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:

this[community.focus-entmt.com]
this[community.focus-entmt.com]
this[community.focus-entmt.com]
this[community.focus-entmt.com]
and this[community.focus-entmt.com]


praise the Emperor

[Disorganic]

Originally posted by Metal Izanagi:

Yeah I'm pretty sure the main thing is that Veteran/Angel of Death are designed for co-op and not solo play. The squad AI can't handle even hormagaunts at any level above Normal.

Squad AI can barely handle terrain. mine get stuck on things and I have to run away from them to unstick and chase me. squad AI is worse than darktide, hell the bots are worse than Unreal Tournament bots from 20 years ago.

the 'emperors finest' stumbling around the battlefield like they have a concussion, its embarassing. having titus yell 'cover me' as I grab the generator wheels on the satellite dish mission only to watch them wander off as I get swarmed was peak comedy.

Originally posted by Vanta:

I honestly highly agree.

Guns feel incredibly anemic, with pitiful damage against anything bigger than a cultist or Hormagaunt. This makes half the arsenal feel pointless.

half the arsenal is pointless. bolt gun, stalker bolt gun, thicc bolt gun, skinny bolt gun... none of them feel significantly different from each other. they should ripshit through hormagaunts and they just... dont. add on the inconsistent hitreg and the fact that enemy shots clip through terrain and objects and the whole thing starts to feel silly.

Originally posted by Vanta:

I don't feel like a badass space marine because i'm having to play too conservatively and i feel forced to plink away with a bolter that does way too little damage in most combat situations because if I go in with melee, even with a well calculated amount of executions and quick shots I feel too squishy and all it takes is ONE stunlock to utterly delete half of your HP. The punishment for failing a parry or dodge is frankly INSANE.

If I wanted to play a glass cannon that cant melee powerful enemies I can go psyker in Darktide. SM2 feels silly because not only am In glass, Im also not a cannon. Feels like the devs did all their final pass playthrough testing with experienced players / other devs and all the weapons unlocked.

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

Originally posted by Vanta:

I honestly highly agree.

Guns feel incredibly anemic, with pitiful damage against anything bigger than a cultist or Hormagaunt. This makes half the arsenal feel pointless.

Why use the standard Bolt Rifle? Why use the Bolt Carbine?

I know it's supposed to force you into melee combat, but legitimately, what the hell is the point of half the arsenal?

The melee focus was cool at first, but then I realized very quickly it feels horrendously balanced. The Power Sword and Thunder Hammer kinda suck because they don't give you executes or quick shots as much as the Chainsword and combat knife

Enemies can stunlock you
Ranged enemies can do incredible amounts of chip damage, and sometimes chunk your health instantly meanwhile, your bolt rifle will dump a mag and a half or even more just to kill them.

I feel like focusing entirely on melee was stupid and brings the game too close to the whole Batman Arkham combat feeling that's gotten so boring in recent years.

A stalker bolt rifle should kill a Warrior in a very small amount of headshots. Hell. Any bolter should be able to do more damage than they do.

The whole non-regenerating health I'd almost be fine with if health items weren't so damn rare and if there were alternative methods of healing than Righteous Fury and stims.

Even the melee combat feels too dang risky, as the recovery of lost health in melee barely helps, stims are too rare and there's no health regeneration on executions. Only armor which you don't get a whole lot of.

The whole games design feels like it was built with co-op in mind aswell. Everything feels ridiculously overwhelming, several encounters are clearly built with competent co-op teammates assisting as opposed to the frankly disgraceful AI teammates (Such as the satellite realignment on the orbital defense gun mission)




I don't feel like a badass space marine because i'm having to play too conservatively and i feel forced to plink away with a bolter that does way too little damage in most combat situations because if I go in with melee, even with a well calculated amount of executions and quick shots I feel too squishy and all it takes is ONE stunlock to utterly delete half of your HP. The punishment for failing a parry or dodge is frankly INSANE.

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.
lack of combat sustainability of inventory-reliant solutions hurts combat flow, which is about sustained, engaging combat.

adaptation of arkham knight mechanics not only makes the fight prettier (because of how many parries are now involved), but also increases the combat flow thru intuitiveness of indicators.

the problem is that it doesn't work as well because of 3 factors:

- arkham knight lets the player attack from greater distance, making the player constantly engaged in combat and not have to watch their character punch the air like an idiot. it serves combat flow and combat aesthetics extremely well, but Space Marine 2 doesn't have it despite of how well it'd suit superhumans space marines supposed to be.

- unfortunately Space Marine 2's attacks without indicators are also quite dangerous comparatively, making the player have to memorize enemy attack animations while reacting to 2 types of indicators, which kills the intuitiveness, and thru it, combat flow itself.

- indicator attacks can hit multiple players despite only one of them being able to see it (in melee situation when they stand next to each other)

[Maou]

Originally posted by NightLexic:

I will say once thing veteran and angel of death are more tuned towards the 3 player co-op experience. It's of course gonna feel a ton harder solo

I think so too, but they should say that it is the intended difficulty when selecting it.

