With Helldivers 2's server issues finally resolved, Arrowhead Studios said earlier this week that it could now shift its focus to cooler things, including – speculatively – playable mechs. These Towers of Mobile Chaos may be closer to joining the fight than we realize, as a video showing one in action has now been leaked on Reddit.
There's no question that mechs are coming to Helldivers 2. They were present in the first game, and one is featured very prominently in the Report for Duty trailer released in February, with the caption “Coming soon after launch.”
But if this leaked video is real – and it certainly looks like it to me – the mighty machines could be coming much sooner than most of us expected.
The leaker, fozzye18, said he wasn't responsible for bringing the mechs into the game, but rather happened to participate in a game with a player who “showed us new things that we enjoy.” One eagle-eyed Redditor noted that you can actually see two mechs in the video, one being used by the player and another that's only visible in the background for a second or two.
Mechs… have fun out of r/Helldivers
There are apparently different types of mechs in use here: Redditor VegetablesWater4099 said the one in the Helldivers 2 trailer was a EXO44while the one in the foreground of this leaked video is a EXO48. The mech in the background is too indistinct to see, but the key point is that if the assessment is correct, we will have access to more than one type of mech in the game. Fozzye18 confirmed that the player who had access to this awesome new hardware “appeared in multiple types of mechs” while playing.
And it's apparently not just mechs that are already functional in the game. Fozzye18 said the player who spawned the mechs also appeared to have access to “new weapons such as an upcoming energy RPG, a meteorite that hits like a nuclear bomb, a group of helldivers to summon to assist (NPCs), and “much more”.
The appearance of the large Stompy machines in live play has sparked all sorts of excitement and quite a bit of speculation as to how they got there in the first place. Some players believe that this stuff is already hidden in the code and waiting to be introduced in future updates, a theory that is at least somewhat supported by dataminers who claim to have found a number of it unused strategies in the game files, including one that seems particularly relevant now: “-DropoffCombatWalker.”
Some players have also wondered if this is the work not of a hacker, but of Arrowhead developers who are releasing the new hardware in random games to simultaneously test it in a live environment and drum up hype. That seems unlikely, but with the Game Master tools described by Arrowhead, which give the developer the ability to directly influence games, something like this could happen.
Whoever it was, it sounds like they had a good time. “He just showed me everything he got out of the files he had. So I’m not sure if he was a hacker or a developer, but he seemed very excited to show us,” fozzye18 wrote. “Until my game crashed because everything was loading and I couldn't find his username anymore.”
Neither Arrowhead nor its CEO, Johan Pilestedt – who are a fairly regular presence on Twitter – have yet commented on the leaked video, but I have asked for more information and will update if I receive a response.
