Is anyone excited about Space Marine?

[Stark]

Of course, this is the cross-platform Gears-format 40k game which the bland Kill Team was intended to promote, made by Relic makers of DoW etc etc etc.

Anyway, I've been trying to find actual information (and there are a few videos etc around of gameplay) but the game doesn't really look very good. The multiplayer in partiuclar appears to be ugly as shit, with simplistic effects and low lethality. Relic is supposed to be heavily into 40k, but when a guy hoses an enemy with a storm bolter and then whacks him with a chainsword four or five times just to get him down, this doesn't seem very good.

Does anyone know yet if/how the coop will work? I'm curious to know if there's any ability to customise in the campaign, because Generic Marine Hero is pretty dull. The list of guns at least seems to be varied, but what I've seen in videos suggests they're a little generic. With any luck it'll have customisation like Gears3 and at least 2p coops, but I haven't seen any gameplay of the battle setpieces so I'm not sure what kind of scale of combat to expect. Does anyone have more information on this sort of thing?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

They've been keeping a tight lid on co-op. It's coming, it's just that no one is sure what form it will take and whether or not it will be part of the game at release or post-release DLC.

A playable demo is hitting in a few days though, so obviously that will be a pretty good indicator of gameplay.

I'm actually looking forward to the MP quite a bit. I've been skeptical of the SP (for similar reasons, bland hero etc), but I like what I've seen of MP. That they included a point-capture mode inspires some hope and I'm loving the customization demos.

[Stark]

Is it a SP demo or an MP demo? I think the MP stuff I've been watching is pretty old (beta video I guess) so hopefully it looks more polished. I'm interested in it too, largely because the jumpjets look hilarious, but the videos seem to suggest it has low lethality which rubs me the wrong way.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

SP, as far as I know. Supposed to be one early Ork level and one later Chaos level.

[DPDarkPrimus]

They've been keeping a tight lid on co-op. It's coming, it's just that no one is sure what form it will take and whether or not it will be part of the game at release or post-release DLC.

It's already been confirmed that it's 5 player co-op, it's Day 30 DLC, and that it will come free with new copies of the game.

[weemadando]

I'm excited in so much as I'll be getting a friends copy once they're done. Unless it is truly the most amazing thing ever.

[Stark]

It's already been confirmed that it's 5 player co-op, it's Day 30 DLC, and that it will come free with new copies of the game.

That's a bit of a lol; the only reason anyone I know is buying it is to give them something to do until Gears comes out. Boat = missed. The best part is that the SP narrative they doubtless think is more important than coop will be forgettable garbage; I'd wager it'll even be their one DoW plot again.

Oh well; it only has to make the days go faster for a week.

[Lonestar]

I pre-ordered Space Marine. I'm too much of a WH40K fanboy to resist.

I've been fuxing around with Gears 2 and I have a strong sensation of "ehhhh". We'll see how SM plays out.

[Stark]

Look, put your shit in and we'll all gather round the fireplace and shoot mans!

[2000AD]

The 40K fanboy in me means that I wont be able to resist, at most I'll put it off till it's on a bit of a sale.
Some of my concerns of it just being Gears of 40K have been soothed by this though

About five minutes into my demonstration of Relic’s Space Marine I realise what I’m looking at is a 3rd person shooter that draws heavily from Gears of War, so I ask an obvious question. “Is there some kind of cover system?” Relic man grins. “Actually, the team has an internal line about that. We say, ‘Cover is for Pussies.’”

I don’t take my eyes off the screen, but my ears do a double take. “We do have this though,” says Relic man. With the press of a button he sends Ultramarine Captain Titus running straight through a low wall of cover like a wrecking ball, and begins hacking apart the orks on the other side with his chainsword. “Oh,” I hear myself say, mesmerised. “Right!”

That right there gives me some hope that this game will actually feel like a space marine game should.

[weemadando]

Then you're s gullible fool who hasn't watched all the other parts of the preview coverage where they show Space Marines hiding behind pillars and cover... BUT NOT ATTACHING TO IT BECAUSE COVER BUTTONS ARE LAME.

[Stark]

It's a lol that they're so married to their ridiculous idea of what 40k 'is' that they intentionally crippled their game by ditching features. It's hilarious to see people sidestepping in and out of cover like it's 1998, because space marines are too hardcore to take cover. Of course, their amazing supersoldiers with megaguns can't destroy terrain or even kill in a few shots because Relic is also married to hitpoint bars. I'd have been happy if they reflected stuff like weapon characteristics and marine abilities rather than acting like having a melee button is a big deal.

The best part about Relic trying to be macho is that they're all beardo nerds.

[weemadando]

It's like the fucking Force Unleashed bullshit.

WHY DO STINKING REBEL SCUM HAVE A LIFE BAR WHEN I HAVE A GODDAMN LIGHTSABER?

Man, game design is hilarious.

[Stark]

I really hope the MP stuff I've seen is pre-balance, because seriously hosing a guy with a storm bolter and having to whack him heaps to down him is not very 40k. Then again, shooting yellow lines and having pussy impact effects isn't very 40k either.

[PeZook]

The cover tihng is really funny when you remember the intro to DoW 1, where space marines huddled behind cover, and then move on to Dawn of War 2, where cover was the big new thing.

But now uh cover is for pussies I guess?

[Stark]

Yeah it's especially ironic from the guys who singlehanded revolutionised RTS games with cover.

[PeZook]

If they wanted to go against the flow and dispense with cover, they should've made all weapons blow right through thick walls and generally fuck everything up in a properly 40K way.

