"Hold the line!": Helldivers 2's latest MO ends up seeing Super Earth face a surprise foe they can't just blow to bits, as PC folks pick up AWOL PSN players' slack
Nope, it's not the Illuminate, it's something even more terrifying - a service outage.
Bad news, soldier! Things were looking like a walk in the park for Helldivers 2's latest Major Order, but through the night UK time, a fresh threat arose for Super Earth to ward off. Just when you thought you'd seen it all, a PlayStation Network outage stopped most players on that platform from reinforcing their PC brethren.
Don't worry though, Turing needs to be held, and those who remained on the front look to have taken on the task of doing so with the kind of gusto you'd expect from a force famous for its roleplaying.
The October 1 outage, according to PlayStation's network service status page, has been seeing some players experience issues when trying to sign in to their PSN account, launch games and apps, access PlayStation video content, and use the PlayStation Store. PlayStation Direct services were seemingly unaffected.
As of writing, the US version of the status page has now updated to say that the issues have been resolved after Ask PlayStation's Japanese account acknowledged the outage at around 2AM UK time this morning, though just going to status.playstation.com seems to still land you at a page saying the above problems persist. Based on social media posts, it does look like things are returning to normal for at least some players.
PSN service is DOWN. A large chunk of Helldivers have just been lost. Hold the line!
by u/BrainstormAndTheory in Helldivers
During the outage, one of the biggest games affected - at least in terms of player sentiment - was Helldivers 2, with PC divers panicking as they realised that they'd have to hold on to Turing as part of the latest MO withoput the help of players on PlayStation consoles who were unable to play.
Cue a bunch of posts calling on those left to "Hold the line!" and channel their inner space marine, plus some suggesting that Arrowhead game master J.O.E.L was somehow behind this unexpected wrench being thrown into the divers' works. Someone even decided to write the whole thing into the game's canon by declaring them and their PS brethren had been "captured by Automatons and taken to a supermax prison facility on Cyberstan".
Thankfully, it looks like Turing hasn't suffered some huge bug attatck during the outage and is still in the divers' hands. Indeed, as some players have pointed out, Helldivers 2's planet liberation mechanics are designed to work as intended no matter how many players are online, so having less folks playing might not have had much of an impact on the divers' ability to hold Turing anyway, provided a good percentage of those still playing didn't suddenly go off and attack another planet.
Have you been impacted by this PSN outage or were you maybe one of the PC folks left defending the Helldivers' progress on building that nice new space station last night? Let us know below.