The curse of horde shooter balance: Fans take to Steam in protest as Space Marine 2 gets unpopular patch—devs promise course correction within the week

If covering Helldivers 2 this year has taught me anything, it's that balancing a horde shooter is monstrously hard—starting with an unpopular major balance patch that dented the Railgun, it wasn't until this month that, after a big overhaul, Arrowhead started hitting the mark again. So to see Space Marine 2 now running into the same problems has given me an unpleasant sense of intergalactic déjà vu.

Late last week, Saber Interactive released a patch retooling the difficulty for Operations, which are the game's multiplayer mode—on the plus side, there's a new Operation for players to enjoy, praise the emperor, as well as a new difficulty mode. Issue being, that difficulty mode's unpopular for a couple of reasons.

Named "Lethality", this difficulty makes Ammo Crate refills limited per player, and severely nerfs your armour regen if you aren't close to your mates. While these things do technically make the game harder, artificial resource scarcity in a game about mowing down hordes of enemies isn't great, and the game's classes are designed to operate at different ranges. The Sniper, for instance, is meant to… y'know, snipe.

That ammo crate thing also applies to Ruthless (the difficulty tier below it) as well, alongside a unilateral 15% reduction in player armour. Combine that with some nerfs to boss-killing tactics, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Looking at the community response, the main issue seems to be a similar one to Helldivers 2—in that these attempts to ramp up the difficulty completely clothesline playstyles and narrow players into a specific set of meta-appropriate boxes, else they suffer annoying damage sponges:

"Why are they forcing players to stay together? How would that work for a team of assault, vanguard and sniper?" Writes one player on the game's subreddit, before noting that one operation even requires the team to split up. In the same thread, the appropriately-named MrTactician sums it up pretty well:

"In a PvE game, players HATE suddenly performing worse through no fault of their own, it simply doesn't feel good. Please be careful with the next patch, I do not want another Helldivers catastrophe because the balance team feels that we are having fun in the wrong way."

This has led to a petite review bomb on Steam, too. While it's nothing like the massive hits Helldivers 2 tanked back in the day, the spike's still appreciable. Between October 17 and the time of writing, the game has received 1,774 positive reviews and 2,431 negative ones. As one player with over 100 hours writes on the new 'stay with the group' mechanic:

"This mechanic is one of the most confusingly out of place approaches to increasing difficulty I have ever seen. It disregards the core pillars of the game's combat flow and seems to have been implemented in a state of confusion where the developers forgot that certain classes are designed to be played at different ranges from each other."

Luckily, Saber Interactive seems to have recognised there's a problem. As written on the publisher Focus Entertainment's X account: "We closely read your feedback regarding the latest patch … we're actively working on another one including balancing fixes. It should release next week." That'll likely be Thursday, if the studio's release schedule is to be followed, though there's the possibility it pushes it sooner.

Honestly, seeing history repeat itself with yet another horde shooter game is a head-scratcher. If Helldivers 2 has shown me anything, it's that trying to balance your game about mowing down aliens by making players feel constrained, rather than powerful? It'll only end in tears. Especially in a Space Marine game, where you're meant to be playing a genetically-modified super soldier with three lungs—being a little OP is part of the fantasy. Here's hoping Saber Interactive can course-correct without the months of drama Arrowhead suffered.