When Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead suddenly rolled out its mysterious Station-81 teases and livestream late last week, a lot of us assumed it’d very quickly lead to something big happening in the Galactic War. Well, it’s now a fresh week and players are still battling to solve the ARG, but at least they’ve come up with some interesting theories.
If you’re out of the loop, this Station-81 business has proven to involve a bunch of code-cracking via dedicated channels in Helldivers 2’s official Discord server, with players there typing in commands and the livestream showing them where they’re at. There’ve been a bunch of different stages to the puzzle, and it seems folks are mostly resorting to trial and error via spam.
As of writing, the stream shows the divers working on a “Station-82”, with one part of the screen noting that we’re at 75% when it comes to datablock recalibration, which I hope’s a good omen.
To give you an idea of how it’s going, a bunch of Arrowhead devs and community staff have changed their Discord names to “SATCOM” followed by a number, and one of them responded to a move the players made in the early hours of today by declaring: “Satcom has lost all hope in the Helldivers”. This profile, which looks to belong to a dev called Daniel Conlon, did do an about face not long after, saying that its faith in the divers had been restored.
Anyway, while the divers are still trying to solve the puzzle, some of them have at least been working on theories as to what could happen next in-game, based on this Station-81 business and things that have happened in the war over the past few months.
I’ve taken a scroll through the ARG-solving doc of Helldivers 2 Discord user Qwikster_, and towards the end of the 48 incredibly detailed pages it currently runs for, they’ve laid out four or five ideas folks have been evolving since Moradesh was lost to the Meridian Singularity in March, with one seemingly have been disregarded.
There’s the “Pilen V Theory”, which the player writes is “the best theory we have” as of writing, and basically suggests that “something to do with the main Illuminate force could happen on Pilen V” because a Repulsive Gravity Field Generator is being built there. A similar theory involving the planet Alta V has been sidelined for now.
There’s a “Code Theory” which argues that “the hex is an in-universe broadcast code for some machine”, a “Numbers Theory” that looks to be based on converting the same hexes in binary, and finally a “Bee Theory”. If you hadn’t guessed, the latter’s my favourite.
“It seems AH developer (QA lead Jojo) seems to be very insistent on Bees. Must investigate,” read the notes on this bit of buzz, “Bees theory comes from him saying, ‘I just like bees’. ilovebees was the Halo 2 ARG. Could also potentially be a reference to ‘Beeposting’ in #galactic-war.” Sounds plausible, and they reckon it could somehow point to the planet Calypso as the potential site of an Illuminate comeback.
Will any of that come to pass? Who knows, but it’s something interesting to think about while everyone spams those chats to try and solve this ARG.