Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is looking like one of the most exciting action games coming out this year. Ahead of its September 9 launch, 13 years after the first installment came out, Focus Entertainment and Saber Interactive have unveiled all the multiplayer options that are part of the surprisingly meaty package, and we’ve had a chance to sit down and chat with creative director Oliver Hollis-Leick about it all.
After the original third-person shooter with hack-n-slash elements from Relic Entertainment, Saber is bringing to the project some extensive experience with renowned IPs such as World War Z and Evil Dead. On top of that, Hollis-Leick, whose resume is also filled with major Saber projects, is a famous figure in the cutting-edge realm of motion capture. This adds to his overall vision a special touch we briefly discussed too.
First of all, and after watching the just-released multiplayer trailer for Space Marine 2, I was wondering whether he and his team had looked at some classics from the PS3/360 era, such as Uncharted 2, which launched from the get-go filled with multiplayer-based content that was clearly assembled mostly out of assets already made for the campaign instead of betting on ‘seasonal drops’ and live-service updates that ‘completed’ the games or grew them over a long time post-launch.
“There’s just this recognition that people are tired of that kind of like, you know, you pay for something and you get 75% of it and then you have to sort of pay for the extra later. It’s like we wanted to release a full game with all of the modes that people would expect and, you know, we’ve created all these great toys, and it was a case of like, let’s find as many ways to play with them as possible,” Hollis-Leick admits. While they’ve got nothing official to share regarding content after the game has launched, they’re not ruling it out either. But the plan is to come out swinging in an old-fashioned way, it seems.
Looking at the surprising reveal of a 6v6 player-versus-player mode, which most fans will surely be excited about, we at GameWatcher also wondered if the team had ever considered going bigger and doubling down on the large-scale battlefields that we’ve seen in the campaign footage released so far. The creative director makes a compelling argument about why that could’ve potentially been a waste of time and resources:
“We’d invested so much in all this swarm technology with the Tyranids and everything, and we have a lot of assets… So we could have gone with a large battlefield, but… players naturally zone in on the kind of vendetta aspect of it, of just finding the other player and taking them out. I think over time we just decided to maximize that aspect of things… It would be tempting to add in all the rest of the decoration, but I think it would end up being missed anyway.” Also, if you’re wondering about the potential longevity of the game past the first few weeks, you’ll be happy to hear straight from the publisher that crossplay will be available between all platforms.
Space Marine 2 also seems to have a strong customization component tied to character progression both in co-op operations and PvP modes. The look at that part of the MP side of the game is brief in the trailer, so I asked about whether we’re getting an ‘army painter’ sort of approach to it or a simpler version of applying skins and new bits of armor and such.
Hollis-Leick points out it’s a bit tricky due to the potential of “people abusing the system and doing all kinds of crazy things,” but it sounds like we’re getting a decent number of options regardless: “We approached it as in, if this were the tabletop and we were miniature collectors… what would we want to be able to do with this? We want to paint them the way we want to paint them. We want to put the decals and the accessories in the right place. We want to be able to choose how we position things on the body… So we were trying to bring that feeling to the customization in the game as well.”
Of course, the matter of customization and giving players the option to come up with their own designs also leads to the question of how much freedom the IP owner, in this case Games Workshop, is willing to give to its partners. Hollis-Leick doesn’t shy away from straight-up confirming things are strict when it comes to what can and cannot be done with Warhammer 40K:
“Games Workshop are very strict about what appears in their universe and how that’s portrayed… We can’t invent things. It just doesn’t work that way.” Most of the process, according to him, is about ‘digging’ and figuring out with them what can be put inside the game “down to the most minute detail.” It’s not uncommon to see new Star Wars games letting their creatives go wild in collaboration with Lucasfilm’s Story Group, but it seems that Games Workshop is much more selective about who puts what into the 40K canon.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in our conversation was learning about how they’re tying the co-op operations, which can be played with up to two other players, to the narrative of the main campaign:
“As you move through the story, Titus will come up against challenges that he just cannot achieve on his own with his two squad mates, and so he’s given command of smaller teams, and he can send them off to do these other objectives. But they’re not just like ‘fire and forget.’ He remains in radio contact with them throughout those missions, and so in the story campaign you’ll hear these box conversations between Titus and the team. And then you’ll go around the other side as you play that mission as those other team members and hear the same conversations from the other side.”
The main idea behind the operations, which add even more co-op content to the game, is to offer “multiple perspectives of the same war,” and they won’t be separated from the main experience, instead adding to it.
“Once you’ve completed the story campaign, the PvE missions continue to evolve and change with mixtures of different enemy types and different objectives,” he adds without going into further details.
About the delay from ‘winter 2023’ to September 9, 2024, a date that seems to be sticking for now, Hollis-Leick had the following to say: “I should tell you: It was not easy to get that extension… These things fall into financial years, and people want them to come out on time, but our game director [Dima] was adamant that he wanted to release this game in a finished state, so we worked hard on it. It was great to see the fans’ reaction to that. They are grateful that we were going to take the extra time.” He also adds that internal testing is ramping up, with a lot of work going into not just polishing, but also “fine-tuning everything” ahead of September.
As mentioned before, Hollis-Leick has a long resume as a mo-cap actor and writer, so I was curious about how that informed his role as creative director on Space Marine 2 (and Jurassic Park: Survival) and affected the project as a whole.
“One of my strengths really, based on my background, is story and character. I spent many years studying story and character, and I’ve been writing games for 12 years now… I could really make sure that the story was as good as it could be, but also motion capture is very much about physicality… Space Marines are nine-foot-tall juggernauts, and so I was able to think of it from that perspective of ‘How do they move? How can we get the maximum amount of power out of these guys?’ And in the motion capture shoots we actually put the actors in American football pads, and we put huge heavy military boots on them and big weapons, and they had these helmet-mounted head cameras on and battery packs and everything.”
I also brought up the aspect of sound design and mixing in video games that present ‘heavy’ characters and how that element sometimes isn’t quite there, resulting in hulking beings that ultimately feel floaty. So far, that doesn’t seem to be a problem in Space Marine 2. Quite the opposite.
“The sound design is critical to that. For every type of terrain that we have in the game, we have a whole range of sound effects just for the way it sounds for the boots to be squelching through that dense swamp mud or cracking down on that thick marble or on the metal or whatever it is. Plus the sound of the joints as they move, the servos, and the magnetic fields… A lot of attention was given to it from the perspective of sound.”
To wrap things up, and also looking towards both Hollis-Leick and Saber Interactive’s future working with famous IPs, I dug further into how the entire creative process of a big game changes when working with someone else’s toys. The creative director was quite eloquent about how tough but ultimately rewarding it is to strike a balance:
“You have to approach it from a perspective of respect. They’re allowing you to enter that world and make stuff, but also, you’ve got to have the courage to suggest new ideas and new possibilities as well and potentially challenge the license holders… That whole process of diplomacy is very delicate… The same thing is true, of course, with Jurassic Park… I think it’s attention to detail, it’s the digging, and it’s the kind of trust that you build up with the license holder that is critical to that process.”
So far, it’s looking like the folks at Saber have nailed what makes the Space Marines the undisputable icon of the Warhammer 40K franchise, and underneath all the cutting-edge tech, we’re getting glimpses of a traditional, straight-to-the-point experience that could be just what players – diehard fans and casual gamers alike – have been asking for from a big third-person shooter for a long time. I wasn’t able to get confirmation on whether a multiplayer beta will be happening or not, but either way, I can’t wait to see how the overall package looks and feels on September 9.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a current-gen exclusive and will be released for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.
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