I don’t know that many folks expected Helldivers 2 to be one of the biggest games of the year. Massive games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, even Palworld, have come and gone in about the same time, but everyone still seems to be playing Helldivers 2 months after release. And for at least one person, that ubiquity is leaking into real life.
To be fair, thanks to its live service trappings, Helldivers 2 was always meant to be continuously played, but Arrowhead Game Studios has turned that into impetus to deliver a spellbinding war narrative and an ever-changing sandbox that’s enthralled a lot of players. And if they haven’t been playing Helldivers 2, they’ve almost certainly seen others play and talk about it across social media, where clips of the game’s comedic chops have often gone viral. Hell, half of my job at this point is acting as a Helldivers 2 correspondent. It’s everywhere you look.
This has apparently become especially true for one Reddit user who claims that it’s all but taken over their town. In a post to the Helldivers subreddit, the user—who goes by the username Kaleon—shares that they have bumped into people talking about Helldivers 2 all over the place. They have overheard everyone from the local butcher to their barista talking about the game, and apparently even seen a Helldivers bumper sticker in the wild. It’s like that clip of Henry Cavill immediately zeroing in on his Witcher castmate Joey Batey at the mention of Warhammer 40,000 during an interview. Folks are getting along well with others who are entertaining their nerdy nonsense, and it’s a beautiful sight.
The replies to the original post suggest that Helldivers 2’s immense spread hasn’t stopped at that one small town either. One of the most upvoted comments is a story about two friends talking about it at the bar when a random person overhears them and shouts from across the bar, “ARE YOU GUYS TALKING ABOUT HELLDIVERS? THAT GAME IS FUCKING AWESOME!” Surprising no one, the Helldivers community is boisterous and funny even when they’re not roleplaying as galactic fascists.
Others mention striking up hour-long conversations with people after inferring that the game they played the previous night “with the boys” was Helldivers 2, and yet another reply claims that they met someone at a bar, chatted about the game, and now that person is dating the commenter’s friend. It turns out love can bloom on (or I guess in this case, adjacent to) the battlefield.
The replies are filled with stories like this, and I keep coming across them while searching for Helldivers 2 stories. The game has a real community, not just an overly involved player base that pumps out great jokes on TikTok, loudly hates on aspects of the game, and shouts at the developers, though they’re wont to do that every now and again too. Games have always managed to bring people together, whether it be friends playing Pong on the same couch, or a squad of Helldivers 2 players waging a galactic war from distinct corners of the world. Other times they evidently unite a whole town. Regardless of the scale, it’s nice to be occasionally reminded of how far-reaching games can be and how intimately they can tie people together over something as simple as shooting bugs and killer robots.
