James Hewitt has an impressive CV. I reel off a list of the games he’s designed to him (Blood Bowl 2016, Adeptus Titanicus, Silver Tower, Gorechosen), and he chimes in to add a few more (Necromunda, Betrayal at Calth). His decades-long career in the tabletop games industry is iconic, and if you’ve played a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Games Workshop boxed g꧑ame released between 2014 and 2017, he probably had a hand in it.
While his tenure at Workshop is what most players will know him for, Hewitt’s work on the likes of Hellboy and Blitz Bowl is equally praiseworthy. After coming on board with Modiphius as a contractor to work on Fallout Factions, a skirmish-based adaptation of the hit video game, he’s now working in-house on its games four days a week. I sat down with him to talk all things 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Warhammer and Nuka-Cola.
“I would never consider any game I've worked on to be finished,” Hewitt tells me via video call. He explains that there’s a point when all your changes and tweaks offer diminishing returns, and done is better than perfect. This goes double when working to tight deadlines at companies like Games Workshop, and other than Adeptus Titanicus, Hewitt never had long to perfect his creations. He created Gorechosen in just two weeks in between returning from some leave and swapping roles within the company.
Hewitt had more time on other projects, but the success of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Blood Bowl put the spotlight on the Specialist Gam༒es team he was a part of, and suddenly their l👍engthy playtests and relatively calm environment became frenzied and hectic.
He’s been away from Games Workshop for seven years now, and his experience at Modiphius is already proving a tonic to that frantic design process. Fallout Factions: Nuka-World will be the first game he hasn&rsquo�🍷�;t abandoned as soon as it has hit the shelves. This time, he’ll be there to support it going forward rather than watch others thrive with his baby.
“With Factions,” he explains, “it's the first time that I've been around to develop a game that I designed. Looking back over Games Workshop, the first thing I did there was Betrayal at Calth, which is a Horus Heresy tactical, squad-based combat thing. It was such a throwaway, like they wanted a game they could put into a box and sell some miniatures. And I was like, ‘No, I'm gonna design a game.’ And so I'm really proud of that, and I would have loved it if the series then continued with that set of mechanics, and changed it differently each time.
“Blood Bowl I did a☂ little bit, but it was mostly pre-release and I moved onto other things. Necromunda I designed it and then left the company. Titanicus, there were huge delays because it was gonna be resin and then it moved to plastic so it was redesigned. It was originally meant to come out when Necromunda did, but they changed it. So I released it and then left.
“I keep seeing these games I design, and then other people pick them up and do cool things with them. That's lovely in itself, but it's so satisfying to be here and, with Factions, we've got all these plans and I'm here to help them move forward.”
Built Like Necromunda, More Similar To Blood Bowl
Factions is an interesting game because it’s meant to appeal💮ꦉ to such a wide range of people. It’s a skirmish game for Fallout fans who’ve never played with miniatures before, it’s accessible in its rules and campaigns, it oozes that iconic Fallout style. You have around a dozen models that you can upgrade between missions, alongside bottlecaps and SPECIAL stats, chems and Deathclaws, but they may not work exactly as you imagine.
From a gameplay perspective, Fallout Factions started life as a “Necromunda/Kill Team kind of game,” to act as a foil to Modiphius’ dense, granular Fallout game, Wasteland 🍷Warfare. However, Hewitt’s explanation of the league play mechan꧙ics is more reminiscent of Blood Bowl.
The balancing mechanics mean you can upgrade your squad of wasteland raiders and not worry about being overpowered against 🌱a🐠 new player. Similar to Blood Bowl’s inducements, if your roster is a tier below your opponent’s, you can buy out your local Commonwealth merchant to stock up on stimpaks and RAD to level the playing field.
Matches should be short, around half an hour in length, and are played on a 2’x3’ board. Setup is quick, and gameplay is as fre𒐪netic as it is fun. It sounds perfect for an evening in the pub, and tournament play could be more e💝xciting still.
Hewitt stresses the importance of nailing the “vibe” of a game, especially when adapting an existing board game or IP. Translating mechanics, even from digital to tabletop, doesn’t always work in the new medium. Hewitt has learned this over the course of adapting dozens of games, from Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower (based on Warhammer Quest and Hero Quest), Hellboy (based on, well, Hellboy), and Blood Bowl 2016 (you know where this is goi💙ng), a process he refers to as &ldquoꦓ;game archeology”.
While Modiphius has plenty of remote employees, Hewitt and the seven core members of the design team work from the office in Nottingham. “When you're working on a board game or something, it's just easier to get around a table and try things out,” he explains.
Despite this, he always goes back to the video games when making decisions about Factions. “I've got various saves in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fallout 4 where 👍I can go and put the cheats on to travel over there to have a look around, or go to the weapon crafting table and roll up sᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚome guns so I can see what we do in the game.”
🌱Hewitt says that Factions is up there with Titanicus as his favourite game he’s ever designed (he would say that), but it doesn’t strike me as coincidence that the two games he had nine uninterrupted months to design are his favourites. The process seems less stressful, the design could afford more iterations and testing, and the final result is more polished as a result. Who’d have thought it, allowing your designers ample time and resources results in better products?
Rꦍead part two of our interview with James Hewitt next week at TheGamer, where we discuss how an adult diagnosis of ADHD affected his approach to game design and more stories from his time at the biggest toy soldier company in the world.
