It took the better part of a month but Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, the tale of a boy and his buddies discovering a shared love of entomology, finally has support for ultrawide displays. And that's not all: Private lobbies for the co-op Operations mode are also live and there's a new Sparring Arena in the Battle Barge that lets players "compete in friendly PvP with the players in their squad." Players who like to fiddle with their look will be happy to hear that a convenient option to reset custom armor and color presets to their default settings has been added to the customization menu.
Those are the highlights, but there are some pretty big changes happening under the hood too. Enemy aggressiveness at the Veteran difficulty level has been toned down for a "better singleplayer experience," but player health has also been "slightly reduced" to partially compensate. Bots have been tuned to be "more helpful and effective," although they still won't carry you to mission complete. Chaos enemy spawns in Operations mode have been dramatically nerfed: The maximum number of Tzaangors With Shield on the arena at the same time has been cut from 10 to four, while the maximum number of Cultist Snipers has been reduced from 10 to three. The accuracy of ranged enemies attacking from off-screen has also been reduced, which should help cut down on nasty surprises.
The Veteran difficulty nerf, minor though it sounds, is probably warranted. Earlier this month, PC Gamer Ultramarine Morgan Park urged co-op squads to bump Space Marine 2's difficult from Normal to Veteran to make it a little more interesting—which he then described as a "massive standing leap" over the standard difficulty level that left his squad of space marines struggling to not get butchered. Given that, it sounds like one person teamed up with a pair of less-than-helpful bots would have a very hard time of it. (Although it sounds like Henry Cavill was able to do it, so maybe it's just a skill issue. Sorry, Morgan.)
- Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2's latest update leads with a fancy datavault for your battle-barge, but I'm far more interested in the new tyranid unit with a cannon on its back
- Space Marine 2 dev acknowledges its FOMO events are 'a source of frustration and stress for everyone', says it'll fix things and isn't trying to make 'a full live service game' by stealth
"We truly appreciate your reports and feedback, thank you!" the Space Marine 2 dev team wrote. "If you have any, head over to our platform Focus Together, which features an entire forum dedicated to Space Marine 2 as well as an 'Ideas' section that is reviewed by the Space Marine 2 teams. We hope you'll enjoy the improvements brought by this update."
The full Space Marine 2 3.0 patch notes are below.
New features
- The Hub Sparring Arena, a new special arena on the Battlebarge available in Operations & Eternal War Game mode where players can compete in friendly PvP with the players in their squad.
- Ultrawide support for PC
- Private mode for Operation mode that gives players ability to play operation alone with bots or alongside one friend without being matchmaked with random players during the mission.
- Added What's New & Message of the Day
- Added option to reset custom colour presets
Gameplay and balancing tweaks
- The marking tool has been updated:
- Improved responsiveness and comfort of Social Wheel control with a mouse
- Disabled unnecessary objects that do not require highlighting and worked poorly with it
- Several minor bug fixes - Power Fist: Damage for fully charged attacks has been greatly increased
- Heavy Plasma: Base ammo increased by 5. Blast damage radious increased. Owerheat per shoot drastically decreased from 50 to 30 for charged shoots and from 20 to 15 for base shooting. Base damage slightly increased by 10%.
- Med Stims restore contested health in addition to actual healing
- Aux grenade launcher ammo now can be refilled only with the Ammo Boxes and can not be refilled from the infinite Ammo Cache
Campaign
- Difficulty:
- Enemy aggressiveness on Veteran Difficulty in Campaign decreased for better singleplayer experience.
- Player's health on Veteran Difficulty in Campaign is slightly reduced to compensate for AI aggressiveness and armor management updates
- Bots:
- Various inhibiting restrictions were lifted, allowing bots to be more helpful and effective, while still not beating the game for the player
- Bots will now help focus-firing zoanthropes when the player attacks them.
- Heavily eased restrictions on bots finishing of enemies instead of leaving them for the player, to reduce annoyance.
