Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 will soon see the release of Patch 8, which publisher Focus Entertainment and developer Saber Interactive have already said heralds the arrival of the hotly anticipated Horde mode.
But what else might it include? Recent datamines of Space Marine 2 itself may hold clues.
Warning! Potential spoilers for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 follow:
Let’s start with perhaps the biggest question Space Marine 2 fans have right now: what is the new class? Datamines suggest it is the Techmarine. Why? Because in the files was mention of a perk called ‘shoulder gun bolter,’ which is a clear indication that Techmarines are finally in play.
For the uninitiated, a Techmarine is a Space Marine engineer-type class who’s a big fan of the Cult Mechanicus as well as their Chapter. They’re big on technology and specialize in fixing and maintaining vehicles and other big stuff, such as Dreadnaughts.
You can see how a Techmarine might slot into a Space Marine 2 squad, which currently lacks a class of this type. And this ties into another datamined detail: the apparent ability to “summon” a Dreadnaught in Horde mode. Dreadnaughts are a part of the Space Marine 2 campaign (one viral moment involves a Dreadnaught being particularly heroic and badass), and you also fight alongside one in a PvE Operations mission. Could you earn the right to summon a Dreadnaught and, as a Techmarine, keep it alive, in Horde mode?
THIS is why I’m a fan of Warhammer 40k! Hats off to @PrimeVideo for producing Secret Level: And They Shall Know No Fear. Watch it here: https://t.co/Gf0i2d0Rus
I highly recommend giving the entire 19 min episode a watch. It’s immersive and awesome. It’s a happy grim dark ray of… pic.twitter.com/iuYxprAo2J
There’s more! As discussed in a recent video by Warhammer 40,000 YouTuber Chapter Master Valrak, dataminers recently unearthed evidence of a Grav-cannon in Space Marine 2. This is, typically, a big gun used by Space Marines that manipulate gravity to cause a target to crush itself to death. Could the Techmarine class, should it be a genuine upcoming arrival, exclusively wield the Grav-cannon? If so, I imagine there will be many players who gravitate towards it with the release of Patch 8.
It’s worth noting that Patch 8 remains under wraps for now, but we’re expecting Space Marine 2-related announcements during the upcoming Warhammer Skulls livestream this Thursday, May 22. Perhaps we’ll find out more there.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Video game voice-actor union SAG-AFTRA are launching a legal case against the presence of generated AI voice-acting for Darth Vader in Epic’s battle royale Fortnite. They’re accusing the company’s subsidiary Llama Productions of using AI to “replace the work of human performers” – or at least, of replacing human performers without first haggling out terms with the union.
Shin’en Multimedia’s FAST Fusion is set to be a true visual highlight when it launches on the Nintendo Switch 2 day one on 5th June 2025. Like its predecessor, FAST RMX, Fusion looks to take full advantage of the new hardware’s capabilities to produce blistering performance at the highest resolution possible.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of the specs, however, we can confirm that FAST Fusion will have a total of 12 tracks at launch spread over four cups. This is a bit of a drop from what RMX offered, but keep in mind that a large chunk of those tracks were taken from FAST Racing Neo, with RMX producing just 6 new courses.
The worst nightmare of all those who fight for Managed Democracy has been made a grim reality.
Despite the valiant efforts of our Helldivers to push back the fleet, the Illuminate have reached Super Earth. Now they are swarming our cities, terrorizing citizens, and destroying our infrastructure. It’s time to rise up and take arms and fight for the precious foundations and soil of Democracy manifest. Helldivers, return to our planet and defend what is rightfully ours.
Super Earth… our home
The urban sprawl of Super Earth is the site of the conflict. Fight among the towering skyscrapers and crowded streets of our home turf as the Illuminate rain down destruction all around you.
Inside the city biomes, you will tackle operations and work to liberate cities together, having a significant impact on planetary campaigns.
Repel the invasion
The Helldivers are tasked with a new objective: to repel the Illuminate invasion by gaining ground over the squids as they fight to control areas where the fleet is landing. It won’t be a walk in the park, divers. Like a game of intergalactic tug-of-war, you will struggle against the incoming forces, gaining and losing control quickly.