[Funpire]

Originally posted by 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 mix 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 enemies on the 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, 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, and your combat flow goes down with it.

if you make the player reliant on their inventory (such as combat stims), it'll make them as strong as their inventory, destroying their self-confidence in the process.
lack of combat sustainability of 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...

side rant:
experiencing this made me already miss Space Marine 1 despite how i played it 1 day before. perhaps it's beside the point, but the prologue was a blatant jab at Firstborn (and thru which also Space Marine 1, it felt like), 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.
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.

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:

I'm really liking this, "allow people to play early thing". The rest of us can get some solid buy or pass feedback while the game goes through live beta.

[TeryonTheHuman]

As it stands i think the game either needs to up the medkit spawn rates or introduce a medic class. Right now, as much as I want some of the higher tier weapon skins I’m sticking to average because the health drought is just making me lose my damn mind. Since you can often times gunshot execute something instead of melee executing it, why not just have one the melee recover armor and the gunshot recover health or vise versa.

Melee executions saved my ass hella in space marine 1 it was fine the way it was.


It also doesnt help that theres often times only one to two medkits at a resupply adding to the rarity so if you entire squad is hurting it can feel like you’re about to waste your time even trying to continue.

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

Originally posted by TeryonTheHuman:

As it stands i think the game either needs to up the medkit spawn rates or introduce a medic class. Right now, as much as I want some of the higher tier weapon skins I’m sticking to average because the health drought is just making me lose my damn mind. Since you can often times gunshot execute something instead of melee executing it, why not just have one the melee recover armor and the gunshot recover health or vise versa.

Melee executions saved my ass hella in space marine 1 it was fine the way it was.


It also doesnt help that theres often times only one to two medkits at a resupply adding to the rarity so if you entire squad is hurting it can feel like you’re about to waste your time even trying to continue.

but if you make the player reliant on stimulants by introducing more of them (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 the battlefield in favor of making them constantly look for some stupid boxes)
lack of combat sustainability of inventory-reliant solutions hurts combat flow, which is about sustained, engaging combat.

and besides, why not let the player use whichever execution they like? gunshot executions feel out of character for space marines, which supposed to save their ammunition instead of using it willy-nilly.

[80sMacTonight]

i completely agree with this take. the game makes you indeed feels like a glass wimp noodle and not a glass cannon or anything strong at all.

this is my review of the game atm

im making a negative review because IMO the game feels too clunky in combat. it just feels off and not correct, it feels like the game is always working against you.
=this is from a player that has played; Chivalry 1 and 2, mordhau, vermintide, darktide and all the souls games with significant hours (4-5K Hours)

1. you aim downsight --> you cant parry or dodge
2. mid combat you are rolling or parrying way to much. sometimes the enemies attack so often im just stuck in a parry loop.
3. the roll catch is insane. i dodge an attack and i still get hit by something else.
4. the gunner enemies have too much HP.
5. ult activation doesn't work normal with assault class. sometimes it decides to just dash instat of fly
6. some attacks have indicators for parry or dodge, but a lot of other attacks dont have it. like come on ( either only have an indicator for unparryable attacks or all of them)
7. gun executions feel awful. because most of the time your armour you get back is instantly gone anyway because you can still get hit in the animation.
8. the space marines feel like wet nudles because you need to hit the common elites way too many times (guns and melee) this just makes you feel weak AF.
9. the space marines also just feel really really slow
10. the grind to the end game easily takes 30 hours per class. this would be fine with 3 or 4 classes, but there are 6 of them
11. the weapon upgrades are locked behind armoury upgrades that you can only get in the higher difficulties (not every player can be good enough for that, why is this a thing?)
12. enemies can stunlock you...... why is this a thing?
13. headshots feel like ass, moslty again because the enemies have wayyyy too much hp (it took 200+ bullets of my heavy gunner to kill a Zoanthrope) like thats half of the ammo you can carry

these are just the things i can think off, of the top of my head.
i know you are supposed to get hit in this game and recover your HP but a couple of wrong moves and i feel like you are heavily punished even on the lowest difficulty.

[Hunk]

Originally posted by 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 mix 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 enemies on the 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, 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. any unhealable damage at the end of the fight makes the player feel like they've lost a won fight.

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 the battlefield in favor of making them constantly look for some stupid boxes)
lack of combat sustainability of 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...

side rant:
experiencing this made me already miss Space Marine 1 despite how i played it 1 day before. perhaps it's beside the point, but the prologue was a blatant jab at Firstborn (and thru which also Space Marine 1, it felt like), 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.
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.

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:

3000 saat mi ? at yalanını sikeyim inananı 3000 saat ne olum ? ya yalan söylüyorsun ki büyük olası gizlemişsin oyun detaylarını şüpheyi dahada arttıran bi unsur yada asosyal ruh hastasının önde gidenisin olum git evlen yuva kur düzenini kur dışarı çık az çayır çimene dokun hayatı yaşa benim rekorum favori oyunum ile 800 saat oda taaa 2015 senesinden beri ara sıra gir çık yaparak oldu (tüm oyun serisinin toplamı) 125 gün aralıksız oynayıp keyif almak imkansız bayar lan adamı nasıl bi piskopatsın amk

[Kozak]

Originally posted by Born2Dive:

If you're going to write an essay, at least run it through a spelling and grammar check before posting.

