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After a surprise announcement at The Game Awards, The Illuminate are now invading Super Earth and her colonies in Helldivers 2. Arriving alongside a new Warbond, dense urban environments and new vehicles to drive, Arrowhead Game Studios delivered on months of leaks in one massive update.
Unlike the last major update, which saw massive nerfs that resulted in review bombs, the community has rallied against the Illuminate threat en masse, causing a huge spike in players fighting for democracy.
Helldivers 2 player count soars
While Helldivers 2 was already a very popular game with a dedicated player base, the release of the new update has caused tens to thousands of players to jump back into the brilliant multiplayer game.
Not accounting for PlayStation players, player numbers on PC skyrocketed more than five times the usual daily peak. Just a few hours after the update launched, the game hit a 24-hour peak of 131,752 players.
At the time of writing, in the lowest typical period for player counts, Helldivers 2 is sitting pretty with over 65,000 concurrent players on Steam alone. With the game’s massive popularity on PlayStation 5, the real player numbers will be substantially higher as well.
The community is in love
While there will certainly be some minor issues in their debut, the new Illuminate content has reminded players what they love about the game. With an emergency major order pushing players to defend against the new threat, Arrowhead’s living universe is back at its peak.
“Close to 100k players on ONE planet like back when we destroyed the first Automatons. It’s glorious,” one fan said shortly after the announcement.
“I got two friends who are out of town on vacation. They rebooked their plane tickets to an earlier flight home when they learned of the update,” said another.
The new Helldivers 2 update has proven, once again, that there’s no game quite like Arrowhead’s multiplayer experience, and it’s glorious. While the wait was massive for the new enemy type, it’s certainly been worth it.
For more coverage of HD2, read about the leaked wildlife system or the reason why players won’t be able to go capeless into battle.
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