Helldiver 2’s long-awaited third enemy faction, the Illuminate – previously seen in Helldivers 1, but still conspicuously absent from its sequel – has briefly appeared in-game. Which hasn’t stopped developer Arrowhead Game Studios from declaring the incident to be “fake news”.
Players began reporting strange sightings across Helldivers 2‘s Galactic War map (thanks PC Gamer) earlier today, beginning with a mysterious cluster of purple sectors where players had previously only seen red for Automaton incursions and orange for Terminids.
If it’s near-incontrovertible proof of an Illuminate presence you’re after, though, then look no further than the small purple symbol players discovered when rolling over one of the mysterious new purple sectors – a symbol long-time fans will immediately recognise as the circle-in-a-circle design
Unfortunately for players hoping for answers, developer Arrowhead’s immediate response was to spin up the in-game lore machine and have its Super Earth Armed Forces High Command dismiss the whole thing as a “recent server outage” caused by a lost Comms Technician decomposing in a server farm somewhere. It’s a typically cheeky response from the studio, but it’s impossible to tell if Arrowhead really is teasing the Illuminate’s imminent arrival (it certainly has form here), or if the whole incident genuinely was an unintended glitch.
Over on social media, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani has responded to reports of recent Illuminate sighting with two words: “fake news”. That, of course, brings to mind the time Arrowhead chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt dismissed players who’d claimed to have seen flying Terminids in-game as nothing but “bug sympathesers”, insisting “bugs can’t fly” – shortly before their arrival was made official.
Hints the Illuminate will soon be making a proper Helldivers 2 debut comes as Arrowhead continues to grapple with the fallout from August’s major Escalation of Freedom update. Players were particularly unhappy with some of the changes made as part of the patch, resulting in Arrowhead committing to a 60-day plan that would see it addressing “fundamental inconsistencies in our approach to game balance and game direction.”