Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is very much not a live-service game. That’s one of the things that felt so refreshing about the sci-fi shooter when players flocked to it last fall. But it felt eerily like one late last month when an in-game reward was locked behind a busted community event. “We are not looking to transform Space Marine 2 into a full live-service game,” the developers said in a recent update.
The event in question was called Imperial Vigil and went live on February 21 and ran through March 3. Players had to compete to earn victories with each of the game’s six classes in operations mode to win the emblem-less Mark VIII Errant Helmet. Two things rubbed players the wrong way about this.
The first was seemingly locking a cool in-game cosmetic behind a timed-event, leveraging FOMO (fear of missing out) to make fans play the game in an arbitrary way during an arbitrary time period. The second was that both the progress meter for the event and unlocking the cosmetic were busted.
“This is some of the worst implemented ‘rewards’ system I have ever seen! I played my 6 games of each class on ruthless yesterday, then play some regular lethals while I waited for it to update,” one player posted on the Space Marine subreddit early on during the event. “Hours later it said 3/6 so I ran through all 6 again on substantial then went to bed. When I woke up it said 4/6 and now having run all 6 again it’s still on 4/6! I have played a minimum of 21 games in the past 24 hours 18 of them focused on getting this damn helm!”
Many others were struggling too. The event had to be twice taken offline for fixes, narrowing the 10 day window for it even further. Plus, the whole appeal of Space Marine 2 is that it’s not a game you have to constantly keep up with like a second job. In a world of Destinys, Apex Legendses, and Fortnites, it’s one of the rare online multiplayer shooters where you can log on, have some fun, and then forget about it for a while. Unless you were trying to get the Mark VIII Errant Helmet or other recent event-gated cosmetics.
“We have noted that the Community Events have received cold feedback since we introduced them as an additional way to unlock cosmetic items,” Space Marine 2's developers at Saber Interactive wrote on February 28. “We saw that many of you mentioned FOMO generated by the events. Rest assured, we are not looking to transform Space Marine 2 into a full live-service game.”
The message continued:
The items available through events WILL be available later, for everyone. We want Community Events to be a way to unlock the items in advance, for the most dedicated players, and not to be a source of frustration and stress for everyone.
However, that means we must provide a smooth experience in unlocking said items, which has not been the case so far. We deeply apologize for the trouble, and are currently working on a simplified process to unlock the items, to make the experience less constraining.
So in addition to having community events run more smoothly in the future, Saber also confirmed that their rewards will eventually be circulated into the game for everyone else regardless of whether they were around to participate in the original event or not. It’s unclear if this was always the plan or only something the development team arrived at after the recent Imperial Vigil train wreck. But given the Live-Service Lite™ nature of Space Marine 2, players will be more eager to know when the game’s next major content update and first story DLC will arrive.
The developers also recently confirmed that a big 7.0 patch is on the way and teased what players can expect from Space Marine 2's long-awaited Horde mode. “You’re very eager to get more info on the Horde Mode, it’s one of our top priorities right now,” they confirmed. “One thing we can say is that it will be very different from the Space Marine 1 Horde Mode, and that there are surprises we can’t wait for you to find out about.”
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