Helldivers 2: Dev Slams Ubisoft/Embracer As New Campaign Splits Fans

Everything going on right now in the galactic war, what you're getting from the new campaign, and why one developer's LinkedIn post has the community buzzing.

If you've been keeping an eye on Helldivers 2 lately, there's a lot happening at once. With two days left on the current Major Order, the push is on, and there's also a new campaign rolling out with rewards that have split opinion right down the middle. On top of that, an Arrowhead developer just said something about Ubisoft and Embracer that has people talking.

Starting with the Galactic War, you've successfully held Varelian 5, which puts things on track with two days still left before the Major Order wraps up. Over on Marfark, the operation against the Automatons is sitting at roughly the halfway mark.

Since it's an Automaton-controlled planet, difficulty 10 missions are going to be tougher, but if you'd rather move things along quickly, running lower difficulty missions will finish faster and help push the liberation numbers up sooner. It really comes down to whether you want to take your time and enjoy the fight or just get through it as efficiently as possible to lock in the win.

The other development with the storm at Ke involves an upgrade from its current status to a Class 2 Exostorm. The latest update suggests that localized atmospheric cells are creating planetary maelstroms. This is important since it appears that the next step of the Illuminate concerning the Void is imminent, and defending Ke is going to be key.
A separate strategic opportunity also opened up recently, pointing to Choohe.

Early intel suggested that additional information about potential targets for the orbital superweapon was being stored there, and grabbing that intel could help determine the right planet to hit. So far, it doesn't look like the community has taken that opportunity, and instead, the focus has stayed on Marfark. It's an interesting call, but that's where things stand.

The transition onto the campaign map reveals quite a lot on the visual front as well.

The Automatons have started constructing what looks to be a Death Star, and their army is spreading rapidly, which makes for an extremely ominous picture when you take everything into account. As for the structure of the new campaign, it's confirmed to run across three phases.

That means if this current Major Order is won, only one more win out of the next two Major Orders is needed to unlock the reward tied to this campaign, which is a helmet. Specifically, it's the KDM-500 Outrider, a piece that a lot of players may already recognize from a Warbond that leaked a while back. Unfortunately, the matching armor isn't part of the reward, just the helmet itself.

The campaign brief for this stretch is called Lightning Intercept, and it came with some extra flavor text, including a rundown of the top five reasons not to worry about the Void. It's a nice bit of world-building that ties into where the story is heading right now in Helldivers 2. Reaction to the reward has been mixed.

Some players are pointing out that fighting through three separate Major Orders just to earn a helmet feels like a lot, especially when the obvious next question is whether the matching armor set will be locked behind yet another set of Major Orders down the line. There's also a fair point being made that while free content is always appreciated, it would have made more sense to just hand over the full armor set instead of splitting it into pieces.

Armor color palettes in Helldivers 2 already tend to vary a lot from set to set, so matching a standalone helmet to existing gear isn't always easy.

Even with the criticism, a free item is still a free item, and there's no real complaint about getting something at no cost, even if the exact function of the helmet itself isn't fully clear yet. Now for the more controversial part of the update.

Arrowhead Game Studios' QA Manager, Dave Gallacher, posted something on LinkedIn that got a lot of attention following recent rounds of layoffs at both XBOX and PlayStation. In the post, he argued that every part of the gaming industry is ultimately controlled by money, and that the people holding that money have acted selfishly for roughly the last decade, cashing out with golden parachutes the moment things start going wrong.

He went on to say he doesn't understand how leadership at Ubisoft and Embracer hasn't faced real consequences for what he called murky business practices, while thousands of skilled developers are left to figure out how to fund their own studios from nothing.

He followed that up with another post suggesting that the real fix for the industry going forward is developer-owned studios replacing the ones that keep shutting down. His point was that after all these layoffs, the industry needs to actually learn from what's happened, manage money responsibly, and build a culture where growth is a result of doing good work rather than the entire goal in itself.

He argued that large publishers and monopolies have already shown themselves to be poor at both running studios and managing finances.

He added that if the people creating the value are the ones who actually own it, better projects are more likely to follow. It's a bold statement, especially coming from someone currently working at Arrowhead, and it raises a fair question about how well that kind of stance will sit with leadership going forward.

There is truth to what he's saying, though, since a lot of AAA studios have been producing lower quality output for years now while chasing growth targets that ultimately hurt the developers rather than the executives at the top. If profitability becomes a bigger issue, it wouldn't be surprising to see other major publishers, including Sony, make similar moves in the future. How this plays out for Arrowhead internally is going to be worth watching.

A comment pointed out the odd feeling of receiving Warbond-style rewards as Major Order prizes when there's still been no actual news about the next full Warbond release in around three to four weeks. That disconnect is a bit strange, especially since there's no fresh information coming from the studio on that front right now.

A final standout comment mentioned getting excited the second a new helmet reward was mentioned, which lines up with how many players reacted to the KDM-500 Outrider news. It follows a similar pattern to how the community responded to cosmetic capes previously, items that don't add any real gameplay benefit but still generated a lot of excitement. 

The difference here is that this feels more like getting one piece of a full armor set, which explains why the reaction has been more divided this time around. Helldivers 2 continues to be a game where the community response shapes just as much of the conversation as the in-game events themselves, and this stretch is no exception.

That's the full rundown of where things stand with the Major Order, the Galactic War, the new three-phase campaign, and the ongoing conversation around Arrowhead's comments on the wider state of the games industry.