Players defending the Imperium for the Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 achievements can now play Operations in single-player or with friends in private lobbies. Space Marine 2’s Patch 3.0 has rolled out on Xbox, adding a host of improvements suggested by players in a recent Space Marine 2 Q+A.As revealed in the patch notes on Steam, Space Marine 2 players can now hop into private matches for Operations, which was previously strictly matchmaking-only. Additionally, a new Sparring Arena can be accessed from the Battle Barge’s Launch Bay, offering you and your pals the ability to fight each other between Operations and Eternal War matches.
As for single-player, or co-op with bots, Saber Interactive has made some tweaks to the AI bots, which will now execute enemies more quickly, attack airborne enemies like the Zoanthropes, and generally become more helpful during missions. With improvements to Veteran difficulty too, which should be a little easier now — although your health will be slightly decreased — tackling the difficulty on your own should be a far better experience. In our Space Marine 2 review, we shared that it was disappointing that Veteran mode was so tough, as the game states that it was designed to be played on that difficulty, so these changes are very welcome indeed.
You can see the full patch notes below.
Space Marine 2 Patch 3.0 patch notes
New features
- The Hub Sparring Arena, a new special arena on the Battlebarge available in Operations & Eternal War Game mode where players can compete in friendly PvP with the players in their squad.
- Ultrawide support for PC
- Private mode for Operation mode that gives players ability to play operation alone with bots or alongside one friend without being matchmaked with random players during the mission.
- Added What’s New & Message of the Day
- Added option to reset custom colour presets
Gameplay and balancing tweaks
The marking tool has been updated:
- Improved responsiveness and comfort of Social Wheel control with a mouse
- Disabled unnecessary objects that do not require highlighting and worked poorly with it
- Several minor bug fixes
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
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, 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
- 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:
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
- 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
Space Marine 2 has been a hit with fans, and the game’s success could lead to Saber Interactive developing a story expansion or even a sequel.