Space Marine 2 difficulties are very bad

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

skip to "why are the difficulties made badly" for a quick summary

(for context, i've spent over 3000 hours in Space Marine 1 exterminatus simply because of how good of a synergy of power fantasy and challenge it has. cutting thru constant hordes of xenos with a chainsword while holding a point for 2 minutes straight in solo exterminatus can never get old to me. it makes you feel like a true self-reliant superhuman war machine that can sustain themselves in a prolonged battle, a true space marine. naturally i was extremely excited for Space Marine 2, as i expected something similar.)

why challenge and power fantasy are important for Space Marine game

challenge gives the player deeper game engagement thru making them push themselves into improvement. it's important for many combat-based games, not just Space Marine.

power fantasy simply makes the player feel like a superhuman, which is obviously mandatory for a Space Marine game. without that factor, the immersive experience of being a space marine cannot be achieved.

my expectations

as i 1st started the game, i've been very excited to see difficulty levels, as i trusted Saber Interactive to understand the nature of Space Marine. i've obviously picked lethal difficulty without 2nd thought, as i want as many and as large enemies on screen as possible to maximize power fantasy and challenge.

my experience with Space Marine 2

unfortunately it turned out that i was gravely mistaken.
lethal difficulty certainly didn't fail me with its challenge level, but the problem is that it achieves it not thru throwing more and/or bigger enemies at the player (like Helldivers for example), as i expected it to do, but thru removing power fantasy aspect. it makes your space marine weak and brittle, as it makes it longer to kill the same enemies, while taking more damage from them.
it also doesn't help how Space Marine 2 made space marines seem too weak to operate a chainsword with the same speed as they did in Space Marine 1, despite looking lighter than SM1 chainswords.

Space Marine 2 makes you unable to fully recover thru combat itself. it kills the combat flow that was present in Space Marine 1, which made your space marine feel like a self-reliant war machine, able to sustain themselves in combat thru swordsman's zeal perk (healing from hitting enemies), or quickly and reliably self-healing when successfully dodging enemy attacks with larraman's blessing perk.
unfortunately, in Space Marine 2, if you're not reliant on stimulants (which are unsustainable by being depletable and unobtainable while in constant combat anyway), the health damage you take doesn't heal, making combat flow go down with it. you cannot force the player to be focused on survival and expect them to play offensively, which is required for combat flow. any unhealable damage at the end of the fight makes the player feel like they've lost a won fight.
it also makes each fight unproportionally differing in difficulty due to varying amount of HP and inventory state at the start of the fights.

regarding stimulants, if you make the player reliant on their inventory (or any factor they cannot fully control), it'll make them feel that they are as strong as their inventory is, destroying their self-confidence in the process, which is an important factor for combat flow. (not to mention how it draws player's attention from immersing themselves in the battlefield in favor of making them constantly look for some stupid boxes)
lack of combat sustainability by having such inventory-reliant solutions hurts combat flow, which is about sustained, engaging combat.

lethal difficulty lets you last long while fighting hormagaunts (swarm of basic small tyranids), but it does so by making you feel like you're always on the brink of death (because only the last bit of the healthbar gets healed thru hitting enemies well enough to last in any fight of decent length), which removes power fantasy aspect of doing that.

difficulties above minimal severely lack power fantasy aspect, despite providing more engaging challenge. sure, i can play on minimal difficulty if i want some more power fantasy, but all difficulties below lethal don't have sufficient challenge to make me engaged thru making me push myself into improvement.

injustice to original Space Marine game

experiencing this made me already miss Space Marine 1 despite how i played it 1 day before. the prologue was a blatant jab at Firstborn (and thru which also Space Marine 1), pushing the message that it takes a single tyranid warrior to kill a Firstborn, and that an outstanding Firstborn like Titus (who bested such a powerful traitor Firstborn as Nemeroth despite being worn down by his rubric marines) can be defeated by some carnifex just because he fought a couple of hormagaunts and tyranid warriors beforehand.

