Arrowhead Game Studios has announced that with the “Escalation of Freedom” update. things are going to get worse for players, in a fun way. That begins with the reintroduction of the Impaler, a Terminid enemy type that burrows in the ground and unleashes large, ferocious tentacles to fight players. According to Helldivers 2’s design director Miklas Malmborg, the Impalers are meant to “cut off your escape route” with their large tentacles, at which point you can reroute or stay and fight. Fans actually began theorizing that the Impalers were on their way to Helldivers 2 months ago, after a blog post mentioned tentacles a few times and seemed to show off at least one new weapon specifically meant to combat them.
If you haven’t played Helldivers 2 yet, know that the game itself is already challenging in its own way. But with this new update, it’s about to become even more challenging.
There will be a new version of the swamp environment because Arrowhead wanted to “spook it up.” It appears to tout a darker sky with the occasional crack of lightning, and the whole thing really does looks moodier than before. There will also be new environmental hazards and reworks of existing ones, like the Acid Storm, which now applies a debuff to both players and enemies instead of just limiting visibility.
Change has been largely incremental, taking place across several smaller, steadily released updates. It seemed like every other week, there was some new feature, enemy, or environment that was being debuted. Eventually, these releases slowed down, at least in part because they were causing numerous problems for the community.
Arrowhead Game Studios has announced that the “Escalation of Freedom” update is coming August 6! Will you join the battlefield?