Blood Bowl 2? new logo

[pressie]

Have people seen this... Blood Bowl 2?

http://www.facebook.com/bloodbowlgame

What do we think this means? Will it have any repercussions on table top? Or just an updated PC game.

[duckwing]

That's interessting. Not much to get excited about if it's still Cyanide doing it, but at least it's good that they still want to invest in BB.

[SetzerGabbz]

I know a lot of people will be unhappy, since the first one is so unfinished and buggy, but I think it has the potential to be a good game. They overhaul the A.I., have all the tabletop teams at launch, every star player, every inducement, rework the customizing of teams (more face, hair, body size, and color options), better animations, etc.

I'd like to see all that happen in my original copy for sure, but since it's not, I'll reserve judgement until the start releasing more info other than just a logo.

[VoodooMike]

I don't think what you end up seeing in "Blood Bowl 2" will be what you're hoping to see... I doubt it'll be another PC version of the board game - it'll be set in the Blood Bowl universe, so there will be Skaven, Dwarfs, more game commentary and such, but I highly, highly doubt it'll involve the turn-based game in some new and improved form. Instead, like the very temporary, obscure leak stated back in the 24 hour period before Focus deleted the postings, it'll be a storyline game and will probably involve a more serious attempt at making a real-time (ish) fantasy football game to appeal to a larger audience. I'm pretty sure that poster even suggested that the game would follow a single player, not a team, such that you're not coaching the entire team at all.

Take a look at Cyanide/Focus's use of the Game of Thrones IP license - they first released a strategy game that was buggy and half-assed, then the other studio released a large-scale storyline RPG that was actually quite good (well, better than you'd expect from cyanide), but also quite a bit different in focus.

There's really no reason at all for them to do a new product that is the SAME thing as the old product... there are a million reasons to do something radically different, and to try to appeal to a wider market.

[spubbbba]

That’s interesting Mike, I’d assumed we were going to get more of the same. But we have pretty much run out of teams, if GW are still against Slann then that leaves just Pact who don’t add much as they are just a mismatch of players from other team. So they’d really have to invent more teams but that runs all sorts of risks, do we have any stats on how much the Khorne team has been used?
They can of course add more stars and stadiums but I don’t think those are much of a draw.

The real time mode was woeful but I did hear a few people who were new to BB who got the game thinking it was an updated mutant league football or like Chaos League. If they made it a violent Madden rip off with Orcs, elves and chainsaws then that could be a lot of fun.

I really don’t know how they’d manage to turn it into a RPG, maybe it will be a manager style game. It would have to be a good game in its own right as the BB community is pretty tiny and I wonder how many would be interested in playing it in that way.

[VoodooMike]

That’s interesting Mike, I’d assumed we were going to get more of the same. But we have pretty much run out of teams, if GW are still against Slann then that leaves just Pact who don’t add much as they are just a mismatch of players from other team. So they’d really have to invent more teams but that runs all sorts of risks, do we have any stats on how much the Khorne team has been used?
They can of course add more stars and stadiums but I don’t think those are much of a draw.

Other than this community's wishful thinking, there's absolutely no reason that they'd have a different studio working on a new version of the same product - we know that the entire team behind BB:LE/CE no longer works for the company, and when they wanted to put out Dungeonbowl, they recycled the same code rather than writing it from scratch. Add to that the fact that the code for the existing game is their refined work across multiple years, so writing the SAME GAME from scratch would result in new, unrefined code... which is a senseless move. Again, the only people this makes sense to is the existing PC game community that self-righteously believes that they should "do it right", and so forth.

Cyanide has at least two studios (france and quebec - I'd say canada but it depends on who in quebec you ask...) and different teams in those studios. Everything points to this being developed by totally new people, and being a different product (since they divided the existing offerings into "editions" instead of version numbers, though they originally did intend to call LE "BB2"). A completely new team suggests new code, meaning a new product, rather than a rehash of the old one.

The real time mode was woeful but I did hear a few people who were new to BB who got the game thinking it was an updated mutant league football or like Chaos League. If they made it a violent Madden rip off with Orcs, elves and chainsaws then that could be a lot of fun.

A well-done realtime mode game of this genre would be fun and popular - with the general gaming community, not with this particular community, though lets face it, most folks would buy it just to check it out, or would buy it shortly after its release if people said it was fun, even if its not the board game. Plenty of people bought the BB manager card game, and no few people read the novels... people talk a good fight, but they're more open to new ideas than they think they are.

