Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters Interview

If you’d like to learn a thing or two about Complex Games’ efforts to accurately portray Warhammer’s Grey Knights in Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, you should check out this recent Rock Paper Shotgun interview with the studio’s CEO Noah Decter-Jackson.

Here’s a quick excerpt to get you started:

How do you balance conveying the feel of such powerful warriors with providing an interesting tactical challenge?

It’s not easy, and we’re still trying to perfect it: the Astartes need to feel powerful, rather than being flimsy and disposable, which is sort of the standard balance in this genre. We tried to flip the script in many different ways on that standard, giving the player tools that they can use like the Knights’ psychic abilities, equipment and the environment itself – this allows the player to be more active and aggressive.

The sense of ‘tension’ in this kind of game balance is very different because of that. The Grey Knights can’t be made to feel expendable, so as a player you aren’t going to have that same immediate fear that if one of your squadmates walks around a corner they’ll instantly get pot-shot and be out for the rest of the game. In practice, this means both pushing the scale and numbers of enemies vastly higher than your small squad, as well as building out mechanics based around pressure from attrition, particularly through accumulating injuries over time.