In the grim darkness of the far future, you will not have to worry about getting preyed upon by rival Space Marine chapters whilst duffing up the Tyranids, for there are no plans to add a PvPvE mode to Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. That’s according to game director Dmitry Grigorenko, who observes that enjoyable PvPvE is the “holy grail” of game design, much-sought and seldom claimed. Balancing shooters in which players fight both each other and the bots is tricky, especially in a game as prone to dousing the screen in giblets as Space Marine 2.
The comments in question were delivered unto MP1st. “PvPvE is a holy grail of game design,” Grigorenko told the site. “A lot of studios are trying to find it and a lot of them fail. The truth is that it’s a very very difficult task. It sounds great on paper, but when you actually start trying, it becomes apparent that it’s very annoying when you fight other players only to get backstabbed by an AI opponent.
“This is why most of the games are trying to ensure that PvP and PvE aspects don’t intersect that much, i.e. AI opponents are restricted to specific places on maps, etc,” he went on. “It’s a complicated mode to implement that would change the experience significantly, so I’m afraid there are no plans for it.”
I’ve been writing a fair bit about Space Marine 2 and related topics behind the scenes, but I haven’t spent any time in the game’s PvP, so can’t really comment on the reasonableness of all this. Still, it sounds like Space Marine 2 PvP is a lot more claustrophobic than, say, an extraction shooter such as Beautiful Light. Slop the PvP and PvE pots together, and I imagine the outcome would be the wrong kind of bloody mayhem. Mind you, this game does have Chaos Space Marines in it. A bit of battle-brotherly betrayal would be perfectly consistent with the plot.