Of course, the emphasis there is "well-done" which... I'm not sure Cyanide has a great track record for. GOT:RPG was fun in terms of storyline, and to some degree gameplay, but it was still not on par, quality wise, with the games coming out of serious development studios. Poor graphics, cumbersome interface, and glitchy functionality marred what would otherwise have been a good overall game... so... good ideas, bad implementation.

I really don’t know how they’d manage to turn it into a RPG, maybe it will be a manager style game. It would have to be a good game in its own right as the BB community is pretty tiny and I wonder how many would be interested in playing it in that way.

I don't think the TT BB community is their target audience. If your goal was to make money, is that really who you'd want to prioritize with your development, knowing that what they want is actually very different from what typically sells? They've milked the TT community already with the current offering. So lucrative was that endeavor that they left only 2-3 people behind to work on the followup versions!

I'll certainly be interested in seeing what BB2 ends up being. People can hope for the best, but in terms of this community, they should prepare for the worst.

[Bob Bifford]

still have to be a mug to buy another game from cyanide!

[Chris]

It has apparently been a good earner for them.
I think blood bowl could be in their eyes a good opportunity for DLC style payments, if the dungeon bowl experiment went well why not have a base game for $20 with say 4 teams and a bunch of stars, then $5 per team, $1 per star etc. Maybe even charges for online play... Just tinker with the existing code and make people pay out again...

I'm sure we all have a wish list of things we would like to see, all essentially stuff we can do in real life with blood bowl - so start with more money, award skills, create star players, create teams and new positions, transfer players, incorporate/work better with BB manager, etc etc. Never mind the bits that are left out - stars and cards, buggy - insert list here, or wrongly implemented - journeymen, shadowing/diving tackle, etc.

But yes it is all too reasonable a fear that they wish to *insert bollocks corporate speak here* with the IP/licence and bring out something else to appeal to a wider pool of people, rather than an improved version of what we have currently that will sell at most to the same number of people it has already sold to.

[spubbbba]

Other than this community's wishful thinking, there's absolutely no reason that they'd have a different studio working on a new version of the same product - we know that the entire team behind BB:LE/CE no longer works for the company, and when they wanted to put out Dungeonbowl, they recycled the same code rather than writing it from scratch. Add to that the fact that the code for the existing game is their refined work across multiple years, so writing the SAME GAME from scratch would result in new, unrefined code... which is a senseless move. Again, the only people this makes sense to is the existing PC game community that self-righteously believes that they should "do it right", and so forth.

Cyanide has at least two studios (france and quebec - I'd say canada but it depends on who in quebec you ask...) and different teams in those studios. Everything points to this being developed by totally new people, and being a different product (since they divided the existing offerings into "editions" instead of version numbers, though they originally did intend to call LE "BB2"). A completely new team suggests new code, meaning a new product, rather than a rehash of the old one.

Ah, I wasn’t aware that it was so different, I should have paid more attention. I’d been under the impression that it was going to be a similar vein from BB1 to LE to Chaos edition. Something like “Star Edition” so CE with Pact, all/most of the star players, some new stadiums and maybe some awful all star teams made of good guy pact or just star players added on top. But that does make much more sense of why they’d call it BB2 and why we won’t see it till next year.

I don't think the TT BB community is their target audience. If your goal was to make money, is that really who you'd want to prioritize with your development, knowing that what they want is actually very different from what typically sells? They've milked the TT community already with the current offering. So lucrative was that endeavor that they left only 2-3 people behind to work on the followup versions!

I'll certainly be interested in seeing what BB2 ends up being. People can hope for the best, but in terms of this community, they should prepare for the worst.

I’ve heard that the BB card game is pretty good but that the novels were awful, even by the somewhat erratic standards of the Black Library. I would be interested to know how much appeal GW’s books have to the regular fantasy novel crowd. Apparently the Horus Heresy novels sold pretty well and they are quite accessible.
Maybe if Cyanide had made the real time version 1st the sole focus they could have done a decent job of it and gained more good will from the community. Existing BB fans already had tabletop, MBBL, stunty leeg and FUMBBL to play on, mind you FUMBBL might never have moved from lrb4 then.

I don't think the TT BB community is their target audience. If your goal was to make money, is that really who you'd want to prioritize with your development, knowing that what they want is actually very different from what typically sells? They've milked the TT community already with the current offering. So lucrative was that endeavor that they left only 2-3 people behind to work on the followup versions!

