Helldivers 2’s relentless bot war has players questioning who the real enemy is

While Operation Swift Disassembly has been going well overall, Helldivers 2 players are starting to worry if they’re killing more than mindless machines.

Helldivers 2‘s Operation Swift Disassembly has seen players push back the Automaton menace into the last sector of space under bot control. Now, players are strategizing, finding the best way to take control of the three planets in this sector that will see the enemy faction wiped out from the galaxy. As they get close to annihilating them, though, some players are starting to question if they’re the real bad guys in this situation.

Are Automatons converted Super Earth citizens?

The Automatons are an enemy faction in Helldivers 2 created by the Cyborgs, Super Earth citizens who have become traitors to their home by augmenting their bodies and declaring independence from the mother planet and managed democracy. Automatons are effectively second-generation robots that, as far as I was aware when I first began playing the game, were completely constructed of metal and used AI as their brains.

A recent post on the Helldivers 2 Subreddit has called the beliefs of just about every player into question, though. It’s a low-quality image of a forum post, and I’m sure it’s meant to look as fake as it does. But it raises a few good points.

First, I have no idea what the Automatons are shouting when they attack. It all sounds like garbled machine noises to me, but I can see how some players would be able to pick out snippets of words. What worries me is that those words could easily be “I cannot stop!” or “They are making me do this!” because of the nature of what the Automatons are. If they’re machines made by Cyborgs, they surely have no say in what their orders are, no matter how sentient their intelligence is.

As this post points out, I have to say I’ve also seen the large metal containers of human bodies and the massive cages littering Automaton worlds. Machines don’t need flesh and blood; they just want planets. There’s no reason they’d collect the bodies of the dead or herd humans into cages if they didn’t have a more sinister purpose. When I logged in today, another player had brought this up. The vats of bodies are building up in my mind, and I think there’s only one reasonable explanation.

The Cyborgs may have created a self-replicated race of machines in the Automatons, but the Automatons might be using Super Earth technology and humans in order to replicate. This means every machine we kill is a human mind trapped in a husk that’s using someone’s mental capacity, bones, and sinew to attack loyal Helldivers in their quest for freedom.

If you’re not sold on this idea, think about the fact that when Helldivers return on the Pelican from a successful mission on an Automaton world, they’re covered in blood. All that blood can’t be theirs. So where did it come from?

After the first planet in the final phase of Operation Swift Disassembly was taken, Super Earth issued a message that sounds pretty suspicious, given the thoughts on Automatons floating around right now. It paints the Automatons as “lifeless, emotionless, and hateful socialists.” It points at Malevelon Creek as if to remind us of all the Helldivers we lost on the planet and the commemorative Cape some of us wear in honor of them. But is it just a smokescreen?

It’s been over a week of battling Automatons, and the cracks in our belief in Super Earth are starting to show. We feel lied to, just like when the blue lasers and flying Terminds were denied. Time and time again, Super Earth hasn’t been upfront with us, and now players are questioning the fictional morals of the fictional superpower they’ve been working for.

More than this, though, some players are even bringing their fictional families into it. This Reddit post about a Helldiver grounding his fake son because he attended a pro-Automaton rally shows how sympathy for the machines is spreading.

A word of caution. In Helldivers 2, just like in the real world, people can be sympathetic to causes that are nothing but harmful and hateful. I’m naming no names, but I think the current state of the world, as well as its history, speaks true to that fact. The Automatons could well be pure evil, but the fact that so many people are questioning that and anticipating some kind of twist shows that there’s almost certainly more to this story.

As with almost every evolution of Helldivers 2‘s story, I can’t get over how effective small textboxes and community speculation over missions are at creating a web of threads being simultaneously pulled on for a much richer narrative. The players really do make it because we all voice those secret thoughts and doubts we have, and it makes the game feel so much bigger and more nuanced as a result.

I’m both excited and terrified as the weekend proceeds. We have two days left and two planets to go right now, and I’m confident we’ll win. But I’m worried about the cost of that victory, not just because it’ll likely cause a new enemy faction, such as the Illuminate, to appear, but because of the cost to every Helldiver’s soul when we find out the truth behind their creation and what they are.