned.
Their reasoning is fair and understandable. They cite rising and falling liberation rates and have a solid argument that moving all Helldivers to Aesir Pass would leave the path to the one planet we must hold, X-45, vulnerable and unprotected.
However, ChingaderaRara later edited the post to explain that after further investigation, they realized their theory was flawed. “These are my final words as I address the Democracy Officer. I was wrong. The attack on Aesir Pass was not a trick and hack of an automaton to distract us from defending X-45.”
What’s so fascinating about this is how players can be so fooled by something as basic as shipping, something the developer probably never intended to do anything more with. The machines were trying to break Super Earth’s security, maybe steal some personal information, and find out where the Helldivers are deployed.
Instead, they ended up with discord in the ranks, paranoia, and what I think would lead to choice paralysis in any Helldiver who had the same thoughts. After all, if you don’t know which planet you should be defending, you can’t effectively defend any of them.