these jabs were thrown to show how Primaris lack such inadequacies Firstborn have... inadequacies which were clearly not present in Space Marine 1, and were made up in Space Marine 2. i understand that GW has a need to push Primaris on top of Firstborn, but making up Firstborn inadequacies that didn't exist just to achieve it feels disrespectful, inappropriate, and unnecessary. why not highball Primaris abilities and leave Firstborn as they were instead of downplaying them?

not giving Primaris such a crucial survivability tool as swordsman's zeal perk Firstborn have in Space Marine 1 doesn't exactly feel like highballing Primaris, but rather another tool of retconning Firstborn into being horrible. not to mention how the player is forced to play with Primaris bots (if not having 3 players) which are absolutely useless despite being "so superior to Firstborn", which further pushes Firstborn downplaying narrative. somehow the great superior Primaris have to spend so much time to kill a hormagaunt (because of how adequately weak their anemic strikes are), and somehow guardsmen (literally NORMAL humans) constantly win in close combat with them with their "dive back and shoot" animation, further jabbing at Firstborn thru Primaris performance. the game's campaign also pushes the message that Primaris instantly die from an explosion that's too weak to tear them apart or even lift them off the ground. you can even notice dead Primaris marine (or once even 2) without a single tyranid corpse laying around. it's like the game says "sure, Primaris are quite weak... but at least they are stronger than FIRSTBORN HAHAHA AM I RIGHT?".

what feels like yet another jab at Firstborn is how Thousand Sons (chaos marines) are so immensely weak in comparison to tyranids and daemons. it seems like Saber Interactive is pushing the message that 3 Primaris marines can take on dozens of Fistborn... especially considering how weak Thousand Sons sorcerers are to them, which supposed to be the most powerful of all sorcerers.

(i made a separate thread about the specific point above here)

why are the difficulties made badly

because of how Space Marine 2 increases the challenge by making the player's space marine weaker, instead of throwing more and/or bigger enemies at them, these difficulties force the player to choose either challenge or power fantasy instead of letting them have the best of both worlds.

i understand that it's easier to simply change the health and damage values to make difficulties in comparison to duplicating enemies and/or changing enemy variant spawn proportions, but it shouldn't be an issue for a game of such budget. more enemies make the game more hardware demanding, but you can turn them into bigger ones instead if that's the problem.

if Saber Interactive really wants this specific way of making difficulty for some reason, then they could at least make custom difficulty with customizable values (health, damage, enemy numbers, large enemy spawn likelihood, enemy aggression, down amount for mortal wound, respawn timer etc.)

solution

please vote for my 5 carefully crafted game update ideas if you want the gameplay to be fixed:

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and this[community.focus-entmt.com]


praise the Emperor

[Badman]

The entire game is designed for co-op, regardless of difficulty. (except easy mode)

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Cheyenesku:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Brother Phobos:

if you haven't read, i'm not speaking of challenge level itself, but HOW it is achieved

No, Veteran is perfecly lore accurate when it comes to how deadly are Nids. More so they are less deadly than in tabletop.
Angels of Death is for coop only and is like Veteran then because you have actually smart people there instead of AI than only deal with objectives if they are close to them.
AI, my brother, is the real problem of difficulties.
And you just wait till you get to tier 3 of operations with recommended lvl 10. Oh boy :D

i understand that it'd serve your (and a plague of people like yourself in the community) goal of discrediting Astartes for anything in this game to be perceived as lore accurate, but do you really believe that you can remove Astartes from being the main faction with such a form of activism? spending your life to find any instance of Astartes lore being discredited and repeating it endlessly?

[Cheyenesku]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Brother Phobos:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Cheyenesku:

No, Veteran is perfecly lore accurate when it comes to how deadly are Nids. More so they are less deadly than in tabletop.
Angels of Death is for coop only and is like Veteran then because you have actually smart people there instead of AI than only deal with objectives if they are close to them.
AI, my brother, is the real problem of difficulties.
And you just wait till you get to tier 3 of operations with recommended lvl 10. Oh boy :D

i understand that it'd serve your (and a plague of people like yourself in the community) goal of discrediting Astartes for anything in this game to be perceived as lore accurate, but do you really believe that you can remove Astartes from being the main faction with such a form of activism?

