Immersion Review: Helldivers 2
Do you want to live forever?!
Menthol on my lips. Perfectly packed potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal. The unmistakable sterility of ethanol-based cleaning solution meant to keep this pod spotless. Ozzie’s singing about a dull emptiness that he can’t find a cure for, but I know that what’ll meet me once I touch ground will give me all the purpose I will ever need. I flick my tic-tac back and forth in my mouth, take a sip of my chai latte, and relish in the opportunity to serve Super Earth like my grandfather would have served the good ol’ US-of-A, had he not played up the screw in his knee.
My pod lands, I get a concussion, then I’m lifted out and immediately killed when my friend misclicks and fires a burst of 5.56×45mm into my skull. He laughs, I laugh, the bugs laugh, and Spotify switches over to Jimi Hendrix shredding on “All Along the Watchtower.”
Helldivers 2 might not seem like the sort of game that’s aiming to immerse its audience. Its blatant satire via extravagant sci-fi violence and jingoistic rhetoric may seem to imply an intent to communicate theme purely via more traditional means like art assets, audio queues, and in-game text, which is generally the approach games take when delivering narrative of any sort, including satire. But peeling back the game’s design reveals a major design goal that’s unique, well-thought-out, and innovative: to impart its themes onto the player using immersion itself.
To understand how the game accomplishes that goal, we first need to understand the themes being imparted. Plenty of other reviews have pointed out that Helldivers 2 is a pastiche of 80’s and 90’s sci-fi action films like Alien and Terminator, but rather than placing players in the role of a more individualistic protagonist like Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor, players instead find themselves as nameless grunts fighting a seemingly unending, meaningless war against enemies presented only as ‘others’ that must be eradicated to protect not only ‘Super Earth,’ humanity’s homeworld, but also the political system of ‘Super Democracy,’ upon which Super Earth’s government is supposedly built. Starship Troopers is perhaps the game’s most obvious influence, which is reflected in the visual design of the game as well as the non-individualistic identity the player takes, but it also informs much of the satire the game is making: Western (specifically American) governments use nice-sounding ideological buzzwords to mask ethically unsound ventures in pursuit of resources or power, and the general populace tends to buy into said buzzwords and either ignore or accept said ventures as a result. Said satire is lampshaded, somewhat, by in-game allusions to Super Earth’s government involvement in creating the wars it’s engaged in, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Unlike many games about war, which choose to ignore the player’s role in spreading the ideology of the country the player character is a part of, Helldivers 2 makes a point of gleefully stating that every Helldiver fighting the good fight (i.e. every player) is doing so to spread Super Democracy to those they vanquish (even though some of those vanquished foes are almost certainly incapable of understanding the concept of democracy, or the facade thereof). You’ll see it a lot when reading menu text or hearing NPC’s talk: “Every drop you embark on, Johnny Helldiver, brings us one step closer to securing the ideals of Super Democracy!” The game places a lot of emphasis on this idea, and constructs many of its non-combat mechanics to reinforce it.
The Major Orders system is narratively explained as the military strategy through which Super Democracy is spread and mechanically provides the playerbase with a unified objective they can pursue collectively and contribute to individually. The % Liberated mechanic is similar in purpose but offers a more tangible, immediate sense of accomplishment in spreading S.D. since it’s a part of the game players encounter more frequently. These mechanics are thematically important because not only do they connect the player’s actions with the ideals of Super Earth, they also provide the player with a choice on how to execute said ideals, and that choice makes the player complicit in Super Earth’s colonialist expansion. All of this is made more immersive, too, because it’s all diegetic: major orders, the mission menu, and the % liberated system are not just non-diegetic abstractions made to communicate information to the player for the sake of gameplay, they’re in-universe abstractions used by Super Earth to allow their Helldivers to do their job of spreading Super Democracy. Like many of the game’s other mechanics, these systems also draw on the imagined experience many players have of what it’s like to operate as a space marine as a way to encourage immersion.
One of the major techniques the team at Arrowhead Game Studios uses to create that necessary immersion is their designing of the game’s combat mechanics to feel authentic to the unique verbs that define the experience of being a Helldiver, and the game’s gun mechanics are an easy to identify example. The player’s aim is represented by a dot that follows their controller (or mouse) movements precisely, but their character’s aim is indicated by a circle that follows the dot at speeds that reflect a few different variables, including weapon weight and the amount of distance the player’s dot has moved. Rounds left over in a player’s magazine are lost when the player reloads, and bullets bounce off armored opponents if the player is firing at them from awkward angles. These mechanics intend to instill a sense of verisimilitude (or, put another way, simulation-esque accuracy), which help place (immerse?) the player in the mindset of a Helldiver, forced to deal with the same problems and considerations a real-life Helldiver would. These considerations are practical, which makes them a good way to immerse a player, but just as important to the game’s immersive fabric are the emotional and moment-to-moment narrative experiences that define what it’s like to be a Helldiver.
