Live-service games face an extraordinarily tough time battling to maintain their player-base, competing against a dozen similar games, and trying to constantly satisfy impossibly disparate audience—but one benefit that’s all too rarely utilized is the ability to be incredibly topical and reactive. Helldivers 2 is flexing that muscle in the best way, with an in-game gag based on last week’s colossal computing failure that saw a Crowdstrike update bring the planet to a standstill.
Boot the game, and those brave enough to defend Super Earth’s managed democracy will see a message informing them of a crucial system update.
“A cybersecurity software update has caused an unexpected outage for all Destroyer surveillance systems,” the note begins, before issuing the order: “All personnel are ordered to manually record their own behavior until services are restored.”
Clearly, any Helldiver worthy of their uniform would immediately begin their own personal surveillance, and report back any infractions they may commit. However, there are more specific instructions directed at members of the Ministry of Science’s IT department:
Instructions to Service Technicians: to bring systems back online, please manually reboot each affected computer 15 times.
This is all, of course, a reference to the Crowdstrike security software update that caused Microsoft computers around the world to BSOD (blue screen of death), with no simple recovery option. Every affected computer had to be manually restarted, with reports from Microsoft that it could take up to 15 reboots before the issue would be resolved. This was seemingly because of the random nature of the boot order of high-priority functions, and needing to beat the odds of Crowdstrike’s error kicking in before Windows could access the internet to apply the fix.
While Helldivers 2’s gag doesn’t have any direct impact on playing the game (it would have been amazing if it could have been rolled into a Major Order, but obviously such things are planned and written and programmed long in advance of rollout), it shows a fantastic advantage of a game that’s constantly alive and able to react to events. Although presumably any real-world IT managers, looking to play the game for a bit of escapism after the last week, might not have found it quite as funny.
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