What are you on about? I main Dark Angels in tabletop. They are not even the main faction - Imperium is and its just storywise. Besided Space Marines in general are not posterboys, Smerfs are.

[Free Luigi M.]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Brother Phobos:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Cheyenesku:

No, Veteran is perfecly lore accurate when it comes to how deadly are Nids. More so they are less deadly than in tabletop.
Angels of Death is for coop only and is like Veteran then because you have actually smart people there instead of AI than only deal with objectives if they are close to them.
AI, my brother, is the real problem of difficulties.
And you just wait till you get to tier 3 of operations with recommended lvl 10. Oh boy :D

i understand that it'd serve your (and a plague of people like yourself in the community) goal of discrediting Astartes for anything in this game to be perceived as lore accurate, but do you really believe that you can remove Astartes from being the main faction with such a form of activism?

Another wannabe expert that has no idea what they are talking about.
Even at the hardest difficulty, space marines are overtuned in this game.
A Tyranid warrior is already dangerous for a marine. 2/3 at the same time will very likely kill him. Let alone soloing a Carnifex.

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Cheyenesku:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Brother Phobos:

i understand that it'd serve your (and a plague of people like yourself in the community) goal of discrediting Astartes for anything in this game to be perceived as lore accurate, but do you really believe that you can remove Astartes from being the main faction with such a form of activism?

What are you on about? I main Dark Angels in tabletop. They are not even the main faction - Imperium is and its just storywise. Besided Space Marines in general are not posterboys, Smerfs are.

interesting, considering how what you say fits pretty neatly with a Warhammer community member stereotype which would imply otherwise

[Cheyenesku]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Badman:

The entire game is designed for co-op, regardless of difficulty. (except easy mode)

Veteran is fine with AI, all three problematic segments (antennas, two generators with rippers and reactor core) are perfectly doable when you find the way:
- antennas: bolt rifle with grenade launcher, staying on the move after dealing with each antenna and trying to keep AI near objective (they can deal with them then)
- generators: flamethrower for rippers and plasma pistol for those flying a-holes
- reactor core second wave: 2 krak grenades picked up where those flyin a-holes are coming from, one grenade each, second wave done in 20 seconds (plasma rifle for first wave)
Rest of the campaign is perfectly fine.

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Joe Chip:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Brother Phobos:

i understand that it'd serve your (and a plague of people like yourself in the community) goal of discrediting Astartes for anything in this game to be perceived as lore accurate, but do you really believe that you can remove Astartes from being the main faction with such a form of activism?

Another wannabe expert that has no idea what they are talking about.
Even at the hardest difficulty, space marines are overtuned in this game.
A Tyranid warrior is already dangerous for a marine. 2/3 at the same time will very likely kill him. Let alone soloing a Carnifex.

another salty vermin religiously bringing up Astartes lore discreditations, attempting to discredit anyone who's not sharing their agenda. Astartes will stay the main faction of Warhammer no matter what you do.

[KyLe <endure>]

tl/dr you are awful and cant cope

[MacSquiggy]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Brother Phobos:

skip to "why are the difficulties made badly" for a quick summary

(for context, i've spent over 3000 hours in Space Marine 1 exterminatus simply because of how good of a synergy of power fantasy and challenge it has. cutting thru constant hordes of xenos with a chainsword while holding a point for 2 minutes straight in solo exterminatus can never get old to me. it makes you feel like a true self-reliant superhuman war machine that can sustain themselves in a prolonged battle, a true space marine. naturally i was extremely excited for Space Marine 2, as i expected something similar.)

why challenge and power fantasy are important for Space Marine game

challenge gives the player deeper game engagement thru making them push themselves into improvement. it's important for many combat-based games, not just Space Marine.

power fantasy simply makes the player feel like a superhuman, which is obviously mandatory for a Space Marine game. without that factor, the immersive experience of being a space marine cannot be achieved.

my expectations

as i 1st started the game, i've been very excited to see difficulty levels, as i trusted Saber Interactive to understand the nature of Space Marine. i've obviously picked angel of death difficulty without 2nd thought, as i want as many and as large enemies on screen as possible to maximize power fantasy and challenge.

my experience with Space Marine 2

unfortunately it turned out that i was gravely mistaken.
angel of death difficulty certainly didn't fail me with its challenge level, but the problem is that it achieves it not thru throwing more and/or bigger enemies at the player (like Helldivers for example), as i expected it to do, but thru removing power fantasy aspect. it makes your space marine weak and brittle, as it makes it longer to kill the same enemies, while taking more damage from them.
it also doesn't help how Space Marine 2 made space marines seem too weak to operate a chainsword with the same speed as they did in Space Marine 1, despite looking lighter than sm1 chainswords.

