There is perhaps no other IP with such an intensity of detail, or worldbuilding, or lore as rich as Warhammer. It’s been around for nearly 50 years. 50. Any work done within it must align with an absurd amount of lore written over years within books and magazines. As you can imagine, faithfully recreating Warhammer in other mediums is tricky. A fact that Saber Interactive chief creative officer Tim Willits was eager to speak about at the Space Marine 2 booth at Gamescom.
Space Marine 2, a long-awaited sequel to a cult classic from the Xbox 360 era, immediately seeps and oozes a reverence for the source material. You don’t even have to play it, it leaks from its trailers and screenshots. Every bit of armour, every NPC, every building. Seeing it is impressive, and actually playing it is a step above. It feels like a labour of love – emphasis on labour.
“It’s a very big challenge,” Willits stated, tapping the table in unison with aspects of the Warhammer lore the Saber team had to incorporate in the upcoming action game. “The Warhammer universe is what, 45 years old now? There was Space Marine 1, which ends with Titus going to the Deathwatch for 100 years. Most people are like, ‘what the hell? I’m already lost.’ The Warhammer universe is so big, there are thousands of planets, different legions, Chaos, the influence of the warp… So, we have so many tools to bring into this story, and it was a pleasure for the team to bring them all in.”
“But even I sometimes get a little lost! Our game director Dmitry Grigorenko, and creative director Oliver Hollis-Leick, those guys know the universe like they’re Games Workshop employees. They’re the ones who went to Games Workshop in 2019 and convinced them to give us the licence!”
But like, c’mon. How much work could it really take over a typical game? It’s just big blue lads with big guns, right? Willits peels back the curtain on a totally different reality, one where every detail is considered paramount. “Working with Games Workshop – they’re so strict! The armour was the wrong size on the ankle – on the ankle! And they were like, ‘uh the ankles wrong’, and we were like, ‘yessir, we’ll fix it’!
So how much goes into making a space marine feel right, and making the fights between space marines and the horrors of the galaxy feel true to the lore? The answer? A lot of tweaking and adjusting a lot of different moving parts. This includes a pretty impressive AI director, which controls various enemies like the Tyranid horde using a pumped up version of World War Z’s swarm technology, and various teams within Saber refining different aspects of the game.
Willits elaborate, “The AI director does a really good job, because you’re a Primaris Space Marine! So you’re a beacon of death, but there are times when you’re like, I’m going to get fucked, then you somehow pull through. Alongside that, the team worked so hard on everything from the quick melee, to the strikes, to the grabs. It’s so hard to do a shooter, as I would know, but even harder than a shooter is a melee game. People don’t realise that. The iteration, trial and error…”
“That’s what the team was working on first. Titus was walking around in a grey box, and we were like nope, nope, nope. Then we’d go to Games Workshop and they’d be like nope, nope, nope. It was just a lot of effort to balance that.”
That’s the gameplay, the feel and fun of a game, but the same is true of the aesthetics of the game. Perhaps moreso, as Willits charged into anecdotes on the process of designing a space marine and getting it approved by Games Workshop. “It was an insane amount of work. Because every, single, insignia, had to be correct. Everything had to be approved. Games Workshop has a whole dedicated system where you upload things, then they go through it with the right person, then they check a box and it goes back to you. If they didn’t have a dedicated system, oh my god.”
“And you know how 40k fans are. If you screw up an insignia? This game sucks! Even the way the enemies reacted we had to adjust and tweak. We had to make them fun and accessible in the video game, but they had to act the way they would in the actual game. There were certain things we did that we had to slightly adjust, like spawning in other creatures.”
“There’s a rule where the Thousand Sons can’t summon demons from the warp, or something like that. But it’s a video game, so we needed to spawn them in somehow. [Here I interject to say only sorcerers can summon demons, not regular dusty Rubic marines]. “Yes, yes! If you didn’t have a sorcerer on the battlefield you couldn’t summon guys from the warp, so it was like mental gymnastics.”
The payoff for all this effort is clear though, even with a fleeting session playing the game on the Gamescom show floor. It’s a Warhammer game fans should be clamouring for. In fact, they’re already clamouring, the fans already know. As for the team, Willits states it’s Saber’s best game yet. “The team loves this game. It’s their magnum opus. Most of the leads made World War Z – like 25 million people played that game – but this game is a whole new level for them. They worked so hard, and I hope people grasp it.”