Former GW/Wh40k Dev joins Blizz (Andy Chambers)

[Azazel]

I know some of you guys here are fellow Warhammer players, so when I found this here link, I thought I'd share it with y'all. Although there's hardly anything earth-shaking in his blog, anyone who knows the GW product will know how important Chambers has been in the development of stuff for 40k in the last 10 years or so, particularly Orks and Tyranids. It'll be interesting to see what he does over at Blizz..

http://www.redstargames.net/news02022006.html

The last paragraph suggests he's not working on WoW, but perhaps SC2..

[Comstar]

Hmmm...would you pay to play Worlds of Starcraft?

[Hoax]

I think the world of Chambers he always seemed like a smart guy who really enjoyed making cool things.  Always thought highly of him compared to a Gav Thorpe or some of the other people working for GW.

Who knows what this will actually mean, but I do think that Blizzard lost some of their talent particularly in the being original and innovated deptartment when the people who formed Arena.net and Flagship left.  Although I'm not nearly enough of a nerd to know any of their names or know when they left.

[schild]

As much as I love Diablo 1 & 2, Starcraft and Warcraft 2 - I would never say Blizzard was ever particularly innovative or original. I mean, they just bought legitamacy with this guy. I mean, they already lifted all of his ideas and made their own worlds out of it. All that was left was to acquire Chambers.

[Hoax]

SC had 3 teams, this was at a time when the two dominate titles had 2 (C&C and WC)

WC3 had hero's, while I'm sure there are some minor RTS clones somewhere that did something similar, the mods that feature spawned alone make it a cool thing.

Diablo was an old idea, in new clothes with the best loot system ever.

WoW... had content?  Seriously you can NOT say anything good about WoW without a caveat.

Casual friendly?
Until you get to 60, then be prepared for BG/Rep/Raiding grinds

Pretty world?
Nothing special graphically other then they learned from asian art designers and made a world that doesn't look like ass and actually has cohesion (EQ's, DAOC, SWG I'm looking at you)

and so on.  Yeah it wasn't a great point, but I'm going to pretend to stand by it.


Oh add Diablo to the dictionary, wtf is Shockeye doing?  :-D RTS too please.

[schild]

WoW is the best dikuclone ever.

[Nebu]

WoW is the best dikuclone ever.

Add PvE to that statement and I would agree.  As much as I despise WoW, it is the best PvE dikuclone ever made. 

[Venkman]

If GW had more levels, I'd say it would trump WoW in terms of raw fun within a PvE experience. The game and character customization abilities are inspired.

Otherwise, yea, I'd agree WoW is the current pinnacle of a Diku-inspire experience. And I don't buy that it's not innovative simply because it turns into a grind at 60. Every game has a cap. It's just that in WoW, more average gamers can hit it, and do so playing a light-RPG experience. For this genre, that was obviously innovative enough.

Hmmm...would you pay to play Worlds of Starcraft?

Not sure. SC always felt very "heavy" to me. It's not a fun world. Even in the darkest days of Warcraft, there was enough tongue-in-cheek stuff to keep the experience light. I'm trying to remember any form of comedy in SC. Maybe it's just the years.

That matters to me. I don't play games to be depressed.

[Alkiera]

If GW had more levels, I'd say it would trump WoW in terms of raw fun within a PvE experience. The game and character customization abilities are inspired.

Otherwise, yea, I'd agree WoW is the current pinnacle of a Diku-inspire experience. And I don't buy that it's not innovative simply because it turns into a grind at 60. Every game has a cap. It's just that in WoW, more average gamers can hit it, and do so playing a light-RPG experience. For this genre, that was obviously innovative enough.

Hmmm...would you pay to play Worlds of Starcraft?

Not sure. SC always felt very "heavy" to me. It's not a fun world. Even in the darkest days of Warcraft, there was enough tongue-in-cheek stuff to keep the experience light. I'm trying to remember any form of comedy in SC. Maybe it's just the years.

That matters to me. I don't play games to be depressed.

Firebat>
"Are you trying to get invited to my next barbeque?"
"Got any questions about propane?"
"Or propane accessories?"

Ghost>
"Never know what hit 'em."

SCV>
"I can't believe they put me in one of these things!"
"And now I gotta put up with this, too?"
"I told them I was claustrophobic, I gotta get outta here!"

