Ever wondered what happened earlier this month when the Helldivers mounted an offensive against Cyberstan? The massive Helldivers 2 event saw players assaulting massive Automaton cities and even going up against Cyborgs for the first time. However, it carried a unique condition – if players hadn’t secured victory before depleting a set number of reserves, the mission would be a failure.

Well, the results are in and surprisingly, the Helldivers failed, even with new toys like an explosive hammer and the Bastion Tank. “The underhanded, subhuman treachery of the Cyborgs returned to once again steal peace from Super Earth’s citizens. The threat of a socialist planet-killer remains active. This is a grotesque travesty of Justice,” reads the official, in-universe tweet about what went down. While exposing the Cyborgs is deemed beneficial, Super Earth is currently in a “strategic contraction phase.”

“We must retract and regroup to prepare for the inevitable, unjust counter-offensive from the surviving socialist menace,” it reads. Which is probably a nice way of saying that the Automatons could attack Super Earth or any supporting location when players least expect it.

Regardless, this is an interesting twist in the ongoing Galactic War. Far be it from the Helldivers to suffer massive defeats under near-impossible odds, but this still felt imminently achievable. Whatever happens next, we’re keen to see how the story develops further, especially since the Battle for Cyberstan marked Arrowhead delivering new meta gameplay on a far more ambitious scale than anything before.

Available for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, Helldivers 2 reportedly passed 20 million lifetime sales last month, which is pretty good news for PlayStation’s live-service initiative (numerous failures notwithstanding). Stay tuned for more updates on what’s next in the coming weeks.

OPERATION VALID PRETEXT CONCLUDED
The peacekeeping Operation on Cyberstan has concluded.

The liberation of Cyberstan has failed. The underhanded, subhuman treachery of the Cyborgs returned to once again steal peace from Super Earth's citizens. The threat of a socialist… pic.twitter.com/4qrqAsC8Nw

— HELLDIVERS™ 2 (@helldivers2) February 21, 2026

Between Automatons, Terminids, and the returning Illuminate – not to mention volcanic worlds and bug-infested catacombs – Helldivers 2 players have surmounted all kinds of challenges since launch. That could change very soon, as players on Reddit briefly spotted a new Illuminate structure in the latest Major Order’s news reel.

Why is this significant? Well, as Arrowhead Games Studio CEO Shams Jorjani noted in an impromptu Discord Q&A, the next major update will apparently see a “lot of Helldivers” dying. Death isn’t anything new for Super Earth’s elite forces, but this structure is all the more foreboding given how powerful the Illuminate have historically proven.

Of course, as has traditionally been the case, you can probably expect some new weapons to help even the odds. The last Premium Warbond added an assault rifle/grenade launcher combo and the Maxigun, fulfilling many a player’s long-standing Rambo fantasies. There’s also the Killzone Legendary Warbond, which has permanently returned and offers some fantastic weapons based on Guerrilla Games’ first-person shooter franchise.

You can likely expect an announcement in the coming weeks for the next update, so stay tuned. Maybe it will include the rogue-lite mode that Arrowhead had been prototyping, which “fundamentally” alters the game.

Helldivers 2 is available for PS5, PC, and most recently, Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review for the latter here.

MAJOR ORDER: The Star of Peace continues its march toward readiness, with its primary optical array now under construction.

This historic upgrade will convert the Democracy Space Station (DSS) into a macro-scale laser, capable of generating a high-yield beam optimized for mass… pic.twitter.com/uwgxmebhnl

— HELLDIVERS™ 2 (@helldivers2) January 8, 2026

A few years ago, it would have been pretty easy to imagine Helldivers 2 releasing as a free-to-play game. It is a live service game after all, most of those are free-to-play because studios want to reduce the barrier to entry. Instead, it launched as a paid-for, $40 game, a far cry from free, but not the $80-$100 releases we're seeing more and more of. And it's because Arrowhead made the decision to do so that Arc Raiders developer Embark did the exact same thing for their own shooter.

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Seems it’s a good day to be a Helldivers 2 player: in addition to the buff-happy Into the Unjust 5.0.0 patch that launched earlier, developers Arrowhead have shared an update on their efforts to shave down the co-op shooter’s mammoth install size. And it’s not so much a shaving as a fully fuelled chainsawing, high vis vests be damned. As the Steam post explains, there’s now a beta build, available to try, that cuts the 154GB game down to 23GB – a 131GB (!!!) reduction. That’s like surgically removing an entire Black Myth: Wukong that was growing out of its back.

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Hey, Helldivers 2's just gotten a patch with some noteworthy balancing tweaks and fixes ahead of its latest warbond - Python Commandos - dropping. In short, a fair few guns now do more damage, some enemies have been made a tad less potent, and the drawback which usually comes with attachinga magnifying scope to your favourite bug blaster has been scaled back.

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Arc Raiders may be the most talked-about co-op shooter right now, but in my eyes, it doesn't hold a candle to Helldivers 2. From the excellent bug-slaying and robot-demolishing combat to the community missions that help you feel part of something bigger, it's one of the best co-op games of all time (and a viral hit, when it first launched), and you can grab it at a massive Black Friday discount right now - but you only have a day.

Read the full story on PCGamesN: Helldivers 2 gets a huge Black Friday deal, making it cheaper than ever, but only for a day

When Helldivers 2 first launched on PC, its installation size was a whopping 154GG. It is now, thanks to the magic of Going Back And Taking A Look At Things, a measly 23GB. Please, God, let this be the one good trend in video games for 2026.

Developer Arrowhead first announced plans to shrink the PC version's size down last month, saying that 154GB figure was "roughly three times larger than the same game installed on consoles!" The reason given for this was that the team wanted to support older mechanical hard drives found on older PCs (all modern consoles have solid state drives), and so in order to give players with those HDDs a playable experience, they "duplicated" a bunch of assets like textures and sound effects, so that a mechanical hard drive didn't need to go reaching all over its surface area just to respond to what was happening at speed on the screen.

Which sounds wonderful in theory, but months of analytics post-release have revealed that not only are a small number of Helldivers 2 players actually using a mechanical HDD--around 11%--but that the pre-release industry standard figures Arrowhead used to make the decision to accommodate them in the first place were off.

They've found that it's the generation of levels causing the biggest slowdown, not the constant loading of assets, and that their projections for how slow HDD users were going to find things were also "very conservative". So a new "slim" version of the game is now being tested in a public beta (which you can join here), clocking in at just 23GB, and this version--optimised for everyone--will only "result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most".

I'm fascinated by this. We live in an age where video game studios and publishers obsess over metrics, yet these numbers were so wrong! And in fixing them, a major video game is going to free up so much precious space–something that could get very expensive soon--that I can install at least 13 indie city-builders where those 131GB used to be!

The PC version of Helldivers 2 will now take up 85 percent less space on your computer, as Arrowhead has successfully reduced the installation size with help from Nixxes.

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The upcoming Helldivers film adaptation from Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions has found its director.

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The war of attrition that is seeing c-suite and games industry leaders continue to pour AI into games and tech in spite of repeated pushback by developers and gamers continues. Today we’ve got a trio of stories from three different companies that are in different stages of AI brainworm infection because this stuff needs to […]