Summary
The entirety ofWarhammer 40K: Space Marine 2has leaked. The whole game. From the story mode to online multiplayer, the whole game is out there, two months ahead of official release, if you know where to look. No, I’m not telling you where. And no, I’m not playing it – for good reason.
In astatement, Developer Saber Interactive says that the leaked build “will be almost a year old by the time of launch”. This could be damage control after the leaker said the build was from last month, but files within the leak also suggested February, so the information is already muddled. Either way, I don’t understand why anyone would willingly play an unfinished game when the final product is months away.
I’ve seen glimpses of the leaked game – it’s a hazard of the job – and it looks, well, unfinished. Menus and tutorials are filled with placeholder assets (most of which actually say the word “placeholder”) and, while the gameplay looks surprisingly smooth, this would be enough to turn me off. What do you gain from playing this build, whether from last month or last year, other than an inflated sense of self-importance and the knowledge that you were first?
The answer is precisely that. The responses to Focus Interactive’s statement on the leak, which pleads with players to wait until September for the finished game, are mostly positive. But a minority of players revel in the fact they’re playing the game early, no matter what state it’s in.
“Idk if I can wait another month tbh,” writes one Twitter user in response. Why not? What goes through your head that results in you needing so urgently to play a double-A third-person IP shooter a month before everyone else? I get that people loveWarhammer, I do too, but this game will be inconceivably better when the developers actually finish it, and there areplenty of other Warhammer gamesin the meantime.
I suspect some people don’t quite understand game development. They saw that the game had gone gold last week, and then they saw a leaked version of said game. That must be the latest version, they might think, and now they can play the finished game free of charge.
I think a lot of people playing the game early are just opportunistic pirates, who would have pirated the game on release anyway. But, when Warhammer is such a popular IP, a worldwide phenomenon these days, I think more people are jumping on the bandwagon.
Maybe they don’t want to be spoiled so, instead of setting up muted words and blocklists, they download the unfinished game to see it for themselves. Maybe they’re just that fanatical about Ultramarines that they can’t wait until September to play. I wonder if some people are just eager to get ahead in the multiplayer so they can teabag day one noobs when the game officially releases. Not that any of your progress or unlocks will carry over anyway, but practice is practice I guess?
Whatever the reason, I don’t see the point. I’m not inherently anti-piracy – it’s often the only way to play unsupported or discontinued games these days – but this seems like a lose-lose scenario. The developer doesn’t get any revenue from its hard work, and you get to play a version of the game that’s worse than the final product. I don’t get it. Pirating the finished game would make more sense to me, although the developers would also hate that.
In case you couldn’t tell from the first eight paragraphs of this article, or the sentence where I wrote “No, I’m not playing it”, I won’t be pirating an unfinished game. I will be actively avoiding spoilers, I don’t want to find out that the rough polygons of Magnus comprise the final boss just for the sake of knowing.
It’s a little different for me, I get that. I’m going to review the game, and I expect the developer will send me a code to play it for free in order to do so. Games journalists want to preserve their relationships with companies so they continue to receive access to their games. Pirating this game and writing about it would probably nix that access. But this is deeper than that. I’m not avoiding playing Space Marine 2 because of any professional reason, because of any relationship I have with Saber (I don’t think I’ve ever talked to them, for the record). I’m avoiding playing Space Marine 2 because it’s not finished.
I’m a fan of Warhammer, I’m a fan of games where you shoot guns at hordes of monstrosities, I’m a fan of the first Space Marine game. I’m looking forward to the sequel. I want to play the best version of it I possibly can. My review copy may arrive sans day one patch, but it’ll otherwise be finished. It will be the product that Saber wanted players to play. Hopefully, it’ll be good. Forgoing the polish to play it two months early just doesn’t make sense to me.
