A huge part of game design is balancing the rules and variables within the game to achieve an optimal play state and experience for the player. This will involve tweaking a vast array of numbers to try to ensure that as large an amount as possible of players have fun that they consider challenging, engaging and fair. In videogames this normally falls to a group of designers that use their own knowledge and experience combined with feedback from everyone that plays the game up until release to change enemy health values, player aim assist and so on until the game feels ‘just right’. This ‘just right’ status is usually incredibly hard to define and achieve but we are fortunate in that a designer can dramatically affect the balancing of the game for the better in the space of a few minutes. Anecdotally I remember sitting with the values of every weapon in the game in front of me and making a whole host of changes and in the space of a half hour we were testing the changes and agreeing that they made a world of difference. This is a total luxury and an aspect I relish and enjoy.
Not everyone is so lucky though.
Warhammer 40,000 can only be balanced by a new edition of the rules and by new army books (army books or codexes describe the special rules for each army) and these have several years turn around. As with all rule systems, you can only design Warhammer to a certain level before it is released. As soon as it is released into the wild people find all sorts of situations cropping up that weren’t accounted for.
Codexes are even more problematic as discrepancies arise between them and new editions of the core rules and then they can break when going against other armies. This is especially apparent to me as a Witch Hunters player. I play a branch of humanity called the Inquisition. These are Gestapo like characters that hunt out aliens, witches and daemons and are backed up by a legion of hard line warrior nuns. The last time they got a new codex was at the end of the 3rd edition of the 40K rules. We are now half way through the cycle of the 5th edition and they are one of the worst armies out there. Other armies have had multiple army book iterations since the Witch Hunter book was released and these have all been changed in line with the trends that Games Workshop have placed in the core rules (greater variety, cheaper troops). Witch Hunters are not so lucky.
There has been an overall increase in power and reduction of gaming points cost in newly revised armies and the Witch Hunters can’t compete. For example, I have nothing that can kill a Daemon army. Other codexes are more than capable of dealing with them as they have more powerful and cheaper troops. The new Tyranid codex (imagine the Aliens) has halved the cost of the basic troops so they can now field double the amount. They have also increased range weaponry so they can now out shoot some builds of my army and can certainly rip them apart in close combat. These changes as a whole are better but it leaves players like me at a distinct disadvantage. The game is no longer balanced and thus not as much fun. Unfortunately not many people play Witch Hunters and so it is not good business to make a big push to bring them up to date.
I guess the best gaming analogy is class changes in an MMO. Things can change and break the game but they can be fixed the next week. I have been waiting several years for my rules to be fixed.
Games Workshop is a strange beast in that people still put up with this in 2009. We live in a world of rapid iteration and change. If people don’t like something because it is broken and unfair it is dropped, discarded and it fails. Not GW though. For some reason they can release broken rules and we are still drawn to it. This could never happen to this degree in the world of videogames but it is utterly fascinating in the world of Warhammer. How long will it last though? How long before they get rid of the established army book business model they have and we get into rolling revisions that we see every year? Maybe every six months? Maybe every month? How would they deliver this? Ebooks are a good idea. I’d happily pay a few quid every six months to get an updated army list on an ebook reader or something.
It is interesting that GW seem to be following the same curve as videogames. Once we released products that could not be changed until the next big iteration, now I download patches daily. It will be interesting to see how GW deals with this.
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