Years from now, Helldivers 2 will be cited as an example of a live service done right, and much of that is down to the constant stream of updates and additions the community gets to sink their teeth into. One particular recently added mechanic, however, is finding unprecedented support among the player base.
The gameplay of Helldivers 2 is in large part shaped by its overarching community metanarrative, which evolves in time with players’ actions. Depending on the goals players pursue and the enemies they dispatch, the game’s story will change, which in turn influences the new elements introduced. It’s a perfect symbiosis between community and developer, and it’s set the stage for a limited-time mechanic that fans are clamoring to keep permanently: the Daily Free Stratagem.
Recently, every Helldiver had the Incendiary Mine Stratagem temporarily enabled to use without any of the associated resource costs or slot consumption, supposedly as a gift from Super Earth to take down an increased Terminid threat. Before that, every Helldiver was temporarily granted a free exosuit but now players are calling for these temporary freebies to be worked into the game proper.
A Reddit post requesting these free, temporary Stratagems to be added into the game on a permanent, rotating basis has amassed thousands of upvotes on the Helldivers subreddit, with nearly the entire comments section cheering the idea on. The top-rated comment, also with over a thousand upvotes, mentioned that trying out new Stratagems on a trial basis would give them “the opportunity to sample them without sacrificing anything in my loadout.”
A fifth Strategem slot dedicated purely to a developer-decided Stratagem rotating daily or weekly wouldn’t be all that hard to implement, both lore-wise and gameplay-wise. The developer could easily write it off as Super Earth weapons testing or something of that nature, and the fact that the mechanic has been used on a temporary basis means that a permanent implementation wouldn’t take much more legwork than what has already been done.
There’s probably still time for Arrowhead to sneak this into the upcoming Escalation of Freedom update, depending on how much work it would actually take. Having this bonus Stratagem would mean that no two matches would play exactly the same, even with an otherwise identical loadout, thus giving players even more reason to come back to an already addicting gameplay loop. If you don’t even know what weapon you’re deploying into the field with, there’s no way the enemies of Managed Democracy can possibly stand up to you!