For example, the extra few milliseconds it takes to flick where you’re aiming feel like a fearful eternity when you’re surrounded by swarms of bugs. Auto-firing your weapon while performing that maneuver despite the ammo you’re wasting might make some sense in certain situations because, if you have to swing your gun around to a completely different direction from the one you were aiming at, you might hit some enemies as you turn your weapon, and even if you don’t, you’ll start hitting that bug behind you even sooner than you would have had you started firing once your sights were trained on them, and the resulting difference in damage might be the difference between life or death.
Support weapons also adhere to this philosophy. Not only are most of them heavy, which makes them take a while to aim, many also benefit from having two people operate them, or require the player to remain stationary during the reload process. Again, these mechanics align more closely with a player’s concept of what it’s like to use an LMG or rocket launcher, and they also create unique narrative moments unique to the experience of being a Helldiver. It’s stress-inducing to be surrounded by bugs, or facing down a four-story acid spitter with nothing but your RPG and a dream, and the decisions you make during moments like that are going to be influenced by those emotions and the tools you have available to you, hence why auto-firing without much care for aim or ammunition might seem like a good call in the heat of the moment. Those emotions and decision points feel organic, too, because no developer hand-wrote that moment (though they certainly designed for it). Helldivers 2 is full of design decisions that create those moments, and many of them arise from the game’s manipulation of how long it takes to perform certain actions.
The ‘stratagems’ system is probably the game’s most obvious unique mechanic, where players open a menu of different ordinances and equipment which can only be selected (and thus, dropped and acquired) by inputting certain button combinations. A simpler approach to designing this system would be to have the player open a menu, select a stratagem with the mouse or joystick, then select an area simply by aiming at it and pressing the ‘Fire Weapon’ button. Helldivers 2’s approach requires more steps and takes longer to perform, both of which make the mechanic more immersive because they deviate from the simplification innate to many schools of game design thought and towards a school of design that emphasizes the mimicry of diegetic actions. More steps means more authentic to the assumed steps a Helldiver would take, and more time taken to perform the action leads to moments similar to the surrounded-by-bugs situation I mentioned before. Interacting with mission objectives, most commonly computer terminals, is very similar to using stratagems and is also immersive for more or less the same reasons.
Another aspect of design the game places a lot of focus on, and one which it reaps tons of immersive benefit from, is its dedication to mechanical diegesis. Every UI element the player interacts with while on missions, from their stratagems to their mini-map, are elements that the player character views via the computer built into the forearm of their armor. It’s a nice visual detail since the player character is animated to look at their screen whenever the player opens these UI elements, but what pushes the immersive quality of this detail is that it also affects gameplay. Whenever the player is looking at their map or their stratagems, they’re unable to sprint or fire their weapons, avoiding convenience (similar to the reasoning behind the stratagem system) in pursuit of authenticity to how difficult it would be to run and read a map or navigate a touch-screen. These mechanics also involve the same sorts of timing and action priority choices that the guns and stratagems involve, too.
This notion of diegesis continues beyond the in-mission mechanics as well. Many of them are less mechanically impactful than the diegesis of the mission selection mechanics I mentioned before but are worth noting for a reason we’ll get to in a moment. The players’ destroyers are used to travel between missions, explaining how missions are arrived at (an element of authenticity that many games choose to ignore). The ships are also used to explain how the game’s party system works: whenever two or more players form a party, their ships group up to form a fleet that travels together. This explains why the player characters can travel to missions together, and also why players have access to all the stratagems they’ve bought, since different players may have different stratagems unlocked.
The game’s loading screens are diegetic too. They only occur twice during the game’s primary loop: once when the player uses a hellpod to drop from their ship to a mission location, and once when the player is picked up by their troop transport and carried back to their main ship. These small details may not matter mechanically, but they help alleviate the immersive dissonance created when a player encounters an abstract game element like a non-diegetic party menu or an old-school single-image loading screen.
Above all, though, perhaps the most intriguing and innovative trick that Helldivers 2 performs is the convincing of its fanbase to roleplay outside of the game itself.
