Helldivers 2 Update Quietly Added Flying Automatons

thegamer.com:

Helldivers 2 upped the level cap and added new storms yesterday, but the file size was a suspicious 1.5GB. Clearly, there's more that developer Arrowhead - and Joel - aren't telling us. But fans soon discovered what had been snuck onto the battlefield - flying Automatons. Democracy save us.

Automatons have deployed gunships onto the battlefield, which fly overhead and scan the area with a red spotlight before unleashing a devastating laser barrage once they've found you. They're hard to miss on account of the bright headlights (do gunships have headlights?).

"They keep moving but [it's] too early to tell the pattern," Bigglettt posted on the game's subreddit, breaking down their experience with the gunships to help other Helldivers before they jump into the fray. "They hover in place for a few seconds max and you shoot down one of the engines like a normal dropship. If you hit them deadcenter they can survive the hit".

Of course, it's not the only new weapon in the Automaton arsenal. As of yesterday's update, giant AT-AT-like walkers, called Factory Striders, have been spotted marching along the battlefield.

Unfortunately, we have neither Jedi nor ground ships to tie wire around their legs and trip them up, so we'll have to take them head-on with a rocket launcher and hope it's enough. If you thought the Automatons were hard before, it might be time to retreat to the Terminid front.

Interestingly, these new Automaton weapons were added after players spotted ominous cloaked warships hovering above their planets. The leading theory is that these belong to the Illuminate, who may have been hiding and watching us this entire time.

Perhaps they're now arming the Automatons in a push to liberate the Cyborgs so that they can prepare a three-prong attack from the West and South. Or perhaps the Automatons are simply more advanced than we first thought. Either way, the war just got a lot tougher.

Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the third-person shooter from