Arm the cannons
Even in the face of such danger, we are not helpless, and all is not lost. The might of Super Earth’s arsenal lies hidden beneath our peaceful, democratic streets. With your help, we must activate our Planetary Defense Cannons and take down the Illuminate fleet in a grand show of power.
Call for backup
It’s all hands on deck as you encounter SEAF troops who will help join the fight to defend our Freedom. These small squads will fight enemies on their own, or they can be ordered to follow Helldivers and provide temporary backup as you navigate toward objectives. Salute and lead them on the path to victory, divers!
Protect citizens
However, you must also be aware of the many civilians still roaming the streets, fearing for their lives. They may be panicked, Helldivers, but it is your sworn duty to keep them safe and they look to you as the ultimate protectors of liberty. Remember: any civilian lives lost from friendly fire will be punished.
Prepare for the fight
Last week, we released a powerful primary weapon customization system and expanded surplus options to fight against the Illuminate as they emerged from the singularity. Now that you have learned the tactics of these new squid troops–like the Crescent Overseer and the hulking Fleshmob–you must master these tools to continue the fight on Super Earth. Use every available resource, divers, and decimate their forces!
Our major update, Heart of Democracy, is now live. Helldivers, to your hellpods immediately! Citizens, enlistment centers will remain open for recruitment.
The battle for Super Earth has begun.
Internet Connection and Helldivers 2 game required for update.
Call of Duty fans are still digesting the news that Activision is walking away from Warzone Mobile, the game that was meant to lead the battle royale into a new era.
Over the weekend, Activision pulled Warzone Mobile from iOS and Android app stores, with the scope of the game being “streamlined” and an admission it had not met expectations. While servers will remain online for now, no new content or updates will be issued to the game, and players can no longer spend real money in it.
“We’re proud of the accomplishment in bringing Call of Duty: Warzone to mobile in an authentic way, [but] it unfortunately has not met our expectations with mobile-first players like it has with PC and console audiences,” Activision said.
It’s a brutal end for a game that clearly struggled right out of the gate. Warzone Mobile launched in March 2024 on iOS and Android as a Warzone-specific Call of Duty mobile experience that offered battle royale for up to 120 players, as well as cross-progression with the PC and console Warzone, Modern Warfare 2 and 3, and, later in the year, Black Ops 6.
IGN’s Call of Duty Warzone Mobile review returned an 8/10. We said: “Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile includes all the best elements of Warzone, while speeding up and streamlining matches and using cross-progression to make this a meaningful extension of the traditional experience.”
Activision’s hope was that Warzone Mobile would make a splash in the competitive mobile shooter market, where the hugely successful Call of Duty Mobile, developed by Tencent-owned TiMi Studio Group, is already established. With Call of Duty Mobile, which has seen 1 billion downloads since launch, revenue is shared between Activision and Tencent. Warzone Mobile, on the other hand, was developed entirely in-house at Activision, and so the company received a bigger slice of the money pie every time a player dropped cash on a battle pass or a cosmetic.
But Warzone Mobile, which requires more powerful mobile phones than Call of Duty Mobile to work well, failed to meet Activision’s expectations, and its development team was scaled down when, in September last year, Microsoft-wide layoffs hit across the games business.
Now, Call of Duty fans, especially those who did play Warzone Mobile, have lamented the state of the game and indeed the franchise.
“This game simply came out too early and wanted to be too greedy,” said redditor Maddafragg. “It could be seen on the Reddit videos, a lot of gameplay was not fluid with weird graphics, it could be seen that even if the game is playable, the device struggles to run it. The world of mobile gaming is cursed, it’s not just Warzone that’s dying. Dead by Daylight mobile and Star Wars hunter will also close the doors.”
“Turns out mobile games need to be optimized on most devices to be successful, you can’t just cater to high end devices and hope your game succeed — it won’t,” added piegeamorue.
