The battle for Super Earth that kicked off with Helldivers 2’s Heart of Democracy update concluded last week, with players managing to fend off an Illuminate invasion of their home planet. One of the two cities that ended up holding out against the hostile squids was Equality-On-Sea, located in the in-game map’s version of China, and it’s led the shooter to make a local news report in the country.
As spotted by players on the Helldivers 2 subreddit, following the big victory for Super Earth, Chinese broadcaster Kanka News’s Good Morning Shanghai anchors fronted a short segment about these recent developments in the game. Based on a translation by a Reddit user with the handle AtypicalGameMaker (whose profile asserts that they’re a Chinese game developer), the report discussed the defense of Equality-On-Sea, hailing both Chinese and non-Chinese players for working together to protect the city.
For some context, Equality-On-Sea and the Super Earth capital of Prosperity City were the only Super Earth cities left standing after the invasion. The defense of the former caused a bit of controversy, with a relatively small number of players review bombing Helldivers 2 because they couldn’t push the city’s defense percentage gauge up to 100%, meaning it’d be fully under their control.
Members of the game’s community suggested the root of this was that Equality-On-Sea was located in-game where Shanghai is in the real world, leading Chinese players to take its defense very seriously. An alleged translation mixup with the Chinese language version of the game seemingly also convinced these players that they could totally liberate the city while the battle for Super Earth was still in progress.
That last bit wasn’t actually the case, with the constant flow of fresh Illuminate troops while the invasion was ongoing making it impossible to fully secure any mega cities at that stage of proceedings. Cue players getting frustrated as they believed their in-game efforts weren’t having a dynamic effect on how the war was playing out, and some accusing developer Arrowhead of railroading them into certain outcomes.
The translation alludes to this apparent misunderstanding, citing the news anchors as having praised Helldivers 2 players for not following Arrowhead’s Galactic War “script” and instead having “fought for their own story in an honorable way.”
Meanwhile, I quite like the way the report looks to have described the final stages of the big fight for Super Earth playing out: “Chinese players were battling the enemies during the daytime using their excellent shooting skills and strategic plans,” the anchors allegedly said, “American players took over the nighttime operations, utilizing air drops and firepower to construct the defense line for Shanghai.
“This great unity of Chinese and American netizens came to a happy ending on the 30th.” Nice.