What really irked me was the statement to the effect of "Everyone knows w/o Space Marines the Imperium would have already fallen."
Now, technically, that's true. However, and this is seemingly the game's biggest disconnect:
THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TABLE TOP RULES, TABLE TOP FLUFF, AND 100% FLUFF.It goes like this. In 100% fluff, 10 Space Marines can take over a planet, fight off 10,000 Orks and basically afraid of nothing. 100% fluff is generally a Space Marine power fantasy
because Games Workshop no longer rights fluff for anyone else but Space Marines, Imperial Guard and Chaos. The bulk of 40k fiction is overwhelmingly Space Marine.
In table top fluff, 100 Marines can hold off 200 Orks, lose some guys and possibly lose. This is because Space Marine players need epic stories that highlight their awesomeness over the other races. Read the other race's codices and you'll read about them chopping up Space Marines like they're getting the mail. Or, failing that, they'll just repeatedly pick on Imperial Guard or races that are closer to them in terms of numbers vs. strength. Either way, table top fluff doesn't set up unrealistic expectations because you're going to be fed the harsh reality of the RNG and those two need to align.
In table top rules, a marine is, basically, 20% better than an Ork at, like, triple the cost. A single Ork can kill a single marine with an appreciable margin of success. What they can't do alone, they do by dint of numbers and sheer fire power shifting the odds in their favor.
TABLE TOP IS NOT ABOUT A COUPLE GUYS KILLING HUNDREDS, IT'S A NUMBERS GAME ABOUT THE LAW OF AVERAGES. You know who are actually really good in table top? Orks.
And this is the problem. They're speaking about all three things in the same breath and trying to build a game on it. Staying true to the pure fluff and the table rules are, in a sense, mutually exclusive. Games Workshop understands this disconnect, which is why they have different rules for what you say when it comes to different products: table top codices, video games and novels. It's a problem every single 40k game has to resolve.
No Imperial Guard player wants to hear "Yeah your race is actually insignificant in the grand scheme of things." Read the Imperial Guard codices, and they'll say they're the reason the entire Imperium hasn't collapsed yet, not the Space Marines. Read the Chaos, Ork or Tyranid Codices and they'll say victory is inevitable, because they're all so awesome, galaxy-spanning and unstoppable.
Each player of each race values their race above all others. Their fluff, their moments of triumph, their strengths and weaknesses, are all important to why players like the races they do.
These guys seem to be oblivious to that. The watch word at GWS is that Space Marines are what moves units. The truth is, every race has its niche and needs to be treated with a certain level of respect, even races you hate. (Personally, I wish the Tau would just disappear from the universe.) You can't make races subservient to other races, regardless of the popularity of Space Marines. Relic knew it, and it's why the Dawn of War games, for as many things as they do right, basically still boil down to evenly matched forces with like powers and troops. They couldn't hack the balance of the fluff of Space Marines being fair to anyone else, and to date, no one really has. Which is why they made so many Space Marine campaigns with completely different balance and rules than the multiplayer, that was their solution.
So Behavioral Interactive seem to be taking the tact that "Space Marines rule, other races drool" and embracing the ideology from a design standpoint. I.e. the game is probably going to be balanced against Space Marines first and foremost, or balanced for Space Marines. I play Space Marines, personally, but I want more parity than that.
Also his talk about game mechanics and the economy, what the flying fuck, it's like Molyneux all over again it seems :S
Yeah, Molyneaux-esqe is probably the best way to describe his assumptions about how players will react to these things and behave, and how he's going to build a business model off of that. Worst of all, he's casting all F2P players as essentially dicks and hooligans, setting up the false equivalency that paying = "disciplined and committed" and F2P = "griefing asshole who lack discipline."
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3748727 times)