“Greed is a dangerous thing. Activision was too greedy and when it leaked that they planned on killing CODM in favor of WZM they essentially turned tens of millions of people against the game. It became ‘us vs them’ and CODM is vastly more accessible than WZM — the loss was guaranteed.”
What’s next for Call of Duty, which appears to be in a tricky spot right now? Earlier this month, The Game Business reported that while Black Ops 6 launched big late last year, the Call of Duty franchise saw its users decline afterwards, and “more sharply” than in recent years.
Here’s the relevant blurb:
… the reality is that despite a strong start, Call of Duty has struggled to engage players to the degree it has in the past. According to Ampere, in March 2025, Call of Duty had 20.6 million players. That is still a huge number, but it’s slightly less than March 2024, which had 20.8 million players, and well down on March 2023, which saw 22.4 million players.
Related, there are a number of apparent datamined gameplay videos doing the rounds that show wall-running and even jet packs working in Black Ops 6. This, some believe, indicates this year’s Black Ops 7 will ditch Activision’s ‘boots on the ground’ mantra for gameplay reminiscent of Black Ops 3.
🚨‼️WALL RUNNING CONFIRMED FOR BO7‼️🚨 There is wall running in BO6 currently It is unclear if it’s leftover from BO3 that managed to make it’s way into a glitch through BO6 or if it’s from BO7 and is left in the BO6 files. @charlieINTEL@ModernWarzone@Dexertopic.twitter.com/0FJ0guUIEH
Activision told IGN its teams are busy and moving forward on a variety of work, so hopefully we’ll see the fruits of that soon. Microsoft’s annual June Xbox showcase is around the corner. Perhaps Call of Duty will turn up there. And, meanwhile, Call of Duty: Mobile is going strong, but, as we’ve pointed out, it’s not as lucrative a business for Activision, despite being bigger.
Activision Blizzard’s recent mobile struggles also call into question Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the company itself, given Xbox boss Phil Spencer has made no secret that the decision was in part motivated by Xbox’s lofty mobile ambitions (Activision Blizzard owns King, the maker of phenomenally popular mobile game Candy Crush). Indeed, Microsoft plans to launch an app store of its own, taking on Apple and Google in the lucrative mobile game space.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
After many months of dogged campaigning in the face of zealotry, atrocity and propaganda about fake WMDs, the heroic avatars of the Illuminate have finally invaded Super-Earth. In just a few short days, the humans and their fanatical and clownish “Helldiver” enforcers may be wiped from the face of the galaxy, ushering in a brave new era in which the surviving bots, bugs and squids link clamps, mandibles and tentacles and dance around singing. You ever hear an Illuminate sing? Literally mind-blowing.
All of which is to say that Helldivers 2‘s Heart Of Democracy update is upon us, following teasers earlier this month. It lets the game’s sordid playerbase of perfidious human stormtroopers blow the shit out of some ace nano-tech molluscs on the streets of planet Earth. The new Earth maps are also full of NPC human soldiers who can be left to fight for themselves or enlisted as cannon fodder. There are crowds of panicking civilians, too. The PlayStation blog post announcing the update’s release suggests that you’ll be “punished” for accidentally shooting them, but that’s not the impression given by the below orgiastic trailer.
Helldivers 2 finally has Super Earth maps to fight on as part of the Heart of Democracy major update.
As had leaked last week, the Heart of Democracy update — out now across PC and PlayStation 5 — sees the Illuminate invasion reach Super Earth. You can now select missions on our home planet in Mega Cities and fight back alongside SEAF soldiers.
The city biomes include operations that work towards liberating the cities, which, developer Arrowhead said, have “a significant impact on planetary campaigns.” This is a part of Helldivers 2’s ongoing Galactic War, a community-driven meta narrative that Arrowhead orchestrates behind the scenes.
The Illuminate have reached the Heart of Democracy.
