Greed for the greed god.
Blood Bowl always existed as the dreamer's answer to the dominance of Madden American Football games. Just as the Madden supremacy had stretched it's tendrils over every single club across the continent of North America, ensuring no other pretender could create their own simulation Football competitor; Warhammer was turning to one of it's most odd offshoots with a different approach to the sport entirely in order to satiate Football Fantasy Nerds. Blood bowl was an utterly bizarre mash-up of the various fantastical and mythical creatures and beasts from the Warhammer mythos, that were thrown together in a bloodsport-esque reimaging of American Football which has somehow been made turn-based with a threat of maiming and death slipped in there for good measure. When it came to turning that into a video game, what we got was a surprisingly fun little title that might have been slept on a little, but drew in the curious enough to keep going as a franchise.
As a fellow with absolutely no interest in American Football, I found the original Blood bowl game to be simply delightful in the way it remixed all the boring elements of the real-life sport and threw in an inherent level of carnage and drama through it's more thematically appropriate systems. "Oh no, this player is already on the back foot: if he rolls full failures again there's a chance he'll end up dead!" It's quite a bit more interesting than the set-up of 'plays' and 'lay-ups' or whatever. Whatsmore, there's a big reliance on the luck of the roll, which can be ever changing and interesting to rely upon as any tabletop lover will happily attest. And my interest was no outlier, as Blood Bowl, after many years doing the cult circuit, finally got itself an up-to-date sequel with Blood Bowl 2. (It only took the six years to get around to it.)
But there's always a problem with Sports games that get their sequels, now isn't there? Because you see, a sequel inherently, as a fundamental example of what a 'sequel' even is, requires the developer to improve upon pretty much every aspect of the original. But what can you really do to improve upon a sports game that captures all the rules and intricacies of the subject? Traditional sports games figured they could just 'sunset' older quality of life features and reintroduce them slowly alongside an agonisingly drawn out visual upgrade progress to justify their 'one new game per season' policy, but Blood Bowl is inherently atypical in it's approach. It's visually stylised, pretty much covers every important rule and sub-rule already and there's very little fundamentally to change beyond just making everything look a bit better. Blood Bowl has had some rules changes through the years, so the games do have the benefit of the ever-changing source material to lean on for ideas; but the generalised route for technical improvements has never been obvious.
That, by and large, is the folly of longevity; because just as nothing is supposed to last forever, little can sustain itself creatively for long. Creativity is just like the wick of candle, burning brightly and shrinking quickly, and once the fuel is gone that flame is snuffed out. In fact, that very example is the thematic heart behind the Dark Souls series, with all the spacial distortion of Dark Souls 3 itself being emblematic of the consequence of drawing out the life of the First Flame for generations too long. Cohesion begins to wear, sense starts to shatter, the strings that held that once beautiful thing together wither and snap and the dream can't stay as one whole forever. Every creative venture needs to be embarked on with a distinct sense of it's morality, because drawing out the inevitable for too long is a disservice to the art itself as well as it's audience. (Hmm? They just made a new 'Luther' movie? I rest my case...)
So if you've been keeping up with the news of recent releases then there's a good chance you know where I'm going with this: it turns out that Blood Bowl 2 was the end of the proverbial road. The point at which ingenuity powered creativity ran itself short and the team reached the zenith of what they could create with their idea. Now the funny thing about that point is you'd think that from there onwards the simple task of maintaining what existed before and doing basic touch-ups here and there for the next release would be child's play. But I guess everyone needs to justify their jobs and exsistence, because to a man, everytime a franchise hits that wall, the next entry turns into a total mess because the team decided to try and reinvent the wheel with match-sticks or something equally as stupid. Stubborn creatives' 'pride', it'll get you everytime!
Blood Bowl 3 is buggy, it's undercooked, it's lacking basic quality of life features such as being able to load back into matches after a disconnect. (A feature considered a milestone coming to the game in it's second season! How exciting!) There's no replay mode or spectator mode- another exciting late game addition. Also, season 1 has the promise of 'optimisation' listed on it's roadmap, which is a bit of a head scratcher. Shouldn't that be something done before the game is released? Oh but don't worry- stick around until Season 3 and you'll get Crossplay... as well as updated rules to match the boardgame. Wait... So Blood Bowl 3 doesn't even have an up-to-date ruleset? Have these people reinvented the game development process or is this game shipping mid-way through the Beta stages? What have the team been working on all these years?
Oh wait, I guess that effort went into Blood Bowl 3's flagship feature: the paid customisation shop. (Groan.) Yes, ontop of your half-baked nearly finished game you can pay extra for individual little customisation pieces for every single individual pawn for about a pound each. New helmet? One pound. New boots? One pound. Oh and there's rarities thrown in there too for some reason. I literally mean 'some reason' because there doesn't appear to be any sort of random loot system so the very concept of rarity makes literally no sense beyond justifying a slight price hike for the 'rarer' customisation pieces. All in all you're looking at probably twice the amount you invested into the game to buy every customisation piece, and those purchased pieces are the only customisation available in the game at launch. Now the team have come out and promised that these cosmetics can be purchased through match earned 'Warpstones' as well, (That's their premium currency) but honestly that just promotes these feature from a horrendously terrible idea to a pathetically under designed one. If you want people to 'earn' their cosmetics, why not build in a challenge system with custom tasks that players can complete for specific customisation rewards? You know, put a little bit of elbow grease into the 'game' part of the 'design' process?
It is stark how hand-in-hand general state games and cashing out to the lowest denominator of monetisation goes. As if the very point at which the decision is made to try and drain the literal blood out of the customer base, all the developers lose the will to motivate themselves anymore and the final product shrivels into a pebble of it's true potential as a result. Maybe that's the industry's way of protecting the consumer through unintentional self-sabotage- or just the very forces of common decency rising up and cursing all of these distasteful development process' for the good of everyone. Still, it's such a shame to watch a relatively niche property with a dedicated, if small, fan-base go the way of the morally bankrupt out of a bizarre surge of greed-blinded ineptitude. It make you wonder if anyone is safe from the avaricious phantom that scourges our community. What will be the next promising title to fall to it's whim? Final Fantasy XVI?
