Arrowhead Studios’Helldivers 2has turned out to be a bit of a masterstroke, and its organic success should at least partially be attributed to the behind-the-scenes game master, Joel, who’s beenslamming Super Earth with numerous challenges but also an occasional boon. Such as the APCs, as of late.
More specifically, it seems thatHelldivers 2‘s infamous game master,Joel, has been at it again over the past couple of days. Whereas Joel is usually busycoordinating the enemy forcesfrom the background, he does sometimes get a bit more hands-on. Recently, Joel’s been jumping into random Helldiver squads to bestow upon them an as-of-yet-unreleased vehicle: the Armored Personnel Carrier, which may or may not be atransition from the originalHelldivers. And, indeed, the APC is fully driveable and appears to feature manual gear shifting, of all things. Because trying to outmaneuver a nasty horde of hyper-predatory space bugs wouldn’t be exciting enough with an automatic shifter.
Joel is hinting at future Helldivers 2 content, including APCs
Immediately after jumping into aHelldivers 2match, Joel told players that “[he needs]to get back to work, please take this.” ‘This’ being the gloriously chunky APC. This isn’t entirely unexpected, mind, as we did posit thatlarge batches of content from the originalHelldiverswould eventually transition over intoHelldivers 2as well, but we certainly didn’t expect to see the multi-seater APC so soon.
Curiously, it would appear thatthe APC isn’t nearly as fragile as the mech, with players being able to jump right in, man the vehicle’s weaponry, and tank hits from Automaton lasers. The regular Exosuit mech is, in comparison, a remarkably fragile weapons platform rather than something that could go toe-to-toe with mechanical monstrosities. Arrowhead does still have plenty of time to nerf the unreleased APC before it’s officially released, granted.
Regardless, the future is delightfully bright if Joel’s behavior so far is anything to go on. Even though you wouldn’t guess as much via the patch notes themselves, Arrowhead has slowly been adding more and more content toHelldivers 2without drawing attention to it.The Shriekers, for one, were in the game weeks before being officially confirmed from Arrowhead’s side of things, and the mystery ofstrange blue lasers gunning down Helldiversis yet to be properly resolved.
Warbonds and whatnotare fine, to be sure, but the really exciting bits ofHelldivers 2materialize when you least expect them. Joel’s APCs are just the tip of the spear, we’ve come to believe, andthat’s precisely the way it should be.
