Key Takeaways
- Patch 3.0 of Space Marine 2 adds ultrawide support, private PvE lobbies, and a new Sparring Arena.
- The patch addresses concerns regarding weapon nerfs and difficulty adjustments for a better single-player experience.
- The update improves game immersion, quality of life, and comparison to similar co-op games like Helldivers 2.
Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is easily one of the best launches in 2024. However, it was initially introduced without a few much-wanted features that Saber Interactive is finally adding weeks after the game’s release.
The game’s Patch 3.0 primarily focuses on adding support for ultrawide resolutions, something that players have been demanding ever since the game came out.
Additionally, it also introduces private PvE lobbies for Operations mode, now allowing players to play the missions alone with bots or maybe even alongside a friend without worrying about matchmaking with random players anymore.
Speaking more of ultrawide resolutions, they have been around for a while in the market, and it is easy to say games like Doom Eternal and Red Dead Redemption 2 helped spark the trend of immersing oneself in a game in more ways than one.
Space Marine 2, for the longest time, has also been compared with Helldivers 2, a similar co-op game set in an inter-galaxy adventure theme that met its downfall, and a revival shortly after earlier this month.
Other Major Updates In Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 Patch 3.0
The latest patch notes prove that the developers weren’t lying when they promised to deliver a fulfilling patch towards the end of September.
Apart from the features discussed above, the game will also see the addition of a new Sparring Arena in the Battle Barge, which will be made available in both Operations and Eternal War modes.
In Sparring Arena, you’ll be given your weapons and grenades as if you were in a PvP match and allowed to spar it out with your Battle-Brothers ahead of your next missions.
Furthermore, the game now allows you to reset custom armor and color presets by replacing them with default ones instantly, establishing a nice quality-of-life change in the game.
Gameplay and balancing tweaks
It’s constant changes and small tweaks like these that often help games establish themselves as evergreen titles.
Power Fist:
Damage for fully charged attacks has been greatly increased
Heavy Plasma:
– Base ammo increased by 5. Blast damage radious increased.
– Overheat 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
For those who like to indulge themselves in the sweet campaign goodness, Saber has a few changes to the difficulty you should be on the lookout for. The changes are as follows:
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, and 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
Spawn killing now will be a thing of past.
- 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
No more glitches preventing players from moving forward in Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2
- 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
These minor changes improve Space Marine 2’s standing as one of the many games set in outer space released in 2024, including Helldivers 2, and the shortly arriving Starfield: Shattered Space DLC.