It was only earlier this week that Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 developer Saber Interactive teased the new content heading to the cooperative action game. Already, the first major update to the game carrying brand-new content is available, and it"s bringing a new operation map, a new difficulty mode, balance changes, and more.
The latest map is set on planet Kadaku, and alongside all the standard enemy types Space Marines have faced before, the massive Hierophant Bio-Titans have now landed. A massive Tyranid enemy that will need to be taken down to survive this Operation map titled Termination.
Next, Lethal difficulty is here for Operation enjoyers looking for even more stress in their lives. According to the studio, this option limits the number of refills Ammo Crates give, has deadlier Majoris enemies, and armor restoring only works when near other Space Marines. Surviving this does grant some exclusive cosmetic items, though. Moreover, when playing Operations in solo mode, photo mode can be enabled to take all kinds of cool shots on the battlefield.
Here are the other gameplay balance tweaks that have arrived with Patch 4.0:
- Melee Archetypes: Fencing weapons" perfect parry window will now have the same duration as balanced weapons but it will start from the first frame of parry animation.
- Melee Perks: Chainsword, Power Fist, Combat Knife charged attacks perks get significant damage increase.
- Basic Auspex Scan: bonus damage on bosses is reduced by 30%.
- Melta Charge: damage to bosses is reduced by 70%.
- Enemy Spawn Director PvE:
- Tweaked idle spawns.
- Enemy variety within waves is now less random while enemy variety between waves is bigger.
- Extremis enemies can now spawn have additional enemies
As for why the reasoning behind these changes, that mostly seem to be making the difficulty harder, Saber said this:
"With Patch 3 we have noticed that Operations mode became noticeably easier, especially Chaos operations. We are happier with what we have right now compared to what we had on release, because before Patch 3 Chaos missions were unpopular. Still, we think that currently Operations mode is a bit too easy. Overall these changes are going to make Operations mode harder, but it is difficult to measure by how much. We will continue to monitor those changes and will continue to adjust the balance of Operations mode. This is not the last change."
Find the complete changelog for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 patch 4.0 over here, which has further fixes, PVP and AI tweaks, and more. So far, the game has gathered over 4.5 million players, according to the developer.