How does Coop work?

[God_Imperator]

Is it like warframe where you get queued with other people?
Would really like to know before I buy it.
Streamers all usually play solo and I ain't buying helldivers to play solo.

[Kashra Fall]

You're in a ship, you queue for a mission and people join your ship to drop with you.
You drop and people can join you.
You can also drop an SoS pod to raise your join priority.
Or you can simply hit quickplay and let it all take care of itself.

[SavageWhiteDude]

You can team up with people directly via the friend list and run as a squad of 2-4 people

Or you can randomly jump in with someone else directly on the map(not entirely sure how it decides who shows up on your map or who doesnt)

Or you can do the quick play which I think randomly assigns you to people.

In other words... I have no idea how it all works and am the wrong person to answer this but yes you can play with rando's

[DarkMan]

The tutorial is short and simple solo event but the main game from there can be played with friends or randoms.

To join someone else’s Helldivers 2 match, simply go to the War Table and choose the Quickplay option. That will bring up a list of players who have activated their SOS beacons and are actively looking for help. Joining their game is as easy as selecting their session, though it’s up to all of you if you’d like to continue playing beyond that.

Alternatively, you can easily start your own Helldivers 2 session and wait for others to join. To do so, simply go to the “Settings” menu, choose “Options,” and make sure your Matchmaking Policy is set to “Public.” This will allow anyone who wishes to join your game to do so.

However, please note that Helldivers 2’s matchmaking systems are currently in what its developers refer to as “Crisis Mode.” In other words, the system is not working as intended and is prone to crashes and other technical issues. It seems that this problem was caused by the game’s sudden popularity leading to server overloads and will likely be fixed shortly once the servers are stabilized.

So some people have had different experiences with it. Some good, some bad. There's been hot-fixes for past couple days. Cross-platform works but not as intended. And console users are not having the best of luck. I suspect that it'll get better since these devs are devoted to getting this thing off the ground and working night and day for now to ensure various fixes and iterations. Like any launch there's a issues.

My biggest beef has been more with framerates... having to tweak settings to optimize it for this game then back again for other games i love. Wish win 11 had scripts for such changes one could run to optimize it. I use Nvidia Control Panel options along with tweaking the in-game settings and have gotten to about 120fps fairly steady now. But at a cost of performance over quality. Which is par for the course for many games.

I've only barely begun the game like others so take it with a grain of salt.

[God_Imperator]

Thank you!