I'll certainly be interested in seeing what BB2 ends up being. People can hope for the best, but in terms of this community, they should prepare for the worst.

True, and BB doesn’t even have the wide appeal of GOT. There are a likely to be a lot more people aware of that who are willing to take a punt on it than BB. But equally if they make the game fun but totally ignore the fluff then they will annoy less fans. It has the added advantage that since they are not following an existing set of rules they can change things without it messing up the balance.

This may well be a better way to get casual gamers into BB. If you can run round as an Orc with a chainsaw hacking elves to bits and occasionally scoring a TD that could have wider appeal.
Of course if they are not going to follow the existing board game then the question is whether it’s worth the bother. They are going to be seriously constrained by having to get GW to sign off on everything.

[Chris]

Of course if they are not going to follow the existing board game then the question is whether it’s worth the bother. They are going to be seriously constrained by having to get GW to sign off on everything.

I suspect GW doesn't care one bit about the game, just their IP and even then they are a bit confused about it as it departs from their core IP. If they brought out a first person football game GW wouldn't care as long as the Orcs were still green.

[Shteve0]

I truly, genuinely, profoundly hope Cyanide collapse under the weight of their own arrogance.

Cyanide - Fix your mess, or go F yourself.

[VoodooMike]

Ah, I wasn’t aware that it was so different, I should have paid more attention. I’d been under the impression that it was going to be a similar vein from BB1 to LE to Chaos edition. Something like “Star Edition” so CE with Pact, all/most of the star players, some new stadiums and maybe some awful all star teams made of good guy pact or just star players added on top. But that does make much more sense of why they’d call it BB2 and why we won’t see it till next year.

Maybe they will make it that, but I don't see why they would. If they believed they could continue in the same vein as before then they'd have had no reason to make CE compatible with LE, or to sell it to people for so low a price - that really signaled an "end of product" release, to me, but I'm not privy to what Focus/Cyanide are thinking on any given day. It strikes me as a really bad idea to just make another board game implementation - they'd likely sell fewer copies this time around than they did the first time.

Maybe if Cyanide had made the real time version 1st the sole focus they could have done a decent job of it and gained more good will from the community. Existing BB fans already had tabletop, MBBL, stunty leeg and FUMBBL to play on, mind you FUMBBL might never have moved from lrb4 then.

Well, the tabletop players who were also avid internet gamers were almost a guaranteed sale, and Cyanide'd had decent success with Chaos League in the past... its not unlikely they thought they could use the TT group's interest as a starting point and move the whole thing into being primarily realtime. Obviously that didn't happen, and the audience for the product became smaller and more bitchy and demanding over time.

Of course if they are not going to follow the existing board game then the question is whether it’s worth the bother.

By who's standards, though? By this community's then its not worth the bother... but if this community isn't the target audience then who cares? Hell, on a good day even this community can't agree on what it wants, and certainly doesn't well represent the consumer gaming market.

I suspect GW doesn't care one bit about the game, just their IP and even then they are a bit confused about it as it departs from their core IP. If they brought out a first person football game GW wouldn't care as long as the Orcs were still green.

This is exactly what I think, too. From everything I've seen GW is only concerned with the fluff, not the mechanics, which is why we've seen a huge grab bag of games from Relic for WH40k, from RTS (that doesn't follow the TT rules) to small squad combat, to first person shooters. With the introduction of the Khorne team it seems apparent they're not even THAT concerned with the game's existing fluff.

I truly, genuinely, profoundly hope Cyanide collapse under the weight of their own arrogance.

You sure they're the ones being arrogant in this scenario?

[pressie]

All the above makes sense and means

In my mind of rainbows, smiling players and make-believe, Blood Bowl 2 is a relaunch of the game with a new core set and new fluff. With a multi-platform release on PC, console, ios and android to go with it. Coaches playing blood bowl in tournaments, on the train using their phone and even in GW shops.

[Darkson]

Demo'd at German Games Day, but no more info than that.
http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2013/08/ ... rmany.html

[dode74]

Pics courtesy of XanderV on OCC:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-ny7v ... C02293.JPG
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k2wP ... US1934.JPG
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-IJGT ... C02294.JPG
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-fdBe ... US2387.JPG

Everything I see on the screens is BB:CE content. The only think which I can see which is likely BB2 related is the manuals on the tables. Here's a blow-up:

The logo looks a lot like this: