Highlights
- Super samples are rare in Helldivers 2 and only found in tough missions, offering advanced ship module upgrades as rewards for players.
- These samples are crucial for progression in Helldivers 2, balancing difficulty with the potential rewards they bring.
- The challenge of acquiring super samples adds to the game’s longevity.
Super samples are an extremely scarce resource in Helldivers 2 and are only found in missions where one of the three hardest difficulties has been selected. Difficulty options scale well in Helldivers 2 and there are many of them, so deciding how much XP and currencies or what pool of resources players hope to receive from a mission is mainly what this choice boils down to. There’ll be far more arduous challenges and more intimidating threats on higher difficulties, but players can weigh that against the available rewards.
Ship modules are what players spend hard-earned samples on and, while a hand cart decreasing backpack cooldowns by 10% may not be as flashy or immediately paramount as any stratagem permit, they are an unsung feature players would be wrong to overlook. Super samples are needed for advanced modules and even if seeking them out is endlessly demanding it wouldn’t be as satisfying or advantageous to the longevity of Helldivers 2 if they were as easy to scrounge as common or rare samples.
How Helldivers 2 Going into Cruise Control Can Benefit Its Longevity
Helldivers 2 has found itself a nice rhythm of post-launch content, and there’s no need for it to jump the gun on any big expansions just yet.
Helldivers 2’s Super Samples Can Often Be a Lost Cause
Helldivers 2’s pink super samples are tremendously toilsome to acquire and hang onto through to a successful extraction unless players are all on the same wavelength and adamant about procuring them as a priority. Otherwise, because super samples can appear in batches of up to six individual pickups, the onus is usually on the player who’s come across them to perilously clutch them for dear life while desperately awaiting extraction.
If super samples are discovered at the beginning of a mission that’s even more stressful since on difficulties higher than Extreme it’s almost guaranteed that players will be cut down by bots or bugs, and yet
Suicide Mission, Impossible, or Helldive
need to be played in order to loot super samples in the first place.
In a worst-case scenario, nobody but one person in a squad drops intending to scavenge super samples and nobody else cares to loot that player’s corpse for their precious sample container in the event of their death. This is another instance of why reinforcing can be tragic in Helldivers 2 as players potentially respawn on the other end of the map with little hope of retrieving what they lost.
Helldivers 2 Wouldn’t Have the Shelf Life It Has without Samples
However, Helldivers 2 wouldn’t have much long-term progression beyond Warbonds if super samples weren’t so tough to collect. Medals are fairly easy to come by thanks to daily personal orders awarding players 15 of them and major orders netting them ~50, and major orders don’t even require each and every player to have contributed to their completion for everyone to reap their rewards, meaning Warbonds are relatively quick to progress through on top of completing ordinary missions.
Common and rare samples are found while aimlessly roaming around and searching for mission objectives, and they’re so great in number that dropping a bunch on a corpse usually isn’t detrimental to the overall haul players will walk away with, though ship modules cost a ton of these commonplace samples and make looking out for them worthwhile anyhow.
Rather, ship modules that require super samples are balanced to not cost an exorbitant amount, which is brilliant because only six can be looted from any given mission where they’re available. Therefore, if players managed consecutive god-tier runs they could clean house in the ship module tree—but that is far easier said than done.
Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2 is a third-person cooperative shooter developed by Arrowhead Games Studios for the PC and PlayStation 5 where players take control of a Helldiver set to protect the citizens of Super Earth by traveling to hostile alien worlds and destroying threats. Players undergo missions, defeat enemies, and use special items called Stratagems to help turn the tide of battle in this punishing release.
- Franchise
- Helldivers
- Released
- February 8, 2024
- Developer(s)
- Arrowhead Game Studios
- Genre(s)
- Shooter
- Multiplayer
- Online Co-Op
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Intense Violence
- Metascore
- 83
- Platforms That Support Crossplay
- PC & PS5
- Number of Players
- 1-4
- PS Plus Availability
- N/A
