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 Firstborn... especially considering how weak Thousand Sons sorcerers are to them, which supposed to be the most powerful of all sorcerers.

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 (this, this, this, this, and this) if you want the gameplay to be fixed.


praise the Emperor💀

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Sobriqeut wrote:

I really hope that this is seen by Saber. More enemies is always the way to go, it's pretty depressing to be on Ruthless difficulty for Operations and having the stupid blue shield bastards eating 10+ relic bolt pistol shots or 5 or more headshots with the same weapon. 

you can contribute to making them consider fixing the issues i've listed here by voting for my 5 game update ideas (this, this, this, this, and this)
(connect your steam account to have more points to vote with)

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MrsHeadshott wrote:

I disagree. Warriors are MEQs. They're just as good at killing as Space Marines with arguably more experience, because they exist inside the Hive Mind. They're not supposed to be easy. Skilled enemies in Great number, that's the point.

I know you talked about hordes with not increased damage just volume of enemies being the was to go, but I disagree. The game feels good with every enemy requiring effort. 

I know weapons will get tuned as it goes, and analytics tells them what's under performing etc. But Combat is a good flow, I like the fight of it, it was an intentional flow.

they definitely supposed to be way easier than they are on average and above