Saber Interactive has announced that it is working on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3, a follow-up to last year’s smash hit, Space Marine 2. Aside from the incredibly dull naming convention, the game was an immensely fun action-adventure that saw Lieutenant Titus shoot, slice, and smash his way through hordes of Tyranids and Thousand Sons in order to save the universe.
While I missed the Orky humour of the first game, Space Marine 2 was an improvement in almost every area. It felt like a natural evolution of its predecessor, which is doubly impressive seeing as Saber didn’t make the original. The first Space Marine was instead made by Relic Entertainment, most famous for the Dawn of War games (which look like they could be making a comeback).
Space Marine 2 played things fairly safe from a narrative perspective. Titus was his usual honourable self, his period in exile with the Deathwatch relegated to the tutorial. There were cameos from iconic characters and a grand showdown featuring the might of the Ultramarines fending off the forces of Chaos in a cutscene that I’m surprised hasn’t already been modelled into a Golden Demon-winning diorama. However, things could have been different.
Space Marine 2 Could Have Been Very Different
Using the Wayback Machine to find a since-deleted interview with the original game’s director Raphael van Lierop reveals his plans for two sequels to Space Marine, had Relic held onto the license.
“I had some big plans for Titus,” van Lierop told Penny Arcade. “The second part of his story was to focus on a ‘Titus Unleashed’ plot—basically there were forces arrayed against him that would see his loyalty to the Adeptus Astartes pushed to its limit, and his reaction would be to kind of ‘go rogue,’ and we’d see a different Titus, not quite as in control as we saw him in Space Marine. He would be kicked out as a consequence—exiled, which would basically be a death sentence for him.”
This was intimated by his arrest at the end of the first game. Instead of sending him on a one-man mission for vengeance, Saber briefly gave us a glimpse at his exile and then immediately brought him back into the fold as a senior member of the Ultramarines. Sure, his allies had some suspicions about his loyalty, but he was as compliant as Roboute Guilliman himself.
He’d probably be Chaotic Good, fighting for the Emperor but outside the constraints of the Codex Astartes.
But van Lierop didn’t just have a plan for Space Marine 2. In his vision of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3, Titus would form his own Ultramarines successor Chapter of soldiers loyal to him.
“He would survive [the sequel], and come back even stronger in the third game, where other Space Marines still loyal to him would rally around him and he’d return to ‘clean house,’ but as the head of a brand new Chapter that we would build around him.”
That sounds pretty extreme, especially as it would have meant deviating away from the poster boys of Warhammer 40K. However, Relic has previous. The Blood Ravens, a Chapter of Relic’s own making created for Dawn of War, have become an iconic force of the Space Marines. I’ve seen countless Blood Ravens on the tabletop at tournaments and friendly games, and they’ve even graced the pages of official Codexes in the years since.
“[Titus would] return to ‘clean house,’ but as the head of a brand new Chapter”
I would have trusted Relic to create another iconic Chapter for its version of Space Marine 3. Alternatively, might we have seen an origin story for the Blood Ravens, whose genetic ancestry is shrouded in mystery? Linking two iconic 40K video games and positioning the Space Marine series as a third-person prequel to Dawn of War would have sent shockwaves through the community, and in an alternate timeline I would have loved to see what Relic cooked up.
What Will We See In Space Marine 3?
What we’re getting instead is Necrons. Many players familiar with Warhammer 40K will have immediately recognised that the final act of Space Marine 2 took place on a Necron tomb world, and I expected a surprise third faction to enter the fray as the game came to its conclusion.
That didn’t occur, but we can surmise that 40K’s most ancient race will have a part to play in Space Marine 3. The presence of Chaos is also a given, which gives us our two opposing factions. I wonder if we’ll see a third Chaos God represented though, after Khorne and Tzeentch made Titus’ life a living hell in the first two games.
Necrons and Nurgle daemons could risk feeling boring, with both factions known for their abilities to soak up damage. Could that mean we have a Slaanesh force on the cards? I’d certainly be interested to see Saber’s take on the Emperor’s Children, after my obsession with Fulgrim recently forced me to paint my first Space Marine squad in over a decade.
As for Titus, I fully expect him to tread the straight and narrow. Perhaps the Secret Level episode will serve as a teaser, or Henry Cavill’s Amazon show will feature the new face of 40K, but I can’t see him doing anything as drastic as forming his own splinter Chapter. Perhaps the stakes will rise so high that we’ll see a Primarch get involved. But if Calgar’s role is anything to go off, that will amount to a cool cutscene and little else.
After the success of Space Marine 2, Saber can either take some risks or play it safe. I suspect it will do the former, iterating rather than reinventing. That makes a lot of sense when it comes to mechanics, but I’d love it to take some wild swings at penning new Ultramarines lore so the most boring Chapter in existence finally gets a little edge.