Space Marine 2 makes you unable to fully recover thru combat itself. it kills the combat flow that was present in Space Marine 1, which made your space marine feel like a self-reliant war machine, able to sustain themselves in combat thru swordsman's zeal perk (healing from hitting enemies), or quickly and reliably self-healing when successfully dodging enemy attacks with larraman's blessing perk.
unfortunately, in Space Marine 2, if you're not reliant on stimulants (which are unsustainable by being depletable and unobtainable while in constant combat anyway), the health damage you take doesn't heal, making combat flow go down with it. you cannot force the player to be focused on survival and expect them to play offensively, which is required for combat flow. any unhealable damage at the end of the fight makes the player feel like they've lost a won fight.
it also makes each fight unproportionally differing in difficulty due to varying amount of HP and inventory state at the start of the fights.

regarding stimulants, if you make the player reliant on their inventory (or any factor they cannot fully control), it'll make them feel that they are as strong as their inventory is, destroying their self-confidence in the process, which is an important factor for combat flow. (not to mention how it draws player's attention from immersing themselves in the battlefield in favor of making them constantly look for some stupid boxes)
lack of combat sustainability by having such inventory-reliant solutions hurts combat flow, which is about sustained, engaging combat.

angel of death difficulty lets you last long while fighting hormagaunts (swarm of basic small tyranids), but it does so by making you feel like you're always on the brink of death (because only the last bit of the healthbar gets healed thru hitting enemies well enough to last in any fight of decent length), which removes power fantasy aspect of doing that.

sure, i can play on lower difficulty if i want more power fantasy, but all difficulties below angel of death don't have sufficient challenge to make me engaged thru making me push myself into improvement.
easy difficulty literally makes tyranids run away from you so you have to chase them around...

injustice to original Space Marine game

experiencing this made me already miss Space Marine 1 despite how i played it 1 day before. the prologue was a blatant jab at Firstborn (and thru which also Space Marine 1), pushing the message that it takes a single tyranid to kill a Firstborn, and that an outstanding Firstborn like Titus (who bested such a powerful traitor Firstborn as Nemeroth despite being worn down by his rubric marines) can be defeated by some carnifex just because he fought a couple of hormagaunts and tyranid warriors beforehand.

these jabs were thrown to show how Primaris lack such inadequacies Firstborn have... inadequacies which were clearly not present in Space Marine 1, and were made up in Space Marine 2. i understand that GW has a need to push Primaris on top of Firstborn, but making up Firstborn inadequacies that didn't exist just to achieve it feels disrespectful, inappropriate, and unnecessary. why not highball Primaris abilities and leave Firstborn as they were instead of downplaying them?

not giving Primaris such a crucial survivability tool as swordsman's zeal perk Firstborn have in Space Marine 1 doesn't exactly feel like highballing Primaris, but rather another tool of retconning Firstborn into being horrible. not to mention how the player is forced to play with 2 Primaris bots which are absolutely useless despite being "so superior to Firstborn", which further pushes Firstborn downplaying narrative. somehow the great superior Primaris have to spend so much time to kill a hormagaunt (because of how adequately weak their anemic strikes are), and somehow guardsmen (literally NORMAL humans) constantly win in close combat with them with their "dive back and shoot" animation, further jabbing at Firstborn thru Primaris performance. it's like the game says "sure, Primaris are quite weak... but at least they are stronger than FIRSTBORN HAHAHA AM I RIGHT?".

what feels like yet another jab at Firstborn is how Thousand Sons (chaos marines) are so immensely weak in comparison to tyranids and daemons. it seems like Saber Interactive is pushing the message that 3 Primaris marines can take on dozens of Fistborn...

