Helldivers 2's Game Master Joel might give you a heavy armored vehicle, if you're lucky

Arrowhead Studios’ Helldivers 2 has 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 been slamming Super Earth with numerous challenges but also an occasional boon. Such as the APCs, as of late.

More specifically, it seems that Helldivers 2‘s infamous game master, Joel, has been at it again over the past couple of days. Whereas Joel is usually busy coordinating the enemy forces from 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 a transition from the original Helldivers. 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 a Helldivers 2 match, 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 that large batches of content from the original Helldivers would eventually transition over into Helldivers 2 as well, but we certainly didn’t expect to see the multi-seater APC so soon.

Curiously, it would appear that the 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 to Helldivers 2 without 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 of strange blue lasers gunning down Helldivers is yet to be properly resolved.

Warbonds and whatnot are fine, to be sure, but the really exciting bits of Helldivers 2 materialize when you least expect them. Joel’s APCs are just the tip of the spear, we’ve come to believe, and that’s precisely the way it should be.