“J.O.E.L. is out to get you now” Helldivers 2 CEO tells players who definitely weren’t already crapping their Super drawers about where the war’s going next

It’s been looking like something big and Illuminatey has been building in Helldivers 2’s Galactic War for a little while now, even if there’s been nothing to fight but the automatons. Well, if you weren’t already worried about what that is, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani’s issued a warning that you might want to read.

If you’re outta the loop, players have recently spotted a number of weird goings-on that they reckon could be the prelude to something like the Meridia black hole suddenly moving towards Super Earth, likely at the same time to does something that involves a huge new offensive from the Illuminate kicking off. With the one year anniversary of the game’s release coming up on February 8, it’d certainly be a fitting way to ring that anniversary in.

The latest thing that’s convinced – and rather spooked – players that the war’s soon set to do something that’ll put their backs against the wall is a comment Jorjani made on the game’s Discord server eariler this week.

“I just wanna give you folks a big props for the DSS maneuver you did,” he wrote, referencing the battles players had won against the jet brigade on Menkent and Lesath, “Brilliant move. J.O.E.L. is out to get you now.” Yep, nothing ominous there.

Naturally, this has got folks on Reddit already drawing on their war paint, as they brace for the latest bot order to give way to something new in about a day’s time as of writing. Some have joked that the game master Jorjani was alluding to will do whatever the Illuminate eqivalent of Davy Jones unleashing the Kraken is.

Meanwhile, one’s firmly in a ‘throw a rock and yell at the UFOs in Independence Day’ mood, having declared “Cry me a river J.O.E.L, if your jet brigade didn’t want to be destroyed, why did they explode so funny?”

To be fair, Helldivers 2 players have recently been given shovels in addition to the latest warbond’s portable hellbomb and other goodies, so they may well have the firepower required to deal with whateever J.O.E.L chucks at them.