Our Mega Cities are under siege. Liberty now hangs in the balance. The Ministry of Defence has authorised arsenal upgrades and placed SEAF soldiers on active duty. Today, we fight for the future of Super Earth! pic.twitter.com/GxkrAQCmKD
The Helldivers are tasked with a new objective: to repel the Illuminate invasion by gaining ground over the squids as they fight to control areas where the fleet is landing. It won’t be a walk in the park, divers. Like a game of intergalactic tug-of-war, you will struggle against the incoming forces, gaining and losing control quickly.
You can activate Planetary Defense Cannons and take down the Illuminate fleet, as shown in the trailer. And, as mentioned, SEAF troops will help join the fight to defend the cities. These small squads will fight enemies on their own, or they can be ordered to follow Helldivers and provide temporary backup as you navigate toward objectives. You do, however, need to be mindful of civilians who are still roaming the streets; Helldivers 2 is as much about friendly fire management as it is blowing aliens up.
The Heart of Democracy update is part of Arrowhead’s long-term committment to keeping Helldivers 2 going for years to come following its record-breaking launch last year.
“Nah. It’s ALL Helldivers 2 for now,” he insisted. “A very, very small team will spin up something later this year and go at it sloowly. Helldivers is our main focus and will be for a loooong time.”
So, how long does Jorjani expect content updates for Helldivers 2 to last?
“As long as you folks keep playing and buying Super Credits we can keep it going,” Jorjani said, pointing to Helldivers 2’s virtual currency that’s used to buy Premium Warbonds. “Last summer we were kinda screwing the pooch so it looked like we wouldn’t be able to keep the train going for a long time – but we turned the ship around, you support us a lot so it’s looking bright.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
“What if Resident Evil and Frogger had a boomer shooter baby?,” teases the trailer blurb for FPSFrog Legs. Stop, stop. You had me at Frog. Then you had me again when I saw the frog using a super shotgun, and then once again when they used a BFG. Then, inconceivably, you had me twice more reading the Steam page. Once when I learned the game was about 40 minutes long, and then again when I noticed it costs two quid. Trailer? Yes. I already said there was. Please, keep up.
Marc Laidlaw wrote 400 Boys in 1981 aged 21, long before he ended up Valve’s lead writer and one of the chief creators of the Half-Life games. The short story was published in Omni magazine in 1983, before it was picked up for Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology and enjoyed a wider audience. On Marc’s website, at the bottom of the short story itself, he points out 400 Boys has probably been read by more people than anything else he’s written, except perhaps Dota 2 seasonal ad copy. Yes, the video game world knows Marc Laidlaw as the lead writer of the Half-Life series. But he’s done a lot more than video games. It’s funny how things work out.
In a post-apocalyptic city where warring gangs follow a bushido-like code of honor, a new gang, the 400 Boys, forces them to unite. A blend of beauty and brutality from Canadian director Robert Valley, whose LDR episode “Ice” won the Emmy for Outstanding Short Form Animation.
“The inspiration for it just came out of walking around,” Marc remembers. “I lived in Eugene, Oregon and there was always the phone poles with the names of bands that were playing in town, and it was just name after name of super cool bands, and I just wanted a way to do that. I just wanted to make up lots of band names. So I came up with the idea of, if I have all these gangs in the story, I can come up with names for all these different gangs and that would be fun. And it was funny. That was kind of the thing that drove a big part of the story, just wanting to make band names.”
Now, over 40 years after 400 Boys was first published, it’s an episode of the fourth season of Netflix’s hugely popular animated anthology series Love, Death and Robots. The episode was directed by Robert Valley, the director of Zima Blue in Season 1 and Ice in Season 2. Tim Miller wrote it. The voice cast includes John Boyega, who famously played Finn in Star Wars. All of a sudden, 400 Boys is having its big moment. Marc Laidlaw never expected this.
“The story kind of faded out, but cyberpunk kept going and I didn’t really think about it that much,” Laidlaw tells me over a video call just days before Season 4 of Love, Death and Robots kicks off on Netflix.
