The robots are winning: Helldivers 2 players are convinced those new planet defense missions are so difficult they must be bugged

GamesActionHelldivers 2The robots are winning: Helldivers 2 players are convinced those new planet defense missions are so difficult they must be buggedWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

Helldivers 2 best weapons - Soldier with a rocket launcher

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(Image credit: Arrowhead)

Helldivers 2 key art, with Helldivers posing and firing weapons against a propagandistic backdrop.

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24 hours into the war’s new front, a red progress bar that’s longer than a blue progress bar suggests the robots are winning. With just four hours remaining on the countdown above the planet Draupnir, Super Earth might suffer its first major loss.

Is a (non-Terminid) bug to blame? Possibly. Just hours after yesterday’s robot invasion began, players reported that Extraction missions to safely escort civilians across a battlefield were unusually difficult. They argue that these specific missions, which are required to progress the Major Order objective, are more intense and dense with enemies than the same mission type on other planets.

“It’s harder than all the other levels. Even 9 was easy in comparison,” said streamerGothalionon Twitter.

“I have not completed one extraction mission,” wrotePepinison Reddit.

“Recoilless is way too slow, autocannons are too weak, rifles are laughable, orbitals kill the civilians. Huge waste of time,” wrote Reddit userSamsquanch-01, who gave up on attempting extraction missions with random teammates.

I can echo that. Our group has been playing at difficulty levels 4-6 and we immediately noticed a difficulty spike on the Extraction mission type. Bot drops flew in at an alarming rate that outpaced our cooldowns on armor-piercing weapons and stratagems. I’ve personally never seen more bots on screen than I did last night trying to get just a handful of civilians across the killzone safely. We were eventually able to win one, but only barely, and not before cranking the difficulty down to four.

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The inconsistency between these Extraction missions and the rest of the game have some convinced that this degree of punishment must be a bug. It does seem unlikely that Arrowhead Games intentionally spiked the difficulty on a single mission type, especially considering the intensity of other mission types on Draupnir and Mantes, like ICBM launch or wave-based survival, is unchanged.

Extraction missions are proving so difficult that, for the first time since launch, players on Reddit are rallying to share specific tips and tricks just to save the bare minimum number of civilians.

UserFit_Assistance_8258, who says they’ve completed a bunch of Extraction missions, shared the strategies that worked for their squad (shortened for readability):

Sound advice, especially the suggestion of smoke and EMS. In Helldivers 2’s first week that focused on bugs, stratagems that stun or blind enemies didn’t seem all that useful when you can just blow them up instead. Now that we’re facing waves of bots with heavy armor, the need for delay tactics has come into focus. It’s true that you don’t necessarily have to kill all the bots, just keep them away from the civilians long enough to meet quota.

Do not do level 6 automaton defense missions in Helldivers, unless you really, really, really want to have a bad time https://t.co/i0ZcT3UGUh pic.twitter.com/0vQhctaXiGFebruary 16, 2024

That’s also the advice of userWorried_Lie_7772, who coordinated with their squad to kite the majority of enemies out of the civilian compound while one stayed behind to escort.

“We waited for bots to mass up and attack us, we found a majority of the bots will arrive near the bigger group of players, once enough bots had arrived, we sent one man toward the evac site to complete the objective, they would still have hostiles dropping on their position, but a puny amount compared to the rest of the squad,” they wrote.

This ended up working for us, too. Not everyone made it into the dropship in the end, but all that mattered was that the job was done. Even if Extraction missions are bugged, it’s been its own kind of fun working around seemingly impossible odds. As Helldivers 2 enters its second weekend and matchmaking stability remains Arrowhead’s chief concern, we may soon find out what it’s like to lose a war.

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