Helldivers 2 Players Have Successfully Liberated Tien Kwan, EXO-45 Patriot Mech Suits Are Now Ready To Deploy

The world that developer Arrowhead Games has created with Helldivers 2 is a huge part of its success – its political satire invites players to role play as soldiers of Super Earth, as ‘Divers’ spreading Democracy across the galaxy, and that’s a major part of the fun.

It’s the setting that allowed Arrowhead to frame the days leading up to a major update of mech suits going live as players needing to first ‘libertate’ Tien Kwan, so mech suit production can continue uninterrupted and be deployed into battle.

On Friday, Arrowhead confirmed that Divers had indeed been successful in liberating Tien Kwan from the Automatons, and that the EXO-45 Patriot mech suits are now ready to deploy.

In any other live service game, these mechs would’ve rolled out like any other update. Of course there would’ve been a lore-relevant reason for the update as there is here, but none of them would include a call-to-action that makes the players feel like they’ve earned the update.

Getting to stomp around as a giant robotic tank is in that case the reward players get for simply, playing the game more.

On one hand, yes, Arrowhead is set up for this kind of weaving of the game’s meta-narrative in a live service game structure with new gameplay features. Not every live service game can do this, because it just wouldn’t make sense in the same way.

But that doesn’t take away just how good of a job Arrowhead is doing at executing the narrative of Helldivers 2 being this massive, galactic-scale war where enemies and players fighting for Super Earth go back and forth.

Now, with that said, time to go spread democracy, with the help of a mech suit.

Source – [Arrowhead Games]