Blood Bowl 2 Addendum

So there's a few things about Blood Bowl 2 to touch on here that I didn't get to in the video.

Changes from the Living Rulebook 6
I had a link to the rulebook in the video description but BB2 has a few differences from it.  I found these in a forum thread on the Steam boards and I'll try to keep it up to date - and if I find a list from the devs, I'll have it linked here as well.  The bits in brackets is how they are in the LRB.

• Human Catchers are AV8 (up from AV7)
• Human Ogres cost 130k gold to hire (down from 140k)
• Orc Blitzers cost 90k (up from 80k)
• If you have more than 150,000 gold saved up, everything above that counts towards your Team Value since it's enough to let you buy some of the more expensive pre-match inducements.

cKnoor
cKnoor is a Blood Bowl YouTuber who's been around for a while.  There's a link to it in the forum thread I mentioned in the video description but he did a series of videos to help people get the hang of Blood Bowl.  Even if you're not exactly a newbie coach, it can still be useful to watch some of his matches to try and learn new strategies or tactics or even just to get an idea of how a certain team plays before you try it out.  You can find his channel through here.


Downloadable Content
As I mentioned in the video, other teams will be coming as paid DLC in the future and, while I think a lot of the arguments for having all 20+ teams in the initial launch are being pretty-damn optimistic, there is one that I agree with - namely that if it turns out you don't enjoy using a particular team you've bought, you're now out-of-pocket.  Sure; it may not be a huge amount of money (some of the more plausible guesstimates I've seen have been around the $5-$10 mark) but it would still be annoying.
One easy way around this, though, is if Cyanide implement a trio of pre-made teams of each race to the base game.  So if the Amazons get added, the core game gets three pre-made Amazon teams you can try out in friendly matches without having to buy the Amazon DLC.  The base game already has pre-made teams for the existing ones; three per species and each at different Team Values (1000, 1300 and 1600 for those curious) and you can still play against DLC teams you don't own so the files for them'll already be in the game.  For all I know, they've already done this but I have no way to check - don't know anyone who owns BB2 but doesn't also own the Wood Elves and Lizardmen.  I'll ask around on the forums and update this when I have an answer.

Cyans
These are an in-game currency that you earn independently of your teams.  There's nothing to use them on at the moment, but Cyanide have said that you'll be able to spend them on cosmetic stuff for your teams, like new jersey colours, stadiums and so-on.  Nothing that affects gameplay, though, purely cosmetic stuff.  I've heard some people say you'll be able to buy Cyans with real money, but nothing official.  It wouldn't surprise me, to be honest, especially since they'll only be used for cosmetic stuff.
I just hope that it'll let you change which stadium you picked for your team - the Hellborn Hooligans ended up with a Skaven-themed stadium since that was the closest to a Chaos-oriented one.  It'll still be named "The Elfblender", though, that's not gonna change.

The Hellborn Hooligans
This next section's just me raving about my Chaos team so if you're not interested in some of the narratives that can form from how your team progresses, you can skip it.
So these guys were the first real team I used in the original Blood Bowl game and, unlike the team's current incarnation, I just let the game name the players for me.  One of whom was a Beastman named Gnar'tigor.  As I took the team through the various cups in the single-player campaign, they kept growing and growing.  Gnar'tigor himself did plenty of growing as well, soon becoming the Hooligans' best player, both thanks to skills he'd picked up and a variety of mutations - a second head, a third arm, claws... he left piles of broken bodies in his wake as he scored touchdowns and even a smashed ankle didn't slow him down.
But then the Hooligans faced one particular Wood Elf team and partway through the match, one of the spindly tree-huggers got lucky.  Gnar'tigor got brain damage.

Between the two injuries and his own value as a player, I had no choice but to let him go; he was bloating the team value more than he was contributing.  But because I'm a big fan of narrative and story, I always imagined that Gnar'tigor took over as the team's PR representative and took to handling the team's publicity - appearing in various CabalVision ads for their sponsors, handling press conferences and so-on.  And while he's normally very polite and well-spoken, his second head would occasionally spout a stream of vulgar-yet-creative profanity towards anyone in the vicinity or on whatever the main head was talking about.  A lot of it aimed at wood elves, to no great surprise.  And during the matches, he'd be up there in the crowd alternately cheering the Hooligans on and beating the ever-loving crap out of the opposition's fans (and any wood elves regardless of who they supported).

With the team's current incarnation, I hired an assistant coach and always imagined him as being Gnar'tigor having shifted from publicity to helping the team train, lending his experience to the new lineup.  Either way; the team now has his son in the roster, Gnar'tigor the Second.  So far he hasn't been blessed by Tzeentch as much as his dad, but he's well on his way to being our premier ball carrier thanks to his first level-up getting him an Agility boost.  At the very least, his mutations'll be along more focussed lines; I was still learning the game when his father was on the team so I'll try to be turning him into a dedicated runner/thrower/catcher, etc.  He may not rack up his dad's body count, but he'll still be making a name for himself.

The Dice
Yes, I know I harped on about these in the video but I just want to re-iterate.  Every dice roll can fail, every dice still has a 1-in-six chance of coming up a 1 (or an Attacker Down on the Block Dice).  I don't care what stats are involved or how skilled you think the player is, they can always screw up.  If you don't get your head around this and accept it, you won't enjoy this game.  If you ever say the dice are being inconsistent (which is an actual complaint I've seen on the Steam forum for the game), I want you to stop and think back over that statement.  At what point are dice rolls supposed to be consistent?  That's why I tried to emphasise where the real strategy in the game is; minimising the risks your team takes while forcing the other team to take a lot of risks.



