"The beaches will dry before the Helldivers do": Helldivers 2 players made Seyshel Beach the new Malevelon Creek, complete with propaganda and a stunned response from Arrowhead
Every time the Helldivers 2 community gets stuck on a difficult planet, some Hellboomer will reckon it reminds them of Malevelon Creek, a famously unnecessary battle so protracted that developer Arrowhead ended up canonizing it after millions upon millions of democratic soldiers were voluntarily put through the Automaton food processor. But with their latest Creek successor, I think Helldivers 2 players actually have a good point: Seyshel Beach is maybe the closest we've gotten all year. It even has propaganda. At various points in the past few weeks, and to varying extremes, thousands and even tens of thousands of Helldivers 2 players have dogpiled Seyshel Beach, a frontline planet in the Illuminate front. Why? I truly, from the pit of my gut, do not know. Maybe they wanted some beachfront property. This, I think, is the key ingredient that too many would-be Creek doppelgangers have missed: sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness. Malevelon Creek was a logistical disaster born of herd mentality, overpowered robots, aggressive propaganda, and senseless aggression, like sheep chasing each other off a cliff. It was extremely difficult, completely pointless, and painfully slow as liberations go. It also actively derailed adjacent Major Orders by siphoning off troops. Sir, I’m Finishing this Fight. from r/Helldivers Stop me if this sounds familiar. Seyshel Beach has not come up in any recent Major Orders – at least, not as an objective. But in September, High Command did acknowledge the efforts of "a small but fervent cohort of Helldivers" who had reclaimed one of the Beach's cities, New Alexandria. (Maybe they were hoping there'd be a sweet library there.) "While the city itself bears no particular strategic significance, the single-minded focus of these Helldivers is nevertheless an inspiration to all," the report read. This report came at the tail end of Operation Gloom Tide, which tasked Helldivers with defending Hellmire for the millionth time this year and retaking Terminid planets like Gacrux while carving out territory in the Gloom. That is to say, on another side of the solar system far from the Illuminate and the very dedicated Beachers. The Beachers didn't let orders deter them, though. Sure, a new Major Order targeting a different planet deeper in the Illuminate front has now seen Beacher counts decline sharply, according to the Helldivers companion app map, but thousands are still at it. The Beach is 84.3401% liberated at the time of writing, and thousands of Beachers are hungry for that final 16.66%. "We have been fighting on this planet for at least 21+ days and it’s just going back [and] forth like the Creek but concrete," Reddit user A7THU3 observed on October 6. "One day the beach will be free," user TDKswipe wrote on October 1 as a previous Major Order tried to pull Beachers away. "The beaches will dry before the Helldivers do!" reads a poster shared by Redditor RazzDaNinja, who insists, "Sir, I'm finishing this fight." To recap: we've got Beach propaganda, Major Order defiance, strategically inconsequential territory, and official acknowledgement from Arrowhead that this player-coordinated strategy is happening. For once, I think you could actually argue that we have a new Malevelon Creek on our hands.