Space Marine 2

How do you mute the sex breathers in co-op?

It’s gripping my shit

Just click y on Xbox in the pause screen and click the player to mute so I guess triangle on ps5 and some key on pc.

Maybe Hanz5559 found me particularly sexy, it was either that or a chronic respiratory illness.

I had to put it in the 30fps mode for that reason about halfway through. Definitely struggles.

Just did the first Operation with two randoms. Was ok. Could see the upgrade grind becoming quite compelling if it weren’t for the tedious loading times.

Decided to complete the trinity and try some PVP but apparently there isn’t even a single other person playing that mode right now. Doesn’t bode well.

If you try them both in the same session, definitely. But I think the controls are sluggish and a bit unresponsive anyway almost by design. You’re a man tank. It’s not Devil May Cry or something.

So I made my peace with it and enjoyed the game well enough even at 30. Really made me itch to build a new PC though so I didn’t have to choose between being resolution and frame rate.

At the 1080p mode, they look much more like my actual painted models 😂

All done! I think I’ll replay it again solo so I can just walk about enjoying all the carnage. Always playing campaigns in co op is fun but you miss a lot as people are chatting and running ahead etc.

I was just reading that article on Eurogamer and EG LEGEND Rogueywon wrote



I must admit.. I haven't really thought about it, or cared. I suppose if you're into WH, but for us causals.. just want to kill stuff? I don't know. I'll leave it to the WH nerds on here

Yeah didn’t give a shit. I bought it to slaughter aliens in the most extreme ways possible and wasn’t bothered about the current affairs of the average Joe foot soldier.

I didn’t notice at any point though the ultra marines being painted as the nice guys. It was pretty clear to me they weren’t a nice bunch and I know very little about warhammer. They seemed like some religious nutters but I got to kill thousands of things with lots of fun weapons.

The Imperium is meant to be horrifying but some of those parallels don't work. There's little 1984 at all, it's barely Totalitarian at that and the Nazi comparison comes up a lot but I can barely see it.

Though the whole hyper masculine space marine thing kinda makes we want to vomit. But I just hate Ultramarines.

Ok, you might have to justify that one



Though the imperium is so big that basically writers can make up whatever they want for any old planet they feel like. 

OK we can move this to some other thread like Woke or something random in News for anyone who doesn't want this in Gaming. As this may just get annoying to other people.

So IMO the things the Imperium more closely parallels tend to be older and more old fashioned Imperial. So things like The British Empire, later day Imperial Russia, The Holy Roman Empire / The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Spanish Empire. None of which were Totalitarian. 

Totalitarianism (also the 1984 reference) requires a very modern and controlling state. As the thing that really distinguishes it is the extinguishing of private morality. All Empires demand obedience. Totalitarian ones require that you also believe in the party/leader/ethno-nationalism/communism inside your own head. So they're characterised through a lot of monitoring (e.g. just like 1984). Side Note: the Nazis often claimed this but were quite bad at doing it as they were chaotic morons, the Ur example is really Stalin.

So older empires. Lots of them claimed you needed to conform, but they never vaguely had the tools to do any of it. The Inquisition of Spain may have demanded everyone conform to a certain kind of Catholicism but in reality never achieved anything like it. As evidenced by all the syncretic traditions in the Spanish speaking world (e.g. where local cults or indigenous religions blended with Catholicism in a way that was in effect harmless or actively helped blend in obedience to the central power). They also were in effect multi-ethnic and rarely had enough control to actually force mass change. You can see this in stuff like the Mexican Day of the Dead, which is both old Aztec and modern Catholicism. Other examples would be Russia demanding everyone be Orthodox and love the Tsar, but in effect if a region far from the centre paid its taxes and didn't rebel there wasn't much that could be done about it. Also everyone who wasn't a noble was basically a Serf owned by a Noble for a long time (including ballerinas, factory workers, composers, accountants). However once a region stepped out of line by god did the Imperial army come down on you hard. Which is basically what the Inquisition did in Spain, or the British Army did in the colonies.

So the Imperium in 40K. To my eye at least behave much more like the second thing than the first. Partly because there's like a billion planets, it takes so long to get anywhere and staffing levels are low. So functionally it's like an old Empire where somewhere could basically be in rebellion for months or years before any central reaction happened. But also it's clear from the background that there's a lot of variation, nobody gives a flying fuck about all the heresy, lawlessness or genestealer infections on Necromunda so long as Necromunda continues to pay the tithe. There's lots of other examples of sectors or planets having quite different internal structures, and its all tolerated so long as they fucking pay their taxes. Genestealer cults and Chaos cults happen within a context where the Inquisition actually tolerates a load of local Imperial cults. There can be a slightly idiosyncratic cult of the Emperor on Bumfuck Secundus, it's when the icon of the Emperor suddenly has 6 arms that they go in and purge everyone.

It's also massively Corporatist (not capitalist corporations). Which is way more like the Holy Roman Empire or Medieval society. It's also a big feature of Machiavelli. Which is where you have lots of parallel interest groups. So the HRE you had noble states, free city states run by the burghers and a variety of religious states (run by a bishop or a monastery). Then they were all confusingly represented in the Imperial Diet and the Elector Counts (some of whom were Bishops). But they all had totally parallel legal structures and sources of authority (which is key as a Totalitarian state does not put up with locations of Authority that aren't the party/leader). So the Imperium has the High Lords of Terra which is a rotating group of people representing those interest groups, who are always vying with each other and have totally different ideas about some things. Which looks just like the HRE to me. An actual modern Totalitarian state would not put up with its most elite soldiers going "eh I think this religion bollocks is more of a metaphor mate" which the Space Marines do. (side note a lot of Nazi Germany is actually like this as the elite Prussian Generals didn't really bother buying in to the whole of the Nazi program, and they never bothered trying to force them to. Stalin murdered anyone who didn't agree with Soviet theory on anything).

Anyhow it just strikes me that the Nazi/1984 parallels are shallow and show a lack of imagination. Or they just indicate the only history anyone does at school these days is World War 2.

EDIT: Just for pure clarity. Living in the British Empire or Spanish Empire or Imperial Russia is also fucking horrible. I'm merely saying not all horrible Imperialist things are also Nazi things.

I think it's important to remember that the actual far right deliberately ignored the satire and co-opted 40K, claiming GW were 'on their side'. There were (and still are, unfortunately) a huge number of fashy types in the hobby - including reasonably popular content creators - who unironically see the Imperium of Man as some kind of ideological eutopia. It got so bad that GW themselves had to address the situation with this statement:




Even now, the Steam discussion boards for Space Marine 2 are an absolute shitshow, with people complaining that they have to see a black space marine. There's even a mod out to remove all the non-white races.

My ex-brother-in-law is a massive racist - even turned up to a fancy dress party as an SS Officer - he had zero interest in Warhammer back when I knew him. Surprise surprise, it turns out he's now really into Black Templars (one of the red flag army picks for these types of people).

I guess my point of this ramble is that you may not be interested in the political connotations of the setting, but plenty of people still look at 40k players and hobbyists as dodgy. That's changing, thankfully - and as more people get into the hobby those white supremacist types who thought 40K was their little private fictional universe will fuck off somewhere else.

Am I allowed to enjoy anything these days without someone moaning about something.