Anyway; got another video planned, just need some good background music.  We'll be trading in the grass and pigskin for neodurium and titanium and the digital for the physical.

Shadowrun Hong Kong: Addendum

As the blog's description says; this is stuff that didn't make it into my Shadowrun Hong Kong video, either due to a lack of time or just plain forgetting (or because I was worried it'd lead into a long-winded ramble).

Protagonist's Background
So HK has a slightly more defined background for your player-character than the last two games.  In Dead Man's Switch, the only things that were nailed down was that your character was betrayed on a run against Renraku that went south and you're returning to Seattle for the first time since that night, while in Dragonfall all that was nailed down was that your character was fluent in German and worked with Monica in the past, but never met her current team.

In Hong Kong, they defined things a bit more for your character.  Firstly; your character and Duncan both grew up in the Redmond Barrens in Seattle before being taken in by Raymond Black.  He got you and Duncan an education, got you out of the slums, then eight years ago you left, the reason is up to the player but it ended with you being thrown into a corporate-run prison, a full-on blacksite with no communication with the outside world.  You were only released because the company that owned the prison was bought out by someone else who decided to save some money by closing the place down and giving you some money to compensate for your incarceration.  You travel to Hong Kong because Raymond contacts you for the first time since your imprisonment and asks you to meet him at the Kowloon docks.

It was a surprise to me, as it makes Hong Kong the first time your character isn't actually a shadowrunner prior to the events of the story.  I've seen mixed opinions on that; some people are like me and are happy with it while others feel like it's restricting the narrative side of your character a bit too much.

Voiced Cutscenes

The game also has hand-drawn animatics with voice-overs.  If you've played any of the Homeworld games, they're much the same as the between-mission cutscenes there.  Otherwise you can just find a Let's Play of the game on YouTube - there's one right at the beginning of the campaign, actually plays before character creation so you shouldn't have to wait too long for it.  I'd actually suggest against watching a Let's Play too far unless you're happy with spoilers.  There's a moment in the first area that loses a lot of impact if you don't know it's coming.  Not gonna say any more or I'll ruin it in the exact way I'm wanting not to.

Goblinoid Character Models

Anyone who's played Returns or Dragonfall probably noticed that Gobbet and Duncan, the two ork companions, were both very slim compared to the orks in the earlier games.  This was one change I was very glad to see as I hated how top-heavy orks and trolls looked in Returns and Dragonfall, especially as the artwork from the tabletop game show them with much more human-like proportions.  This motivational poster actually uses artwork from the 4th edition core rulebook - one of the pre-gen example characters, an ork gunslinger adept - and that's how orks normally look in the Shadowrun artwork.  Well... okay; this one's a particularly-attractive one but you get my point.

Either way; I was glad to see that orks and trolls looked more like they did in the source's artwork.  Worst bit of the old models was how a lot of them had mouths that looked like their teeth were growing straight out of their lips, which is something I've never seen in any Shadowrun artwork.  Humanis would probably have more traction if all orks and trolls were that ugly!

Dialogue Quantity

I think I mentioned this in the video, but just re-iterating it here to be sure.  There is a lot of dialogue in SR: Hong Kong and there's even a long thread on the Steam forum for the game titled "Why is this an interactive novel?"  I don't think I need elaborate on the thread creator's opinion when he gave it a title like that.  Personally; I think it's got a decent amount, none of the conversations seem rushed and I always felt that the conversations you could have with your teammates in some other RPGs (like Mass Effect or the KOTOR games) ended just as I was getting into it.  That being said; I can see why some people might find it to be too much dialogue.  I'm quite a big reader so I actually like having this much stuff to read.

Funnily enough; I think I recall a thread making the exact same complaint about Shadowrun Returns - which had a hell of a lot less dialogue than Hong Kong - not long after that came out.

Conclusion

So I know I took a while to get this out after the last video and that it's taking me a while to get another video up and I'm sorry for that.  The issue is that my videos normally end up so long that it can take anywhere from six to ten hours to upload and I don't like leaving my computer on overnight if I can avoid it.  Combine that with the monthly cap on our downloads (and that I think uploads count to it as well) and you can see why I'm trying to stagger my uploads.  There's also only one day of the week that really works for uploads and that's Thursdays - it's the day I'm at home the least thanks to work and the local wargaming night so not having internet access at home doesn't really bother me.  Thankfully I've got other arrangements (which I won't go into here) that means I'm not leaving the computer on all day in an empty house but if I haven't got a video edited and ready to go by Wednesday night, then it'll be another week at the earliest before it's uploaded.

I'll make exceptions if the finished video file is only about 2.5GB - that can usually be uploaded in just six hours or so so I can start it before work and it should be done by the time I get home, but with how I ramble on sometimes that's not guaranteed.  Hopefully having this blog to fall back on'll help me keep video lengths reasonable so I can upload them any day.

The next one is planned, but thanks to discoveries I've made since I recorded it I'll have to do it over again.  Not too happy with how the commentary on the old version turned out anyway - kinda focused too much on the game's mechanics over how it plays and I left out some very important considerations you should take into account before buying it.

Anyway, see you guys in the next video.  Hopefully it'll be as bloody as the title'll imply.