Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 just closed out its second year of post-release support with a one-two punch of updates. Patch 14, aka The Confrontation Update, adds a new enemy and significantly expands the game's PvP options. Since Confrontation's release, a separate update has added Steam Workshop support to Saber Interactive's hugely successful shooter.

Let's start with the Confrontation update, which, as the name, suggests is heavily focussed on Space Marine 2's PvP mode, Eternal War. Patch 14 adds two new PvP arenas, a medium-sized map called Sanctum, and Facility, which Saber describes as "one of the most compact PvP maps" available in the game. Alongside these maps, the patch adds weekly PvP rewards, meaning you can earn cosmetics and other in-game rewards by playing matches and completing challenges.

If you're more interested in the cooperative side of Space Marine 2, then the update introduces a new enemy for players to fight—the Scarab Occult Terminator Sorcerer. The Sorcerer is a tough miniboss opponent that will appear throughout the game's Operations mode, and furnished with a wide array of abilities. He's able to create copies of himself, teleport around the battlefield, and attack the player with a powerful laser beam. This video gives a good overview of the Sorcerer's moveset. It seems like he'll provide a stern test for even the most grizzled Ultramarine.

As for the Steam Workshop support, obviously it's early days for Space Marine 2 mods. But there are a few player-made extras that are worth checking out. The main one is the Astartes Overhaul, which has been available on NexusMods for a while. The mod rebalances Operations while adding new weapons and customisation options. It introduces three new classes to play as—Terminator, Chaplain, and Apothecary, as well as four new weapons including an Assault Bolter and an Artifex Bolt Rifle that comes with optional incendiary bolts.

Most of the other currently available mods are addons for the Astartes Overhaul. These range from adding some extra execution animations to letting you play with six or even nine-man squads. There are a few non-Astartes mods however Health on Executions makes Space Marine 2's grisly finishers even more like Doom's glory-kill system, while Rogue Trader Tyranids reworks the game's insectoid menace to more closely resemble their 1985 models.

While this wraps up Space Marine's second year of updates, Saber Interactive has confirmed that it will continue supporting the game for at least another year. The developer hasn't specified what new stuff will be coming to the sequel in the next twelve months, but a detailed roadmap will be revealed on the game's second anniversary in September.

It's been a big week for Project Zomboid, the wildly successful zombie survival sim that, like a doomsday prepper holed up in a fortified basement, simply refuses to leave Steam early access. Its first major build update since 2021 coincided with a slight price increase for The Indie Stone's undead phenomenon, but this didn't stop the game from setting a new record for concurrent players on Steam.

As detailed on the Project Zomboid blog, build 42.20 brings an extensive overhaul to the game's setting of Knox County. For starters, seven of its towns have been completely reworked with new art that gives each settlement its own distinct architectural style, completely unique buildings and houses, and improved landscaping between the buildings.

In addition, the surface area of the map has been doubled, bringing the total number of tiles to 35,000. This map expansion brings with it multiple new and overhauled locations to explore, including a boy scout camp, an "entirely new" prison, and everybody's favourite spooky locale, an abandoned orphanage.

My favourite stat of all is that the build adds "400 procedural basements". There's no specific reason for that—I just like the idea of needing to procedurally generate a basement. Not all of Project Zomboid's basements are subject to algorithmic whims, however. There are also 75 unique basements that you may stumble upon during your adventures.

Alongside the changes to the map, build 42 expands Project Zomboid at a mechanical level. It introduces new animals like cows and chickens, while also making changes to the hunting and trapping system, opening up new opportunities for farming and wilderness survival. The update also brings an improved stealth system, fishing refinements, and the ability to drag corpses.

It's a significant update, and The Indie Stone has increased the price of Project Zomboid to reflect that. Prior to Build 42, Project Zomboid cost $20 (£16.75), but that's now been raised to $25 (£22.50), which is a substantial hike. But that didn't stop the game from reaching a new all-time player concurrent on Steam, with nearly 79,552 players flocking to Steam to check out the update in the early hours of Friday.

With build 42 now out, The Indie Stone's attention will presumably turn to the next planned update, which will herald the long-anticipated return of NPC survivors to Knox County. Given the average length of time between more recent Project Zomboid builds, I wouldn't expect to see this surface for a few years yet.

What is that quasi-critical darling and pillar of K-content Crimson Desert even about, anyway? The answer becomes less clear by the day, as now it's something of a full-blown trading simulator—given this is the developer behind Black Desert Online, a game where you can breed and sell horses when you get tired of adventuring, I'm surprised it took this long.

Trading was already in Crimson Desert, but a sizable economy overhaul arrived in the latest patch, which you can read about on Pearl Abyss's website. It adds 133 new trading posts, rebalances "types and quantities" for all trading posts, and introduces some new mechanics to simulate supply and demand.

For instance, when too many items are sold at a single location, that will affect local prices. And if you trade at remote locations ("hard to reach by wagon," as the notes describe them) you'll turn a higher profit. That's on top of the fact that trade profits in general have gone up, and there are 24 new types of "high-value" goods to move.

The response on social media is a mix of pleasant surprise and raised eyebrows. "I'm actually baffled," said Reddit user VictorBelmont. "I thought like three people actually did wagon trading." a reply from Hazel0mutt reads, "Probably because it was a shitty system. Now I'm excited!" The update seemingly continues a long trend of Pearl Abyss shrugging off critiques that less is more by insisting 'no, more is more.'

There's a host of minor fixes as well—certain challenges which were bugged before should be completable now, and there are "improved interaction animations" for animals like the platypus and the feathered weasel. That might sound negligible, but you don't get kudos from the Prime Minister of South Korea by cutting corners on your platypus animations.