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Space Marine 2 has celebrated two milestones recently. One, Focus Entertainment announced on X that the game has passed 4.5 million players, which is a staggering amount. And second, the game has just recently received its 4.0 patch – the first major patch in the game’s cycle, as always complete with patch notes. And while the first instance of news is celebrated by the community, the patch itself has been far more divisive.
The First major Space Marine 2 update causes fan outrage
Space Marine 2 has been in the good graces of its players since launch, yet this patch seems to be a cause for concern. The prevailing topic of contention are the overarching nerfs, which have overshadowed the new Operation (Termination). “They nerfed the game too much!” lamented Nirosxs in one Reddit thread.
Where to even begin? For instance, the ammo crates now have limited refills per player, while Majoris enemies can get enraged and far more deadly. Meanwhile, armor restoration from finishers now has an “aura effect” which requires that you’re close to your squad for it to proc. However – all of the above only works in the new Lethal difficulty. Other difficulty levels remain unaffected. Yet some players have misread those lines, thinking that these are overarching changes to Operations.
Still, other nerfs are far more concerning. Cleverly named AnotherSmartNickname wasn’t too impressed by the weapons nerfs: “Judging by the patch notes, this patch feels like they’re just nerfing things to see how we’ll do so they can tweak the game more. I don’t like that. How about hiring a dozen QA testers instead of making us their guinea pigs? But I guess that’d cost money and they are just selling a 60-dollar game with Season Pass, can’t afford that.”
Many players have compared this patch with some of the more outrageous changes that hit Helldivers 2 earlier this year. “Hope they are not choosing the Helldivers 2 path, we’ve all seen what that does to the player count.” said Emolch78, and BooskaMacleswag added: “Reading this patch list felt a lot like reading a Helldivers patch list from around the time I started to like the game less. This even has the same cadence of not being completely egregious, but still just enough specific changes made in specific ways to feel more like malicious compliance than actual listening to the community opinion.”
Both weapons and classes were hit, and players aren’t too happy
Besides the weapons, the community feels that some classes have been hit too. TheFinalYappening objected that Heavies are going to be useless now: “The Heavy is already, in my opinion, the worst class in the game. these changes are just making it worse imo.” Assault Marines are another victim when it comes to the new higher difficulty, and with them, all other classes will find it more difficult to operate properly: “Wait, if we can’t get shields from takedowns in Leathal difficulty if you are far away what is an Assualt going to do if he has a Sniper and a Heavy doing thier jobs in the backline?” asked Dk_jungle_, with another Redditor chiming in: “What is Sniper going to do with an Assault and Bulwark on the frontline? What happens to the Vanguard that breaks away from the group to grapnel to a priority target? This change simply damages the ability of most classes to function in that difficulty.” Fortunately, Stuart 267 had a deliciously sarcastic remark that made us chuckle: “Easy fix – Don’t play Assault, Vanguard, Sniper or Heavy… 3 classes that execute/attack at range and a class with no melee and now got ammo nerfs.”
What’s even more concerning is that this is just a small sample of fan outrage with the latest patch. More and more players are reading the patch notes and coming out with their opinions. The amount of positives is vastly outnumbered by negative sentiments, meaning that Sabre will need to take a good look at in-game performance once players really dig into the gameplay. To sign it off, this comment from Rengerippo sums up the fan sentiment fairly well: “The game needs less nerfs and more buffs. We need everything viable to some extent like VERY powerful block weapons, very high damage one-hit weapons and powerful small bolters or on almost any low rarity weapon. Relic weapons usually are broken but some are just bad.” We hope that the devs take notice and account or player reactions, even if this is early in the patch cycle. We’ve seen what can happen to games that overnerf players to facilitate artificial increases in difficulty.