Space Marine 2 speedruns the Helldivers 2 arc, reversing unpopular nerfs and buffing tons of guns: "I forgot that once the game comes out ... it's yours first and foremost"

gamesradar.com:

Reset the clock, folks. A multiplayer shooter where nobody in the universe ever truly wins has rolled back some poorly received nerfs and sweetened the deal with a spoonful of buffs. Space Marine 2 update 4.1 is coming this Thursday, and it's bringing a sledgehammer for the nerfs introduced with update 4.0 last week, in record time mirroring and resolving the sort of balance debate that consumed Helldivers 2.

In the newly minted 4.1 patch notes, game director Dmitriy Grigorenko explains the approach that led to update 4.0 and thanks players for being vocal with feedback. "While we noticed criticism with regards to difficulty adjustments – and rightly so – we’d also like to thank you for your very positive feedback on the new 'Termination' map," he says. "No matter the feedback, we’re grateful that you feel so passionate about Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. The key takeaway for me, personally, is that I forgot that once the game comes out, it's no longer a dev's game. It's yours first and foremost."

Grigorenko opens with some fresh good news: the Space Marine 2 team is looking to establish public test servers in early 2025 to "harness this energy" and help polish updates pre-release. The game is seemingly gearing up for a long tail of support after its runaway launch. (Continuing the parallel, Helldivers 2 devs said in August that their own test servers are actively being worked on.)

Patch 4.1 is intended to get the game back on the right track, then. First of all, the 4.0 difficulty tweaks that ended up hitting lower difficulty levels inordinately hard are getting rolled back almost entirely. "Extremis enemies’ spawn rates in Minimal, Average, and Substantial difficulties will revert back to their pre-Patch 4.0 levels and will be significantly reduced in Ruthless difficulty to hopefully strike a balance between how hard the game was at launch and how 'easy' it became with Patch 3.0," the patch notes clarify. 

"Space Marine 2 is all about the power fantasy, and