Dropship>
"In case of a water landing, YOU may be used as a flotation device."

Science Vessel>
"E equals M C ... d'oh, lemme get my notepad."
"Ack, who let all these lab monkeys free?"

Artanis>
"Stop poking me!"
"What do I look like, an ORC?"
"This is NOT Warcraft in space!"
"It's much more sophisticated."
"I KNOW it's not 3D!"


See, humor!

Alkiera

[Jeff Kelly]

Well I played Games Workshop games for almost a decade but quit a few years ago when they started to dumb down the system and started to scrap all the old miniatures every time a new revision came out. Also they release new stuff at the same glacial speed as Blizzard.

The release cycle for Games Workshop games seemed always a bit odd to me as it went basically like this:

Warhammer/Warhammer 40k:

Release new revision
release last army list for the last revision
dumb down rules
buff Empire/Tyranids
Scrap 2/3 of all models in the new revision thus forcing everybody to buy new ones.
Raise price of new models
release new revision
release army lists for the three most popular armies (Empire, Orks, Dwarfs/Tyranids, Space Marines)
Announce all other army lists, release preliminary army lists so that people can play ("coming soon")
do nothing for a year
release some more army lists
do nothing for two years

With games other than Warhammer it went something like this:

Announce new game
release new game
do nothing for two years
cancel new game and stop producing models
do nothing for two years
when the game is bloodbowl re-release it.

I grew quite tired of the fact that every time I got my army up to the level of a new revision a new revision was released and all models suddenly became obsolete.

They also never did a good job at balancing armies. For WHFB at least Empire has always been > All. So I am skeptical whether the new employee is a blessing or a curse for Blizzard

[Azazel]

Actually, Jeff. That's quite an inaccurate portrayal of their release schedule, which I may correct tomorrow if I can be arsed.

[Calantus]

Andy Chambers... was that the longhaired guy with the pathetic looking face, or was it the guy with long hair, facial hair, and who looked mildly scary? It's been a while...

[HaemishM]

I know some of you guys here are fellow Warhammer players, so when I found this here link, I thought I'd share it with y'all. Although there's hardly anything earth-shaking in his blog, anyone who knows the GW product will know how important Chambers has been in the development of stuff for 40k in the last 10 years or so, particularly Orks and Tyranids. It'll be interesting to see what he does over at Blizz..

http://www.redstargames.net/news02022006.html

The last paragraph suggests he's not working on WoW, but perhaps SC2..

Funny, I always thought Andy Chambers was the overly-stoned cockgobbler who came up with the most whacked out shit that totally broke all the rules for other forces, making whatever he wrote a completely overpowered cheesedick force.

[kaid]

Somehow it seems appropriate for blizzard who stole so very many ideas straight from Warhammer has now hired one of the guys who tought that stuff up in the first place.

Still the warhammer people always seemed cool with what blizzard was doing so more power to them for not being bitches like marvel.


kaid

[Trippy]

Andy Chambers... was that the longhaired guy with the pathetic looking face, or was it the guy with long hair, facial hair, and who looked mildly scary? It's been a while...

I think it's probably the former. The latter sounds like a description of Rick Priestly and the pictures I've seen of Andy have him clean-shaven.

[Trippy]

Funny, I always thought Andy Chambers was the overly-stoned cockgobbler who came up with the most whacked out shit that totally broke all the rules for other forces, making whatever he wrote a completely overpowered cheesedick force.

That sounds more like Gav "Blood Angels" Thorpe than Andy Chambers.

[Hoax]

The Eldar codex was his tour de force.

[schild]

The Eldar codex was his tour de force.

Christ. You just made my brain pop.

[HaemishM]

Funny, I always thought Andy Chambers was the overly-stoned cockgobbler who came up with the most whacked out shit that totally broke all the rules for other forces, making whatever he wrote a completely overpowered cheesedick force.

That sounds more like Gav "Blood Angels" Thorpe than Andy Chambers.

