Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Previews and Interview

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on May 21st, 2011

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During a battle in a valley, I was jumped by Bloodletters. Thanks to their connection with the warp, they could phase quickly about the battlefield, dodging my swings and worse delivering some of their own without retaliation. Titus's simple control scheme is a blessing when surrounded, but without any specific combos or any way to knock the daemons off their attack patterns, I was repeatedly eviscerated. The only way past the section was to stand farther back and take potshots: an approach at odds with the developer's exhortation that (Space Marines don't take cover.)

That means no cover system, even if Gaia looks like it was previously inhabited by a race of sentient three-foot-high walls. Despite the developers' best efforts, it's tough to break routine: I repeatedly found myself running to hide when close to death. Space Marines use a recharging health bar, with a layer of armour protecting a layer of hit points. But when attacks start to chip away at the underlying health bar, instead of finding one of the game's abundant low walls and surreptitiously ducking your seven foot frame behind it, Relic want players to hurl themselves back into the action and earn their survival.

Space Marine is looking interesting for anyone with a taste for constant action and adrenaline. Those that prefer the tactical side of things are likely to be less impressed. Despite coming from the hallowed hallways of the Relic offices, I struggle to see how fans of the developer's prior output (largely RTS titles) are going to be sold on such an approach to the Warhammer 40K universe.

Then again, this is Warhammer and apparently it's pretty popular.

The Space Marines are the scalpel in the Imperium's arsenal: the precision weapon that cracks the enemy open so the sledgehammer of the Imperial Guard can finish the job. When it comes time for battle, Space Marines don't draw lines of combat, build their base and stick around harvesting tiberium: they pull up in orbit, scream down out of the atmosphere in drop pods, land directly onto the enemy's base and cut off their head, leaving the now-leaderless enemy troops to be cleaned up by the foot-slogging weakling humans of the Imperial Guard. Then they're gone, off wherever else they are needed. Hell, a warzone isn't even a serious fight unless you need ten or twenty Space Marines there. If the whole Chapter shows up, something probably galaxy-threatening is going down. More than one Chapter? Armaggeddon. You don't wheel the Space Marines out for just any old keg party.

I think the important legacy of Carnage was the desire to find a different way of exploring or expressing the ideas of this IP.

Early, early in Space Marine's development, there was the notion of it being more like an action-RPG. So, there was some fooling around with genre-blending. In the process of creating a game, there's this sort of evolution that happens, and there's also kind of a winnowing-down as well, as you focus on things. I think we had a little bit of a kitchen-sink thing going on early-on, where we wanted to be a lot of different things. Like we're going to take elements of this and elements of that and kind of blend them together. I think you see the best expression of that in how the combat system works right now, but all the rest of it started feeling like a red herring and a distraction.

Some people are like "You've got these two other guys in the world. How come there's no squad control?" Because what we want you to be doing is running into combat and messing with Orks. I don't want you to be thinking about ordering that guy to go over there and "Make sure you lay down covering fire." There's lots of other games you can do that in. That's not this game.

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