Tech
Space Marine 2 Director Explains Why They’re Rolling Back Its Most Controversial Changes
Last week, Space Marine 2‘s 4.0 update arrived and many players weren’t happy about it. While the free patch did add a new mission, it also made the co-op third-person shooter much, much harder in some annoying ways. Now, developer Saber is rolling some of these changes back and promising to add public test servers, too.
On October 17, Saber Interactive pushed out patch 4.0 for Space Marine 2. The free update added a harder difficulty option, a new co-op mission, and made changes to enemy spawn rates, armor, ammo management. It also included a modifier that forced players to stick together to survive. The feedback from fans was extremely negative, with many players complaining that the game was too frustrating and hard across difficulty options and that the power fantasy of Space Marine 2 had been ruined. Saber Interactive agreed and, on October 18, promised another update was coming soon that would address complaints. And now that update is live.
On October 23, Space Marine 2 director Dmitriy Grigorenko posted update 4.1’s patch notes on the game’s official forums alongside a series of highly detailed explanations for the controversial changes that had been made before.
For example, Grigorenko says that the idea behind increasing the number of deadlier “Extremis ” enemies was to make the game harder without just increasing enemy health pools. The plan was to make the game’s second hardest difficulty tier, Ruthless, more challenging. However, the change made all tiers harder while also making Ruthless incredibly annoying. So Saber is rolling back the change on all difficulties below Ruthless, while tweaking the spawn rate on that difficulty to be somewhere between 4.0 and pre-4.0.
Space Marine 2’s new patch finally buffs Bolt Rifles
But 4.1 isn’t just about reverting some annoying tweaks introduced in the last patch. This new update finally buffs all Bolt Guns in Space Marine 2. This has been a request from many players since the game’s launch in September, as these weapons are iconic in Warhammer 40k, but they felt weak in the sci-fi shooter. Here are the weapon buffs:
- Auto Bolt Rifle -> Damage increased by 20%
- Bolt Rifle -> Damage increased by 10%
- Heavy Bolt Rifle -> Damage increased by 15%
- Stalker Bolt Rifle -> Damage increased by 10%
- Marksman Bolt Carbine -> Damage increased by 10%
- Instigator Bolt Carbine -> Damage increased by 10%
- Bolt Sniper Rifle -> Damage increased by 12.5%
- Bolt Carbine -> Damage increased by 15%
- Occulus Bolt Carbine -> Damage increased by 15%
- Heavy Bolter -> Damage increased by 5%
Another very frustrating addition to 4.0 was the “Tight Formation” mechanic added to the game’s new super hard difficulty. This forced players to stick together at all times to recover armor, but ended up making it particularly hard to play some classes and people weren’t happy about that. With 4.1, this mechanic has been removed. The game’s director says it was the studio testing out gameplay modifiers and while it still plans to bring modifiers to Space Marine 2, it will wait until “they’re ready.”
The full patch notes are worth reading, as Grigorenko is very open about the tweaks made in 4.0 and why they happened. He also explained that after seeing all the feedback and frustration following 4.0, his big takeaway was that he’d forgotten “once the game comes out, it’s no longer a dev’s game. It’s yours first and foremost.” To help prevent this situation from happening again, Grigorenko announced public test servers will be available in 2025 and they will let players try out “major balancing updates” before being fully released.
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