At least that would've been cool

[Stark]

It would have been awesome to have their silly RAEG HEALTH system for autoguns or lasguns and similar filth, but had bolters etc be actually powerful and high lethality to demonstrate the distinction of marines.

What I've seen suggests the bolters are just regular machineguns, which is a bit lame. I wish they'd taken the apporach of having a few generic weapons and then a range of more characterful, limited use weapons, but it seems most of them are pretty generic (machinegun, weak machinegun, battle rifle, big machinegun, blue machinegun, sniper rifle, etc).

[Jaevric]

I have it on pre-order, though I assume I'll be just as terrible at this game as I am most of the FPS genre. The main character for the SP campaign being bland doesn't bother me; he's an Ultramarine, there's nothing in the Codex Astartes about having a personality so most of them don't bother.

The "cover is for pussies" thing is a little irritating, fluff Space Marines aren't idiots and do understand the concept of "taking cover." The guy being able to smash through walls to get to melee range is a nice touch. Destructible terrain with sufficiently heavy weapons would be better and seems like it would encourage some communication and planning in multiplayer. This is probably wildly optimistic of me, but I don't play a lot of multiplayer FPS so I don't know for sure.

Having to hose something that isn't a Warboss, Terminator or Dreadnaught down with a heavy bolter to kill it is lame and hopefully won't happen in the final game.

[Broken]

I tossed a pre-order for this from Steam, I do hope its good since I have enjoyed Relic's Dawn of War series. The graphics are a bit lackluster (of course, I was just watching the battlefield 3 trailers, so its hard not to compare) but the multi-player custom stuff looked good.

Does anyone know if Relic plans on releasing mod tools for the PC version? Not that I have any modding skills but would love to see what that community could do with a pre-build WH40K game instead of adding stuff into a game the modders sometimes did in something like Fallout 3. Or even (I think it was the Total Realism mod for Battlefield 2, iirc) be able to tweek the multi-player stuff with their own servers for increased damage and less useful cover. But really, WH40K really needs destructible terrain like BC2 or Battlefield 3. Ohh, imagine a WH40k mod running on the Frostbite 2 engine, now that would be sweet.

[Stark]

Destroyable terrain is good, but teamwork really relies more on a critical mass of players, to get the better players cropping up more often. SM will probably only have a decent playerbase for a few weeks, if that, before it goes the way of War for Cybertron.

[Feil]

I played the Steam demo. It was fun.

As shooters go, there's nothing noteworthy about it. You run around, you can aim for better accuracy or to use your scope, headshots on normal orks are one-hit kills, body shots take between two (for the sniper rifle) and four or so (for the bolter and bolt pistol). You can dodge-roll, you can sprint (infinitely, there's no five second timer after which your Space Marine starts wheezing and gasping for breath). The only cover is terrain that you happen to decide to stand behind. Killing baddies gives you Fury, which you can trigger to use bullet time. There is no jump or crouch. Everything seems to work reasonably well, but that's all you can say for it.

As fighting games go, also nothing noteworthy. You can chain up to four attacks, or chain zero to three attacks followed by a stun, which increases in effectiveness and area of effect based on the number of melee attacks you made before it. Attacks momentarily knock back affected enemies, but as you're frequently surrounded you're likely to be taking hits, anyway. Approach a stunned enemy and press the Execute button to do a synch-kill and regain health. As with ranged fighting, killing baddies gives you Fury. When Fury is triggered for melee, you gain health with every hit and do more damage and knockback.

The reason for the lack of a cover system is obvious once you play it: you're getting rushed by hordes of orks who want to hit you with their axes, not Nazis who want to stand behind cover and shoot you with rifles. If there was a sticky-cover system in the game, people would just die a lot more from getting stuck to it.

The place the game excels is in successfully wedding the shooting and melee aspects of the game. Call it the Mass Effect Effect (har): take two mediocre games from different genres, weld them together, and if you don't get an unplayable wreck where design concessions made to weld them together ruin both games, you end up with a good game.

No idea about multiplayer, since it wasn't in the demo.

EDIT: You guys are reading way too much into one comment by one member of the development team. Cover is still a component of the game, as it is for any shooter, with terrain pieces obviously built in for that purpose, and if you stand in the open while people are shooting at you, you'll die, as in any shooter.

[Stark]

UPDATE - Feil has no idea how cover systems work. Gears has both a cover system and lethal melee and a focus on close-range combat (as do most third-person shooters in general). Mixing shooting and melee is done in (putting aside every third person shooter ever) Hunted, in almost exactly the same way only more interesting, and nobody cared.

I'm interested to hear that SP has high lethality, when MP appears to be the opposite. It's possible that MP with high lethality just sucks, because you have so few agility options in the game setup, which would be pretty super annoying. I haven't seen how their squad or res systems work, so high lethality + crap movement + narrow conefire would be a pretty bad combination.

Is there any information around non-infantry enemies? Surely there will be vehicles or big robots or evil chaos ghosts or whatever? They 'chaos drone' is probably the least imaginative non-infantry enemy they could have announced so surely there's more out there than 'green guys' and 'guys with purple eyeballs'.

[Feil]

I recall seeing some footage of set-piece battles that involved shooting at vehicles. I very much doubt that vehicles will play a part outside of set-pieces.

[Ford Prefect]

you can sprint (infinitely, there's no five second timer after which your Space Marine starts wheezing and gasping for breath)

This is the best news about Space Marine.