Helldivers 2 players rush to find "Karl" after deleted post from official account, which is certainly not "an illegal Automaton broadcast," but may be a crossover hint

Hirun Cryer
·2 min read
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Helldivers 2 Democratic Detonation Warbond heavy armor helldiver.
Helldivers 2 Democratic Detonation Warbond heavy armor helldiver.

After accidentally tweeting out a message in binary code asking about some "Karl," Helldivers 2's developer has denied that the message was an "illegal Automaton broadcast."

Arrowhead Game Studios is never one to break character, broadcasting game news from behind the 'Ministry of Truth,' and that trend continues today. The Helldivers 2 Twitter account tweeted out a string of binary code which, when put through a machine translator, comes out to "Where is Karl?" The perplexing message was deleted roughly an hour later.

Now, the game's Twitter account is pushing back at the strange message, denying that it's an "illegal Automaton broadcast." In the tweet below, with Arrowhead once again in character, the developer denies that Super Earth's communications were hijacked by Automaton forces for their propaganda needs.

So the transmission definitely wasn't an illegal Automaton broadcast, and it definitely wasn't a hijacked Super Earth deep-range transmission, which begs the question: what was it? Arrowhead, or rather, the Ministry of Truth, isn't keen on answering that question right now, telling social media followers and Super Earth soldiers to simply "disregard" the message entirely.

Of course, this almost certainly means that the Automatons are up to something. You might recall Helldivers 2's director personally disavowing footage of flying Terminids, right before flying Terminids joined the co-op shooter. The director also downplayed blue lights flashing across the game's sky as fake, right before blue lasers entered the shooter as a very real force. Not to be undemocratic, but sometimes you've got to trust your eyes.

Naturally, everyone's wondering who this enigmatic Karl character is. One prevailing theory is that it's a Deep Rock Galactic reference - the co-op game has an unseen character called Karl supporting its player characters, and what's more, the official Deep Rock Galactic Twitter account responded to the Helldivers 2 tweet above, writing "we don't know either" in binary.

This isn't the first time Helldivers 2 and Deep Rock Galactic have cropped up in the same sentence. Last month, players favorably compared the two shooters, leading Deep Rock Galactic's developer to gush about Helldivers 2 and propose a collaboration between the two games. Maybe this is the beginning of a fruitful partnership for two certified co-op hits.

PSA: Fixes for not getting Helldivers 2 Medals for Major Orders can potentially take a while to come through.