40 years. That’s a long time for anything to be turned into something, isn’t it? But it might have happened earlier, around 15 years ago, when Tim Miller from Blur (the company that does all those fancy video game cutscenes and, these days, so much more), got in touch about maybe turning 400 Boys into something. It didn’t happen. Like so many projects, it fell apart following studio changes.
Then Love, Death and Robots exploded onto the scene in March 2019. This edgy, adult-oriented animated anthology was unlike anything we’d seen on the streamer. Some episodes were challenging, some were weird, some were weirdly challenging. Whatever they were, you couldn’t help but watch. And, Marc noticed, Tim Miller from Blur was involved. “I always say, I can’t imagine anybody else who would’ve turned The Drowned Giant, this J. G. Ballard story, into an episode of an animated feature,” Marc says. “So I had a lot of respect for Tim just from that.”
Marc moved to Los Angeles in 2020 and, as the pandemic eased, met Tim a few times at various events around town. He didn’t want to push 400 Boys, but maybe, just maybe, if this Love, Death and Robots thing kept on going, maybe it would come back around. Then, a year ago, Marc got the ‘would you be interested in us optioning 400 Boys?’ email. It was finally happening.
Marc spoke with Tim, who took over the script, about the story itself. He says the episode is faithful to the source, but there’s some new stuff that helps sell the story visually. He had a couple conversations with Robert Valley, the director. He pointed him to the 400 Boys audiobook, which Marc narrated (“I did a reading of this back in the pandemic when everybody was trying to entertain people by posting audio books of their fiction and stuff on YouTube”).
But really, Marc wasn’t that involved. “It just was fun to sit back and not have to be involved in the trenches on something for once,” he says. “And I just kind of wanted to enjoy it when it was done and see what they made of it.”
And Marc has seen the episode, as you’d expect. “John Boyega and the characters and the accents and the setting is just so cool to me. I mean, they made the story just so much more fun visually, I think.”
400 Boys is, as Marc describes it, from “a different me from lifetimes ago.” Of course it is, he wrote it over 40 years ago when he was a young man. “I’m still pretty happy with it considering how young I was when I wrote it.”
“And then there was a long time of not much happening,” he says. And then, as we all know, Marc got into the games industry in 1997, into Valve as it was making Half-Life. “And that whole thing happened…”
Laidlaw “retired” from Valve in 2016, but it came across as a hard retirement from everything. In truth, he’s in a comfortable enough position to be able to do what he wants, pick his own projects and share them when they’re done. “I think I retired too hard,” he admits. He never wanted to stop being creative. He wanted to get back to writing, but the publishing industry sort of disappeared while he was working on video games. Forget new video games, too. “I can’t do games without a bunch of people. I can’t make a game myself.”
So Marc makes music now. He got a boost in audience after Valve’s Half-Life 2 anniversary documentary came out last year and he released a lost development video from the early days on his YouTube channel. “I’m like, I’m in the wrong business!” Marc jokes. “I should just be leaking information about my old employer.”
Did it feel weird looking back at Half-Life all these years later for the Valve documentary, I wonder?
“Yeah, it was good for me to just kind of process and put a bow on that stuff, see a bunch of old friends, think about that, the whole thing,” Marc says.
“I hadn’t talked to or seen a lot of those people for a long time. I still stay in touch with a few folks, but they’re also not really there anymore. I don’t know what’s going on there right now, but it was fun to hang out with people and talk it over and it was therapeutic.”
With Half-Life and Half-Life 2 anniversary documentaries done and dusted, the only Valve game Marc might be asked to reminisce over now is Dota 2, which, ominously, is 12 years old. Perhaps in eight years Valve will come calling. “I could speak to Dota. That’s the only thing left.” Unless, of course, Valve fancies doing something on Alien Swarm (“I did a little bit on Alien Swarm”).
It is impossible, I find, to talk to Marc Laidlaw without talking about Half-Life. With those Valve documentaries out in the wild, there isn’t much left to say about the past. But maybe (hopefully?!) Half-Life has a future, and it’s that thread I want to pull on.
