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It's Nandi! Hello friends sorry for the long
delay since I last posted some of you who have
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been keeping track know that I've been away on
holiday for the last 2 weeks and it's been pretty
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awesome part of that holiday involved a trip to
Germany to Snowprint's Berlin headquarters where
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I enjoyed meeting and chatting with some of the
team. You'll remember Wilhelm, the General Manager
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of the Snowprint Berlin office. I prepared some
questions for him to translate into a video but
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quickly time got away from us. It's an incredible
studio with a small but very passionate team and
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what should have been a very short meeting ended
up being an almost 4-hour visit. I've summarized
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the key points in the interview here. In this
video Aun'Va will represent Wilhelm and the
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Snowprint team. So that you know I'm not making
all this up this is a small 10-second clip of some
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of the juicy stuff that lies ahead: "The answer,
here, for 2025 is that I think the thing in the
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near future that I'm most excited about this is to
actually do something about campaigns." I started
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the interview fairly broadly with Wilhelm. We
know that tacticus has been publicly playable
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for over 2 years and has established itself as
the biggest mobile phone Warhammer game currently
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on the market. I asked him to reflect on what he
was happiest with, what he thought needed to be
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refreshed and what Snowprint has lined up for
2025. Wilhelm was pleased with with Guild War,
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generally speaking, in terms of how the game mode
evolved from its initial release over a year ago
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the team took player feedback on board and made
several improvements to the mode that improved
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playability added user interface features and
Polished it to make it an overall more enjoyable
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experience. Wilhelm also spoke about Faction Wars
as a more recent success. Tournament Arena was a
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game mode with a stagnant metagame and faction
Wars was an excellent way to change things up.
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Faction Wars ultimately has a limited shelf life
because after a while people will just play the
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factions that are stronger in that game mode,
however it successfully broke up the monotony
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of Ragnar and Aun'Shi mirror matches for a short
while. Survival was the last thing that he spoke
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about as a particular success. It is a new game
mode with unique gameplay and challenging enemies
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and by the end of the year we will have four
iterations of survival. Many of the feedback
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and engagement metrics they get on Survival tell
of its success and the team is justifiably proud
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of it. In terms of the game modes that needed
to be refreshed Wilhelm made it clear that
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the two main ones the team were looking at were
Salvage run and Onslaught. Onslaught was initially
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conceptually designed to be something more akin
to what we now see in survival - a wave based mode
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where you need reinforcements to make it through
more formidable enemies. These modes are dated
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and he acknowledges they need a revamp. You heard
this in the clip earlier but the snow print team
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is working on something related to campaigns it's
been something the community has been clamoring
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for for a while and Snowprint hasn't turned deaf
ears to those voices. The main reason it hasn't
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happened yet is the time and opportunity cost
required to flesh out a campaign. Designing new
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campaigns takes a lot of time to sculpt individual
tile sets and enemies and as you saw in the Saim
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Hann campaign lore has to be Canon and compliant
with the 40K Universe. It's really sensitive stuff
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from an intellectual property standpoint and there
is a lot of scrutiny from Games Workshop around
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it - particularly from a lore point of view.
They're working on something that Wilhelm calls
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more dynamic and more lightweight from a narrative
point of view which allows them to release more
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campaign-like content at a higher frequency.
Their solution should reach the players sometime
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in early 2025. We then moved on and I asked
Wilhelm about the process by which they create
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new characters. I asked explicitly about legendary
characters, translating lore and tabletop
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characteristics to the game and whether or not
they design characters with particular game modes
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in mind. Wilhelm explained that they try and keep
all characters broadly at a similar power level
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they try to keep the higher Rarity characters more
complex with more exciting interactions but don't
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necessarily want them to be the best characters
in the game at all times. An excellent example is
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Mephiston who has the uniquely powerful ability
to move your units forward to hexes through his
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active ability and another unique ability that
lets you invalidate healing and Reviving. Older
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characters, particularly starter characters, were
created with simple game mechanics and design
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to keep complexity manageable for newer players.
Over time Snowprint has revisited those characters
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and as we have seen in the case of the Orks -
reworked them to get them up to speed. Wilhelm
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explained that when designing characters they
intentionally try to create them with particular
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niches in mind. The folly of creating universally
powerful characters is that it creates situations
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where everyone builds and plays the small pool of
characters. This stifles theory crafting makes it
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boring for players and is bad for the game
economy. The approach Snowprint have taken
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should allow players to build characters that they
are emotionally connected to and still be able to
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perform reasonably in the game. That dovetailed
nicely into the conversation about nerfs. Snow
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print can't think of every interaction between
characters in the game and Snowprint have been
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sparing in nerfing characters. The reset stone
was introduced over a year ago as a way of having
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fewer feels bad moments when the character
that you've been working on for a long time
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suffers from being hit by the nerfbat -something
that they try and avoid as much as possible.
