Let’s just pause and take stock of how much has happened in everyone’s favorite new co-op shooter, Helldivers 2, since it launched a month ago: the first players dropped in to find a bug-infested galaxy, quickly found there were also killer robots on the other side of said galaxy, fought for a planet they believed was their very own Vietnam and lost, bounced back in order to seize the means of exosuit production, won, unlocked mechs, survived their first meta upheaval, fell victim to a planetary hazard or two, and are most recently fighting to exterminate the bugs in a sector for good. That’s a lot of action and back-and-forth over the span of a relatively short period of time, and things show no signs of letting up, as players are now encountering a troublesome new adversary on the frontlines.
Just as Helldivers 2 players began liberating the Umlaut Sector, a series of planets with pesticide-spewing towers called the Terminid Control System that can purportedly wipe out the bugs threatening Super Earth, Arrowhead Game Studios has rolled out their latest surprise to unsuspecting players and introduced flying bugs. Or did they?
Arrowhead’s CEO Johan Pilestedt has taken a fun approach to the rollout by refuting its veracity. Typically the first person to rally the “troops” to an in-game cause, it’s an admittedly funny reversal to now play dumb and obscure the fact that the enemy forces of Helldivers 2 are either evolving or revealing new threats we didn’t know about in order to maintain morale.
The community is, as ever, playing along and “reporting” any signs of flying enemies to the Ministry of Truth, while others are confronting Pilestedt with the truth and being shot down. The best of these are the examples of flying bugs on Helldivers 2’s promotional artwork, which Pilestedt is now claiming are doctored images. As one Redditor succinctly puts it, “How 1984 of them.”
Unfortunately for Pilestedt’s attempted misinformation campaign, we do have at least a few confirmations that the bugs have indeed sprouted wings and are every bit the troublesome bastards we imagined them being. Of course they’d evolve just as we started learning how to fight these things. Now to find the right loadout to take out Chargers and these winged abominations…
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