There is no point asking Marc if he knows whether Half-Life 3 is in the works. As he says, he doesn’t really know the people still left at Valve, but even if he did, he’s not about to announce the game here in our interview. Can you imagine the email Gaben would send if he did?
It is a better use of our time, I think, to ask Marc if he’d ever write for a video game again. Marc says he is, generally, still open to writing for a video game, and suggests Hideo Kojima should perhaps have given him a call. “When Death Stranding came out, I just was grinding my teeth. Like, does he know I’m available? I’d be happy to help do the last polish of dialogue on your script and not wreck anything, but just make it lines that actors would sound better coming out of their mouth.”
Marc, as he alluded to earlier, “retired really hard,” and he thinks that because of that, the industry doesn’t think to ask him to do anything. “When I see the Miyazaki stuff, the From studio stuff, of course you go to George R. R. Martin first if you could. Nobody needs my name on their project to sell copies. But I mean, that kind of thing to me is exciting.”
The lack of interesting offers post-Valve came as something of a surprise, Marc says. “I did kind of expect more interesting offers of stuff to do afterward and was kind of like, ‘this is weird: somebody wants me to write their synopsis for their mobile phone laser tag game.’ It’s like, they don’t know what I do.”
Wait, really? Someone actually asked Marc Laidlaw to write a mobile phone laser tag game after he left Valve? “Those are the kind of things I would get,” Marc admits. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know that I have much to offer you guys, but I mean, I don’t really like to say no to stuff.”
Marc continues: “I haven’t really heard any interesting game offers that seemed right for me. People think of me as, you can come in and write a bunch of stuff for a game. I’m like, ‘do you notice how little writing there was in Half-Life?’ Sort of the point of it was I hated reading in games.”
And then the inevitable interview-closer: if Valve gave Marc Laidlaw a call and said, ‘we want to get the band back together for Half-Life 3,’ would he answer that call?
“I would not do that,” he replies, matter of factly. “I can definitely say I would not do that. Even when I was there, I started to feel like, ‘Oh, now I’m the old guy shooting stuff down.’ I think at some point you need to let the people who are the fans and the creators who’ve come in because of what they learned from you maybe, and let them have that. We need new stuff. We didn’t need me going, ‘Well, the G-Man wouldn’t do that in my day.’ And I found I had to restrain myself. People would get enthusiastic about stuff, and I felt like it was becoming a negative force on some of the creative process.
“I haven’t played the VR Half-Life: Alyx, so I don’t really feel like I can. I don’t know what’s going on with anything. And it is not really my place. God knows what it’s doing in terms of creative process of how to get a great experience that will surprise people. And you have to be right at the edge of what you can do in a moment. And I’m not on that edge anymore. That’s not what’s interesting to me at this point. So I don’t think I’d be good.
“Plus, I’m one of the older guys, maybe not the oldest, but it’s so much work. I mean, I don’t think I could do that anymore. I get into my own things, but it’s not on anyone else’s schedule. And yeah, I’m pretty much done. I mean, maybe not done with games altogether, but definitely the Half-Life part of my life is way behind me.”
So, that’s that. Half-Life is done with Marc Laidlaw, and Marc Laidlaw is done with Half-Life. But there’s a lot more he’s done in the past that’s relevant now. Just look at Netflix making 400 Boys, 40 years later. Maybe, at some point in the future, Netflix will knock on Valve’s door and ask to turn Half-Life into something. Then Marc Laidlaw can go through all this all over again.
“The fact that I got into the cyberpunk thing before it was called cyberpunk, and then I came across this sort of beginning game company that ended up making Half-Life… I’ve been lucky to be a part of these things that just kind of become phenomena.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Now we’re cooking with asbestos: Warhammer Skulls, the yearly power armoured excite-o-thon hosted by Boltgun actor Rahul Kohli, returns this Thursday. It’s traditionally a time of reveals and revelry, with the Mechanicus sequel a likely contender for the spotlight this year. You can watch it live on TwitchHam at 17:00 BST/12:00 EST/9:00 PST. Here’s a teasytrailyhypeyshouty in the meantime.