Browse r/Helldivers for long enough and you’ll find many, many posts written as if they’re diegetic discussions of the game’s weapons, factions, and political stances. Players pointing out the logical inconsistencies in Super Earth’s in-game messages are dubbed traitors to Super Democracy. Game-related announcements are written as if they’re being seen by actual combat-ready Helldivers and not ordinary people playing a video game. In a now famous example of this sort of roleplay, Arrowhead’s CEO publicly and explicitly stated that flying bug enemies did not exist within the game. This was proven to be factually false, and yet the community roleplayed as if the flying bugs didn’t exist until Arrowhead’s CEO admitted that flying bugs were definitely possibly real. I also like the top comment on this post.
How this roleplay came about is likely a web of good narrative design, marketing, and a few paid social media posts, but the effect it has on immersion is really interesting because it’s a unique example of a video game that tries to immerse the player in a diegetic political mindset that is then used in satirical roleplaying outside of the game itself.
Discussing politics online is... a lot. Discussing fictional politics is a less exhausting but still rather niche internet hobby. Helldivers 2 manages to make this hobby more broadly appealing by 1. making the politics shallow and 2. making the politics funny. No one (that gets much attention) truly believes in the totalitarian ideals promoted by Super Earth. It’s all half-baked, surface-level rhetoric that anyone who’s read a dystopian novel will understand as ethically bad, but it’s also so half-baked that it’s easy to make fun of by posting sarcastic, irony-laden memes that pretend like it’s a valid way to view the world. It’s worth noting, perhaps, that one of the most popular modes of social media comedy right now is to make sarcastic, irony-laden memes about real-world politics.
This is great marketing since it encourages players to post a ton online and get more eyes on the game, and the encouraged roleplay is good for immersion. What ties it all so beautifully together, though, is the fact that it can happen outside the game itself. The fact that people are roleplaying like this en-masse in an online (and sometimes real-world) environment means they spend more time being immersed in a mindset brought about by Helldivers 2, and the more frequently you are immersed in a thing, the more immersive that thing is going to feel.
But, there are a few parts of the game that are lacking in immersive quality.
The pre-mission equipment menu isn’t explained diegetically and thus is a tad dissonant to the rest of the game. An easy fix would be to show the player character in the pod they’ve stepped into, and to display all sorts of different equipment within said pod that gets cycled as the player chooses them. Armor and gear customization outside the player’s pod has the same issue and can be solved in the same way, minus the drop pod, obviously.
The purchasing of different stratagems is also dull presentation-wise. It’s nice to have a little video showing what the stratagems do, but a more interesting interface at the very least would help sell the mechanic’s immersive quality.
All of this is just a lack of some sort of clear diegetic explanation for certain mechanics. Adding any extra steps to these mechanics would probably make them less convenient to use and thus would probably frustrate players, so I understand why they were made to be more straightforward than the in-mission systems. Still, it’d be nice if the developers could spruce up those parts of the game so that they’re closer in immersive quality to basically every other part of the game.
Helldivers 2 is... awesome. It has some great high-level design and I’d be remiss not to mention its unique existence as a multiplayer game aimed at immersing its players. You don’t see a lot of those, and that makes Helldivers 2 special: a proof of concept for an pretty innovative idea.
A lot of the game’s design attention seems to be on immersion, but what makes that attention really special is that there’s also an important narrative intention behind the game’s immersion. It’s easy to think of immersion as an element of art that’s self-justifying, that immersion itself is a goal unto its own that can be considered a justified end-point for a work’s narrative purpose. I think that’s a bit shallow-minded, though, because as we’ve discussed in other posts, immersion is a tool just like any other quality in art, and it can be used like any other artistic quality to communicate an idea to an audience. Helldivers 2 is special because it uses immersion to make a point about the world we live in. Helldivers 2 has something to say, and it uses immersion to do it. That’s not something you see very often.
I’ll admit that when I started this piece, I didn’t think it’d be too long. I’d played the game for about half a dozen hours and recognized some of the more obvious things it was doing on an immersive level, but the more I played it, the more I realized how many design choices were made with the specific intent to immerse the player in the game’s unique circumstance. I’ve been a fan of Arrowhead since I was engaging in spontaneous, non-consensual PVP with my friends using earth-cold-arcane-lightning sword slashes in Magicka, and it’s nice to see them get this sort of industry recognition for a game that is truly fantastic on so many levels.
Helldivers 2 is a game that marks a maturing medium, one whose creative language is developing away from syntax borrowed from other mediums and towards a language uniquely informed by the affordances and qualities of the medium itself. It’s not a perfect game by any means, and there are more immersive games out there too, but the things Helldivers 2 does make it the sort of artistic piece that pushes a medium to improve, to become what it could be rather than resting on the laurels of what it has been, and that’s something to celebrate.
