Focus Entertainment has announced that Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 development has begun, which is great news for fans of one of the biggest hits of 2024.
“Your duty is not done,” the company writes on BlueSky. “We’re pleased to announce that the development for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 has officially begun at Focus Entertainment, Saber Interactive and Games Workshop.”
“Players can look forward to an immersive campaign, a multiplayer mode, and innovations that will redefine the standards of third-person action games,” they add. “We will take all our learnings and apply them to an even bigger and more spectacular game for the third instalment.”
It’s interesting to note how Focus frames the game’s development as being a collaboration between the three companies. This comes a few weeks after it was announced quite specifically that Hasbro has signed the Space Marine 2 team to develop one of their tentpole franchises into a game. There’s a lot of flexibility in how studios work these days, so Saber’s St. Petersburg studio could have multiple teams and new creative leads could be stepping up to work on Space Marine 3 while the old leads look to crack this new nut.
Either way, it will be a while before we actually get to see Space Marine 3, and if you were worried that Space Marine 2 would be dropped like an unloved toy from yesteryear, Focus have assured players that there is still plenty of support for that game to come, continuing on with the planned post-launch support roadmap.
They followed up, “We’ll share updates on this new title when the time is right. For now, our focus remains on delivering the best possible experience for Space Marine 2 players.”
There’s already been the dangled thread that support for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 could continue after the end of the current roadmap. Back in February, on the cusp of Season 3 of content, the team said, “Worry not, even if this roadmap ends in 2025, that doesn’t mean the game will not receive new content after that!”
Of course, it’s easy to start speculating what kind of challenge you’ll have to face when Space Marine 3 arrives. After battling Orks and Chaos in the first, Relic Entertainment developed game, Saber used their Swarm engine to great effect to let you fight Tyranids… and also Chaos – which the developers admitted was something they wished they hadn’t repeated. However, there were also teasers of other alien races sprinkled through Space Marine 2, with the appearance of Necron tombs hinting that these ancient robotic beings could be opponents in future…. and hopefully not Chaos again.
Even with that foible, Space Marine 2 goes down a treat for fans of Warhammer 40,000 in particular. In our Space Marine 2 review, we said, “The best rendition of the Warhammer 40,000 universe we’ve ever seen. Bombastic, brutal and brilliant fun from start to finish, though those who are already invested in Games Workshop’s sci-fi world will get the most out of it.”
Source: BlueSky