Helldivers 2 grunts capture sightings of a returning faction while the game's director desperately restarts the propaganda machine: "The Illuminate are already here"

Keep your head down, Helldiver, blue sniper beams (that may or may not exist) are rampant. Helldivers 2 players have been sharing footage of what seems like a new unfriendly faction in the game, though the shooter's director is determined to suppress such anti-democratic lies. 

Helldivers 2's Galactic Map has a good amount of free space with the bug critter Terminids and the robot army Automatons only taking up half the table. Developer Arrowhead Studios then has space aplenty to add new baddies and some players are now convinced that a returning faction, The Illuminate, is already in the game.

Several clips and testimonies found on the game's main subreddit claim that mysterious blue beams have been shot from the sky and even killed a few cadets. Though a some Helldivers also claim that the blue beams might sometimes aim at enemy bugs, so the mysterious force might just be spreading their own kind of democracy. See the evidence (or forged documents) with your own liberty-loving eyes below.

The Illuminate was a major enemy faction in the first game. Their psychic teleportation abilities and tentacled faces made them both tough to fight and even tougher to look at. Some of the leaders also donned celestial robes to further spread their religious zealotry, rivaling the false prophets of Halo's Covenant. But that's all in the past - The Illuminate was thoroughly squashed, never to return - according to the sequel's director and the Ministry of Truth's propaganda machine. 

Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt and other truth ministers reviewed the footage to quell anti-democratic claims about The Illuminate's return. "Blue beams aren’t real, it can’t hurt you," he writes - unless you were unlucky enough to lose a limb during those (fake) blue beam strikes. Illuminate sightings have been reported for weeks now, so a new threat will probably join the game sooner rather than later.

Whatever comes next will likely be just as involved and fun to watch unfold as the inclusion of