Games

Not only is it a choice, it's a choice the community has had several opportunities to make and has failed each time, and it's starting to become a funny meta-story of its own at this point.

Operation: Legitimate Undertaking would be the first time we had to make this choice, and that choice was to unlock either the AT mines or a new rocket launcher. To unlock either, we had to liberate the planets where they could be manufactured, but for lore/game mechanic reasons, we could only save the factory workers on one of those planets, before the other one would ultimately succumb to invading forces.

To unlock the AT mines, we'd have to liberate several planets before we could even reach the destination planet to begin liberating it and we'd have cut it very close to the deadline (because absolute failure was the third option, if we couldn't liberate either planet in time), but the path toward the rocket launcher planet was significantly shorter. So the community banded together to liberate the planet with the rocket launcher, since that was at least a more easily-guaranteed victory. The AT mines would have to wait for another day.

The next time the AT mines would become available again was several weeks later, and the task to unlock them this time wasn't so much a "choice", as much as it was a challenge. Enter, Operation: Metallic Harvest. The task was for the community to collectively kill 2 billion Automaton units by the deadline. "Easy, in the bag", the community said to itself, as we had just come hot off the heels of a similar major order to kill 2 billion Terminid units, which we had completed well before the deadline. 2 billion kills? No big deal, those mines are as good as mine get it hah hah hah.

Unfortunately, this major order came just after the announcement that the previous major order was actually glitched and every player in a mission was getting points for every other players' kills, basically making it so that the progression was 4 times faster than it should have been. So our previous confidence was misplaced, and caused us to misjudge our ability to actually get 2 billion kills in time, resulting in a failure of this major order. Once again, the AT mines were put on hold.

That brings us to today, with Operation: Trolley Problem, where the developers are basically giving us the mines at this point, but it's of course still up to us to accomplish, where we have to once again choose which planet to liberate. Realistically, they could have given us any other explanation for what's happening on the other planet, and we could've had those mines. But the choice was mines, or children.

We're Helldivers. We're Super Earth's elite. You think we're really about to let suffering children die? No, we're the good guys, and at least half of chose children are of legal age to work in munitions factories, so saving those children means saving the future of democracy. Sorry mines. Maybe next time.

Honestly, I hope that the community continues to never unlock the AT mines. I want to be able to look back at this game in five years and see the storied history of all the failed attempts to unlock them.

My bet, given how you budget for this type of PR stuff, is that it was basically the players picking the story that got told while they got a new weapon and a charity donation happened. Like if the players hadn't chosen to do so, there would have been some contrivance for someone certainly has to save the children. Since they saved them, now the children will get together and give you this thank you gift, or something.

Illusion of choice, but not in a bad way.