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
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