PvPvE is 'a holy grail of game design,' says Space Marine 2 director, and he's got no plans to chase it: 'A lot of studios are trying to find it and a lot of them fail'

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 supports co-op PvE combat for up to three players. It also offers 6v6 competitive PvP action, for those who are into that sort of thing. But never the twain shall meet, according to game director Dmitry Grigorenko, who said in a recent chat with MP1st that there are no plans for a PvPvE mode, for an eminently practical reason.

"PvPvE is a holy grail of game design," Grigorenko said when asked about the possibility of such a mode being added to Space Marine 2 in the future. "A lot of studios are trying to find it and a lot of them fail. The truth is that it's a very very difficult task. It sounds great on paper, but when you actually start trying, it becomes apparent that it's very annoying when you fight other players only to get backstabbed by an AI opponent.

"This is why most of the games are trying to ensure that PvP and PvE aspects don't intersect that much, i.e. AI opponents are restricted to specific places on maps, etc. It's a complicated mode to implement that would change the experience significantly, so I'm afraid there are no plans for it."

On paper, some kind of PvPvE mode sounds exciting: You're blasting away at a squad of Chaos Marine goons, bullets are flying, swords are swinging, stuff is blowing up, and all of a sudden, Xenos! But would it really work out that way? I suspect Grigorenko's point is spot-on: Bad outcomes from unpredictable events have great potential for emergent gameplay until it's actually happening to you, at which point the whole thing becomes unalloyed bullshit. Who thought this was a good idea?

And Saber's hands are already full keeping Space Marine 2 balanced as it is. A recent patch added a new difficulty to the game's co-op multiplayer and made some other related changes, and it has not gone over well: Well over 2,000 negative reviews have flooded in since the update went live on October 17, not enough to tank the "mostly positive" rating but sufficient to get attention from publisher Focus Entertainment, which quickly promised that a new patch with "balancing fixes" will be rolled out sometime this week.