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We spoke about the requisitions and farming
characters and the current problems in the
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game. Snowprint recently introduced blessed
requisitions to gain shards for a specific
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group of of characters. However many characters
cannot be reliably obtained if their release
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event is missed. For example, a player could
currently see an ad for the blood angels but
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when they download the game they have no way to
farm for those characters. Wilhelm acknowledged
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that the team sees this as a problem. They don't
want characters to flash by and be unobtainable.
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The ideal situation is that players who are around
for the character release event and do well should
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earn the right to be strongest with that character
in a short exclusivity period. However, Snowprint
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want to introduce mechanisms into the game where
players can return and unlock characters even if
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they miss the initial release. I asked Wilhelm how
the team decides on things like when to complete a
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faction straight away as we saw in the case of the
T'au or give a faction three or four characters
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and then release the final character later.
There is less intention here than the public
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might perceive. The Snowprint team crafts design
Cycles around a 5 week schedule called the live
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Ops cycle. They have their own internal plans for
stuff in that live ops cycle - say a blood angels
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hero release event and then a legendary character
but plans are thrown askew by real world events or
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tie-ins with Games Workshop. Recent examples
include the Titus event or trying to stay
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temporally close to Games Workshop releases.
As a result their planned release schedule
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sometimes needs to be revised and they have to
fit characters in further down the line. A case in
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point is the Tyranid faction where they finally
released the fifth character via battle pass
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almost a year later. Our conversation then moved
onto the topic of reworks. Snowprint has a pretty
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steady release of new content guild raid bosses
roughly every 3 to 4 months. New game modes like
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war and survival and new characters every patch.
The pace at which older characters are looked
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at and reworked seems slower in comparison so we
spoke about this. Wilhelm explained that they have
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a self-prescribed release and event cadence every
live op cycle. They have a hero release event,
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two quests and a legendary release event so every
cycle they have to immediately devote some time
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to sort out this initial layer of content. The
goal is to keep looking at the oldest or weakest
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characters and improving them through reworks.
They were happy with the Ork rework and are hoping
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to do one character rework every month depending
on competing priorities. That may be two reworks
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in one live op cycle and then nothing in the next
one but that is broadly the pace that they aspire
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to. The other competing thing here is that they
don't want to make the starter characters too
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complex as these will be the first characters
that new players pick up and they don't want
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them to be put off by any complicated mechanics
and gameplay. That conversation led nicely into
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talking about new players. Tacticus has become
immensely more complex than when I first started
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playing 2 years ago. If I was to recommend the
game to a friend to pick up it is currently
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quite hard for them to get the roster and teams
required to play competitively in a lot of game
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modes. There were two talking points that came out
of it. First we spoke about catch-up mechanics to
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get players up to speed. Wilhelm acknowledged
that this is an area that the team are aware
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of and want to update but it has far-reaching
economic implications and takes time to implement
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properly. The second bit was about the true
new player experience framed in a way that I
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hadn't really appreciated before. When somebody
downloads Tacticus, or really any other game,
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the first few minutes and missions and gameplay
are really going to inform them if this is
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something that they're going to continue
playing longer term. There is apparently a
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funnel concept in game design where when you get
100 players to download the game and as you go
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through things like completing missions 1, 2 and
3 - the number of players that progress through
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each stage reduces over time. In order to have a
functioning game at the end of the funnel you need
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to have a reasonable number of players. Something
that Snowprint, and indeed any game designer,
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has to think about is how to make that funnel
and new player experience as good as possible so
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instead of narrowing over time and ending up with
four or five long-term players they get 40 or 50
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that stay the course. The tutorial is just one way
of helping to adjust the funnel shape and with all
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of the new stuff in the game that's something that
they are also looking at updating. Talking about
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the new player experience and player retention we
then moved the conversation on to when Tacticus
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would be playable on your own computer - whether
it be PC or Mac. As an Ambassador and Creator I'm
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pleased to already be part of the initial testing
group for the software that's going to allow
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tacticus to be playable on your own computer.
That's still in the very early stages and we
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are reporting our bugs to the developers as and
when they come up and Wilhelm wasn't able to give
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me a concrete time frame for when this would
reach the player facing side. However I would
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expect Tacticus to be playable on your computer
at some point point in 2025. I couldn't leave
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without asking about my favorite character
in Warhammer 40k - Commander Farsight. I was
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delighted to hear that since Snowprint broke the
seal with Titus as the sixth playable character
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for the Uultramarines they indeed do have plans
to include Farsight as a playable T'au character
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in the future. It is apparently a matter of when,
not if, Farsight joins Tacticus - but there are
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some finer nuances to iron out as the model size
is curently an issue. That was a longer video
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but hopefully you enjoyed hearing these insights
directly from Snowprint bye for now! it's nandy