No, I'm thinking of Chambers. He used to have really long, scraggly heavy metal hair back in the early '90's when I was paying attention, around the time of 40k Second Edition. He was a cockgobbler. He came up with all kinds of little bitty stupid fucking rule exceptions for special characters and shit like warp cannons and such that so totally broke the game it wasn't even funny. You'd have one or two forces (Space Marines and Imperial Guard) on one set of fairly decent rules, and then along would come Orcs and Eldar and it's like the writer wasn't even paying attention to the mechanics of the system. He was, IMO, mainly responsible for the "newest Codex is mostest strongest" complex GW had back then.

[Trippy]

Funny, I always thought Andy Chambers was the overly-stoned cockgobbler who came up with the most whacked out shit that totally broke all the rules for other forces, making whatever he wrote a completely overpowered cheesedick force.

That sounds more like Gav "Blood Angels" Thorpe than Andy Chambers.

No, I'm thinking of Chambers. He used to have really long, scraggly heavy metal hair back in the early '90's when I was paying attention, around the time of 40k Second Edition. He was a cockgobbler. He came up with all kinds of little bitty stupid fucking rule exceptions for special characters and shit like warp cannons and such that so totally broke the game it wasn't even funny. You'd have one or two forces (Space Marines and Imperial Guard) on one set of fairly decent rules, and then along would come Orcs and Eldar and it's like the writer wasn't even paying attention to the mechanics of the system. He was, IMO, mainly responsible for the "newest Codex is mostest strongest" complex GW had back then.

Ah okay that was a little before my time -- I started reading and buying the various WH 40K sourcebooks around 3rd edition so I missed out on "Herohammer" and the other munchkin stuff from back then.

[5150]

I've talked with Andy C at many-a-gamesday and hes a very cool and down to earth guy (Gav Thorpe is the moron)

The GW release schedule use to be to re-invent each of the 2 major games systems every 4 years, needless to say, once the number of armies grew this tended to piss off the player who had to wait 3.something years to finally get their list, only to have it made redundant a few months later.

The 4 year cycle has since been dropped and what they how do is revamp the rules every couple of years in such a way that the published lists still remain usable - they also revamp the lists every few years (40k is a good example where the rules have 'recently' been revamps with only a few notable differences and some of the original codecies (namely space marines) have also been revamped - the onld lists (and to a lesser extend rules) are still usable however

[Hoax]

The Eldar codex was his tour de force.

Christ. You just made my brain pop.

50 point Wraithlords?!  Starcannons for everyone?!  Come on, if you know anyone who plays Marines you must have heard them bitch about it.

[Azazel]

Somehow it seems appropriate for blizzard who stole so very many ideas straight from Warhammer has now hired one of the guys who tought that stuff up in the first place.
Still the warhammer people always seemed cool with what blizzard was doing so more power to them for not being bitches like marvel.

Warhammer (fantasy and 40k) is the biggest appropriator of historical and pop culture imagery that I've ever seen. Blizz may ave patterned their general Orc and Goblin designs after the warhammer ones (or more accurately, after Kevin Adams' sculpts) but Blizz have nothing on GW for stealing ideas..

As for the army book power spiral, it's a combination of bad design philosophy, and a nod up top to keep the new releases churning over. They're less bad about it these days, though, it's still present.

[Righ]

I remember when Games Workshop used to be an importer of wargames and when their shops were the first high street stores to sell RPGs. Somewhere I have the first issue of White Dwarf and the first Citadel miniatures. Although the Warhammer rules were well executed, they were bad news for people who wanted to browse through many varied RPG and wargames on a Saturday afternoon before settling on buying some complex FGU or SPI game. The GW shops sought a younger market, and they focused almost entirely on their own products leaving a void in the retail games market in the UK. As a result, GW and Warhammer can GET OFF MY LAWN.

[Alkiera]

I guess I'm fortunate to have a couple decent B&M gaming stores in town, and one of them in particular is really nice.  They own 2 spaces in a small strip mall, one has their store with some space at the back, the other is all open with tables and chairs.  They're constantly having CCG tourneys(Favorite overheard line: "Utica is such a cultural wasteland... no one plays Magic there.")  Lots of tabletop mini-based games going on too, from WH40k to a dozen others.  Shelves and shelves of RPG books, lots of selection, not just stock d20 and Vampire/Werewolf, but a lot of everything.

My gaming group usually meets there to play on the weekends.  Less distractions than meeting at someone's house, usually.

Alkiera