- Bots are now allowed to help with Gargoyle objectives
- Fixed a variety of bugs related to bots getting stuck
- Fixed a bug where bots can run out of ammo on weapons without a magazine
Operations Mode
- Tweaked AI Director and spawn rules of Chaos enemies in Operations mode:
- Max number of Tzaangors With Shield on the arena at the same time reduced from 10 to 4
- Max number of Cultists Snipers on the arena at the same time reduced from 10 to 3
- Max number of Tzaangors on the arena at the same time reduced from 30 to 20
- Max number of Rubric Marines with Boltguns on the arena at the same time reduced from 8 to 5
- Max number of Rubric Marines with Warpflamers on the arena at the same time reduced from 4 to 3 - Perfect parry has been updated, now restores armour for killing minoris, not only for countering their special attacks
- Regarding Block and Fencing Weapons, a bug has been fixed in perfect parry window for fencing weapons. Now it has 20 frames window for perfect parry and 10 frames of vulnerability at the end of animation, instead of 30 frames of perfect parry for full animation as it was intended originally.
- Assault Class: Base groundpound damage increased by 30%
- Armor boost drops from destructible crates are now less common (cooldown raised from 30 secs to 60 secs)
PvP
- Improved player spawn system. It should make spawn killing more difficult
- Reworked Vanguard's Grapnel Launcher in PVP. Instead of full stun it will now stagger enemy and will slow him down drastically.
AI
- Reduced ability to stunlock enemies with ranged attacks across all AI characters
- Accuracy of ranged enemies is reduced when attacking from off-screen and accuracy of ranged enemies is reduced when attacking melee-engaged players
- Regarding Hormagaunts and Tzaangors: Melee damage now deals specific amount damage instead of removing 1 complete armour segment per attack
- Zoanthrope:
- Increased psychic scream damage sparsing time from 0.5s to 2s to prevent one shot damage
- Psychic scream damage reduced from 11 to 8
- Psychic scream effective range reduced from 50 to 40m
- Psychic scream cast range is reduced by 10m - Termagant:
- Fleshborer spray attack damage reduced from 1 to 0.5
- Flashborer spray attack damage reduced from 0.3 to 0.1 - Tyranid Warrior with Devourer: Projectile damage reduced from 0.9 to 0.6 per projectile
- Rubric Marine With Warpflamer:
- Icon of flame damage reduced from 9 to 6
- Flamer burst damage reduced from 6 to 4 per shoot
- Flamer shooting damage reduced from 6 to 4 per projectile
- Health reduced by 10% - Rubric Marine with Boltgun:
- Spray attack damage reduced from 1.5 to 1
- Precise shot attack (with red indicator) damage reduced from 4 to 2 per projectile
- Reduced frequency of teleports used to disengage players to make them less annoying to fight Health reduced by 10% - Tzaangor With Shield: HP greatly reduced
- Carnifex:
- Rage phase updated, carnifex becomes faster and more aggressive
- Taunt frequency reduced
- Fixed a bug where his cone of thorns attack wouldn't fire projectiles - Hive Tyrant:
- Health slightly increased.
- Resistance to explosives and melta weapons increased by 20%.
Customization
- Fixed icon colour for the Administratum Grey, Auric Armour Gold and Celestra Grey colours
- Fixed several issues with default colors being wrong on some chapters (i.e. Iron Warriors)
- Vanguard Relic Right Greave part now requires 29 victories instead of 36
- Added a Colour pattern called "Greaves Pattern" allowing the player to customize bottom and top half of the leg separately
Maps
- Fixed several issues that were preventing players from progressing within some levels
- Fixed a lot of minor collision issues
- Tweaked dust storm density and duration in Ballistic Engine operation
- Tweaked Heldrake fire timings on the bridge in Reliquary operation
- Trials can be now accessed via Hypnomat in Armoury
General fixes
- Fixed a bug where changing loadout mid operation would restore your health
- Improved Jump Pack Ability responsiveness
- Fixed several issues in Trials
- Fixed a bug where in some rare cases controls would stop working after performing a finisher
- Fixed a bug where player does not receive armor data from Hellbrute spawned from chaos portal
- Fixed a bug that caused Vanguard's "Adrenaline Rush" perk description to show 1% instead of actual 10%
- Fixed Announcer spam in Eternal War mode
- Fixed multiple ways of duplicating ammo in Operations mode
- Fixed a bug where Grapnel Launcher would get canceled if overlapped by small geometry
- Fixed a bug where Tactical perk EMPEROR'S VENGEANCE did not work with Plasma Incinerator.
- Fixed a bug where several weapons could restore more than actual contested health (i.e. Meltas, AoE weapons etc)
- Fixed several issues that were causing loss of saves
- Fixed an unidentified voice at the end of the story that was assigned to the wrong character.
- Lots of minor UI fixes and improvements
- Lots of minor animation fixes and improvements
- Localization fixes
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