why are the difficulties made badly

because of how Space Marine 2 increases the challenge by making the player's space marine weaker, instead of throwing more and/or bigger enemies at them, these difficulties force the player to choose either challenge or power fantasy instead of letting them have the best of both worlds.

i understand that it's easier to simply change the health and damage values to make difficulties in comparison to duplicating enemies and/or making different enemy variant spawn proportions, but it shouldn't be an issue for a game of such budget. more enemies make the game more hardware demanding, but you can turn them into bigger ones instead if that's the problem.

if Saber Interactive really wants this specific way of making difficulty for some reason, then they could at least make custom difficulty with customizable values (health, damage, enemy numbers, enemy aggression, etc.)


praise the Emperor :Die:

Level up and you'd be surprised at how much easier the game can get. Executions should restore a small amount of health.

[Kozak]

I'm going to preface by saying I beat the game in it's entirety on Angel Of Death with 1 other person and 1 ai on my team. There is no achievement or point in playing this difficulty unless you just want to slog through the game instead of feeling like a main character in a video game, I 100% recommend everyone play through the game on normal regardless of what Veteran says in it's description.

Operations is where the difficulties show their true colors, playing difficulty 3 and up is borderline unfun. Not to beat a dead horse because a lot of these points were already made in this thread but something has to change in the way they approach "difficulty" in operations otherwise I see a lot of the player base outright quitting the game due to not being able to unlock any purple/gold armory data since it requires a good amount of luck with your spawns to get through a level. Don't even get me started on lvl 3-4 difficulty levels with chaos. Something has to change otherwise I don't see this game surviving to seasons 3 if everything stays the way it is.

[Free Luigi M.]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Brother Phobos:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Joe Chip:

Another wannabe expert that has no idea what they are talking about.
Even at the hardest difficulty, space marines are overtuned in this game.
A Tyranid warrior is already dangerous for a marine. 2/3 at the same time will very likely kill him. Let alone soloing a Carnifex.

another salty vermin religiously bringing up Astartes lore discreditations, attempting to discredit anyone who's not sharing their agenda. Astartes will stay the main faction of Warhammer no matter what you do.

Lmao please give it a rest. Your trolling sucks. Come back when you have better material and you have solved your small-penis complex.

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Joe Chip:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Brother Phobos:

another salty vermin religiously bringing up Astartes lore discreditations, attempting to discredit anyone who's not sharing their agenda. Astartes will stay the main faction of Warhammer no matter what you do.

Lmao please give it a rest. Your trolling sucks. Come back when you have better material and you have solved your small-penis complex.

listen here you Warhammer community polluting activist. how about you go pollute a different place where people don't see right thru your motives? you are not achieving anything for your agenda here.

[valium]

My only real complaint is how easy it is to interrupt you, forcing you into a more Dark Souls dodge rolling flow rather than an Arkham game block and bash. The perfect parry system felt bad on Veteran in comparison to the dodge-roll and follow up shot, because multiple things will hit you at the same time interrupting you parrying the intended enemy.

Also why Vanguard is baller while Bulwark feels bad.

[Al Thapir]

I totally agree with you: you don't feel powerful and imposing, your ranged weapons deals no damage and your health deploys to quickly.

I don't know who though the contested health was a good idea, but it wasn't. SM1 had a great system going on... don't try to reinvent the weel.

Want to increase difficulty? Give us more bosses, pair the warriors with a tyrant every few "waves" of enemies, give elites and bosses several patters with AoEs, unblockable attacks, etc.

And PLEASE, revamp the "warning" system. The blue and red "circles" distract more than help, because the timing of each attack is way different from one enemy to another. Either you pop the circle the instant before you are suppoused to parry/dodge or don't use those visual clues at all... again, trying to reinvent the weel went south...

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Cheyenesku:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Brother Barry:

A million times this. I completely understand locking you in on a heavy attack, but any kind of attack? Infuriating.

Dodge cancelling is one of the most stupid gameplay mechanics ever. You comit to an attack - deal with it.

what's so good about forcing the player to "commit" to an attack? is it so they can be punished for not knowing that some unlikely thing will happen in the near future?