Thanks for adding literally nothing to the conversation, you must be fun at parties

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

Originally posted by Hunk:

Originally posted by 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 mix 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 enemies on the 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, 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. any unhealable damage at the end of the fight makes the player feel like they've lost a won fight.

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 the battlefield in favor of making them constantly look for some stupid boxes)
lack of combat sustainability of 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...

side rant:
experiencing this made me already miss Space Marine 1 despite how i played it 1 day before. perhaps it's beside the point, but the prologue was a blatant jab at Firstborn (and thru which also Space Marine 1, it felt like), 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.
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.

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

3000 saat mi ? at yalanını sikeyim inananı 3000 saat ne olum ? ya yalan söylüyorsun ki büyük olası gizlemişsin oyun detaylarını şüpheyi dahada arttıran bi unsur yada asosyal ruh hastasının önde gidenisin olum git evlen yuva kur düzenini kur dışarı çık az çayır çimene dokun hayatı yaşa benim rekorum favori oyunum ile 800 saat oda taaa 2015 senesinden beri ara sıra gir çık yaparak oldu (tüm oyun serisinin toplamı) 125 gün aralıksız oynayıp keyif almak imkansız bayar lan adamı nasıl bi piskopatsın amk

the way how you hide behind some exotic language to taunt me proves even further how superior i am to you, vermin. it is only what I choose to do that's important, because only MY priorities are important. you really thought you're speaking to your equal? go back to serving priorities chosen for you by someone else, slave, because you are clearly bred to SERVE those who are better than you, not have agency to speak while not spoken to by them, let alone taunt them.

[BROTHER PHOBOS]

Originally posted by Kozak:

Originally posted by Born2Dive:

If you're going to write an essay, at least run it through a spelling and grammar check before posting.

Thanks for adding literally nothing to the conversation, you must be fun at parties

he's just one of these "people" who are butthurt about writing aesthetics

[Misery1ndex]

Difficulties are a odd thing with certain games, especially where you play as an unstoppable juggernaut who's supposed to be able to take tremendous amounts of punishment, which in turn would make the game feel too easy, but turn that around and you die in 1 hit which definitely ISNT a space marine

Though Angel of Death difficulty wasnt stupid hard, its doable solo and im not that great at shooters, there was a couple sections that took a dozen or so deaths.

Atleast its not as bad as DOOM/DOOM Eternal where the hardest difficulty turns the doomslayer into a wet piece of paper, 1 hit from an imp fireball and you're practically dead.

I'm not entirely sure how the dev's could've made the game hard and fun at the same time, but not make you feel like a fake space marine wearing armor out of cardboard. Probably for me the biggest gripe is healing, theres so few medicae stimms, and they heal only 1 block segment of health, And if you got no grey health and no medicae stimms, the only other way is to wait for your ability. I recall liking the healing mechanic better in the first game.

[Moon Rabbit]

This game is difficult for all the wrong reasons. It's just poorly designed. Too much emphasis is put on actions that should be optional like finishers and perfect parries. Your health shouldn't rely entirely on them and for ♥♥♥♥♥'s sake the marine feels like weakling. And the game lies to you about healing during the intro mission. WTF?

FOV is too low, attacks are too clunky to deal with swarms let alone swarms and elites. Not enough reliable AOE for melee. I hold the button down and it could do two different things push back or AOE and they never seem to be what I need at the time.

[Hunk]

Originally posted by Brother Phobos:

Originally posted by Hunk:

3000 saat mi ? at yalanını sikeyim inananı 3000 saat ne olum ? ya yalan söylüyorsun ki büyük olası gizlemişsin oyun detaylarını şüpheyi dahada arttıran bi unsur yada asosyal ruh hastasının önde gidenisin olum git evlen yuva kur düzenini kur dışarı çık az çayır çimene dokun hayatı yaşa benim rekorum favori oyunum ile 800 saat oda taaa 2015 senesinden beri ara sıra gir çık yaparak oldu (tüm oyun serisinin toplamı) 125 gün aralıksız oynayıp keyif almak imkansız bayar lan adamı nasıl bi piskopatsın amk

the way how you hide behind some exotic language to taunt me proves even further how superior i am to you, vermin. it is only what I choose to do that's important, because only MY priorities are important. you really thought you're speaking to your equal? go back to serving priorities chosen for you by someone else, slave, because you are clearly bred to SERVE those who are better than you, not have agency to speak while not spoken to by them, let alone taunt them.

bırak palavraları aq türk değilsen niye eti popkek türk olan bi meme kullaniyorsun bu ara yaptığın rp harbi cringe git bi doktora görün

[Sailor Gloom]

I agree as well, my main gripe was the enemies that shoot at you do it from across the map and just blend into the background visual noise. So I'm constantly taking chip damage and to avoid that have to play in a really boring way of corner peaking and taking them out methodically. I was getting through it, it just wasnt very fun.
Also the audio mix sucks and lacks punch and intensity