Helldivers 2 CEO spills the beans on an unreleased 'heavy machine gun' with a tripod before immediately correcting himself: 'Never mind. There's so such thing as HMG'

Like a moth to a flame, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt can't help but tease the future of Helldivers 2 whenever he logs on to Twitter.

Today, after penning a cryptic tweet about giving Super Earth citizens «more officially regulated and mandated freedom,» Pilestedt replied to one fan's concept for a tripod-equipped minigun with a curious insight into a different, unreleased Helldivers 2 gun.

«Gatling guns as support weapons are cool, but only if they accurately represent the insane recoil. We may, but it will require some real cool mechanics,» Pilestedt replied to one fan.

«You could add a deployable tripod that means to kill recoil, you kill your own ability to move, 3 second deploy time, 3 seconds to pack it up,» responded Twitter user FedNet23. «If you are in undeployed mode, recoil should be savage unless a 2nd player is helping you keep it stable holding a 2nd rail.»

«This was the idea for the HMG,» Pilestedt wrote back, before immediately tweeting: «Nevermind. There's no such thing as HMG.»

While Pilestedt doesn't clarify what «HMG» stands for, he's likely referring to a heavy machine gun that doesn't currently exist in Helldivers. Well, it doesn't exist anymore. This is not the first time such a weapon has come up—during the very first hours of Helldivers 2's launch in February, several players reported seeing a «MG101 Heavy Machine Gun» support weapon stratagem in the unlocks menu. A few hours later, it apparently disappeared, but not before they snapped a screenshot of its in-game description. According to that description, the HMG is «a very powerful but difficult-to-wield machine gun with intense recoil.» It would have unlocked at level 12, between the Autocannon and the Railgun.

We can only see the back of the HMG in the deleted in-game description, but its appearance lines up perfectly with another weird icon that's disappeared from the game in recent updates. For a few weeks in Helldivers 2, the regular machine gun was represented on the map with an