Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is set to get a much-needed update this week that’ll roll back changes that made the game impossibly difficult for many players and caused outrage among fans.
Developer Saber Interactive announced that Patch 4.1 is set to release on Thursday, October 24, and it’s coming with a ton of changes, along with explanations as to the changes made in the now controversial Patch 4.0. Game director Dmitriy Grigorenko posted a statement at the beginning of the patch notes thanking players for the feedback. He then goes into the reasoning behind some of the broader changes players were upset about.
One of the big problem points was the Ruthless difficulty, which was deemed too easy by players after Patch 4.0, according to Grigorenko. The developers also saw a massive increase in win rates on that higher difficulty. So the developers increased the spawn rates of Extremis enemies and reduced armor by 15%.
“The reason why it was reduced last week was that we noticed a very substantial bump in win rates on Ruthless after Patch 3.0,” Grigorenko wrote about the armor changes. The spawn rates proved to be a bigger issue though, and proved to make lower difficulties much more challenging.
Your feedback made it clear that the game had become more intense and stressful on lower difficulties, and this was never our intention. As I’ve personally emphasized in interviews, Space Marine 2 is all about the power fantasy, and Patch 4.0 negatively impacted it for many of you,” Grigorenko wrote. “This is why we’re rolling back these changes.”
Many of these changes are rollbacks to the status quo before Patch 4.0, but the Saber team will continue to work on striking a better balance between challenge and fantasy.
Another much-requested change in Patch 4.1 includes buffs to Bolt weapons in Operations mode. They’re very beloved in the Warhammer community, and have been weak performers in game since launch. You can see the full list of changes in the patch notes, but basically all of them have gotten damage increases.
Finally, Saber has removed the Tight Formation system, which was introduced for the Operations mode’s highest difficulty. It instituted a proximity requirement for players in co-op, which was poorly received by the community. Grigorenko clarified that the developers added the system as a “first step towards the introduction of gameplay modifiers” in lieu of more difficulty tiers, but that it restricted some classes too much.
To counter any negatively-received patches in the future, Space Marine 2 will be getting public test servers sometime in early 2025, so that players can provide feedback on potential changes. This is similar to what happened in Helldivers 2, where the developers introduced a series of updates that sunk the “fun” factor for players, and eventually made improvements while instituting a public playtest option.