The futility of Helldivers 2's 'Menkent Line' has parts of the community feeling bot fatigue: 'We fought hard to establish a defensive line, and for what?'

The ever-marching galactic war campaign of Helldivers 2 is impressive, so much so that it's a little difficult to follow, though the sense of FOMO is there for the right reasons, that being «I'm missing out on a cool, emergent, player-driven story». Well, that's the idea at least—right now, the community's a little bummed out.

While I say «the community», I think it's important to highlight that I'm talking about its most vocal, galactic-war focused elements here. I'd bet a safe wager that the majority of Helldivers 2 players are content to just gun down bugs. So content, in fact, that a major order to stamp out 2 billion of them passed in the blink of an eye. 

Before I get into the how and why, though, there are two bits of important context to consider. Firstly, most major orders over the past month or so have been automaton-focused. Here's where the last nine have sent us:

That asterisk is there since it's best to focus on Automatons for this latest major order. At the time of writing, there's only one defence campaign in Terminid space, and, uh, a lot more in the Automaton's invasion—which has been spreading like wildfire across the galactic map.

So overall, that's 7 out of 9 major orders (or 9 out of 11 if you count phases as their own major orders) that've required us to turn clankers into scrap metal. I'm personally fine with that, since I happen to like doming Hulks with my Anti-Materiel rifle, but I also haven't done any Terminid missions in close to a month. Whenever I've played, it's been Automatons on the menu. So why the larger ennui?

Helldivers 2 uses a forgivable amount of sleight-of-hand: Arrowhead Games is still engaging in the lengthy process of hiring new staff to match its success, which is a lot harder than you might think. After all, who trains the new hires if everyone's already busy matching pace? Money can lead a dev to water, but it can't teach them how to drink from your custom-made infrastructure of lakes.

In essence, major orders have a