Last week, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 developer Saber Interactive brought its first major update to the game, delivering a brand-new Operation map and a new difficulty mode, among other changes. A huge number of balance changes were also a part of this update, aimed at toughening up the Tyranid forces against the playerbase that was easily carving through levels.
While the new content of Patch 4.0 was received well by the community, the new balance changes were criticized overwhelmingly, with many even going as far as to review-bomb the game on Steam. Today, the studio revealed that a brand-new update is imminent with rollbacks and fresh tweaks that will give all the power back to players" hands.
"No matter the feedback, we’re grateful that you feel so passionate about Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2," says Game Director Dmitriy Grigorenko in a statement. "The key takeaway for me, personally, is that I forgot that once the game comes out, it"s no longer a dev"s game. It"s yours first and foremost."
To make sure these kind of updates do not catch the playerbase and developers off guard again, Saber is implementing a public test server program to let some of the community try out changes before they are rolled out to everyone. The program should go live in early 2025.
According to Saber, the hardest difficulty the game offered at launch, Ruthless, had a 60% win rate in September. Following later patches though, the win rate had climbed to over 80%, prompting some players to say the game was becoming too easy. This had led to the latest changes that increased enemy spawns across all difficulty modes, which triggered the mass of negative feedback.
"Your feedback made it clear that the game had become more intense and stressful on lower difficulties, and this was never our intention." adds Grigorenko. "As I’ve personally emphasised in interviews, Space Marine 2 is all about the power fantasy, and Patch 4.0 negatively impacted it for many of you."
Other changes in this upcoming update include substantial buffs to the entire Bolter family of weapons in Operations, removal of the Tight Formation system that required players to stick close together, increased armor in the Ruthless difficulty, and other tweaks.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Patch 4.1 lands on Thursday, October 24 across all platforms. Read the complete changelog here.