Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 FAQ outlines plans for coming updates

Here’s what the developers will and won’t do

Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment

Having attracted over two million players shortly after launch and becoming the most popular title of the IP, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 looks like a great success for Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment – but as it is in modern gaming, much work remains to be done when it comes to post-launch support.

Although the developers already shared a roadmap for future content updates previously, they’ve taken the time to sit down for a Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine FAQ and answered some of the most pressing questions from the community. Their responses are very transparent and give fans a clear picture of what and what not to expect from upcoming patches.

Stabilizing the servers, which are sometimes ailing due to the mass of players, is one of the high priority items on Saber’s list – additional server capacity is bound to come online and “a bigger patch is planned soon to improve this topic further.”

In the next patch, the developers want to make campaign allies a little less passive, especially in boss fights. They also want to tune them to help with certain objectives in a later update. Planned for the future as well are some tweaks to AI aggression on Veteran difficulty.

General PvE balancing is currently getting looked at, though the developers are still collecting the necessary data to make final decisions on a few things – such as how to buff the Assault class, deal with the Blocking weapon trait, or how to help Bolt Rifles perform better.

Improvements to matchmaking are being planned, so that users will not matchmake with players of the same class anymore. Saber Interactive wants to tackle toxicity as well, rewarding XP to a user based on their actual contributions – at the moment, some groups are kicking players from their party to slot in a friend and let them get all the XP for the match.

“We don't want to make rash decisions before seeing the global picture,” the developers wrote about PvP balancing. “At the moment we are checking the most common topics such as melee balancing, shock grenades, Bulwark & Heavy being too present in capture game modes. Expect some tweaks in the first big content patch but not before.”

Tweaks for balance as well as quality-of-life improvements are on their way. / Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment

Spawn protection is another point on the agenda to prevent PvP matches from devolving into the spawn kill fests everyone – well, besides the spawn killers – detests.

One of the big topics in the community is getting more customization options for Chaos Space Marines – and those will come, but only up to a point. Saber emphasized that lore restrictions, clipping issues, and visual class recognition are all factors preventing the customization from being as deep and varied as that for the Imperium’s Space Marines.

Introducing new classes to the game is something the developers are not outright saying ‘No’ to: “That is definitely something we are heavily discussing.” However, they point out that production costs and time for this are high, so it seems to require some more thought. A similar response has been given to the question of new melee weapons. For these, the finisher animations seem to be the big obstacle.

More colors, some face customization for Space Marines, adding the Pyreblaster into PvE and PvP modes, and custom PvP lobbies are all coming. Thunderhawk customization, on the other hand, is not high on the priority list.

Saber also gave a firm ‘No’ to adding i-frames to gun strikes, introducing a FoV slider, or enabling the camera to swap from looking over the right shoulder to looking over the left shoulder.