This is the rulebook designed to send Blood Bowl into a perpetual format.
The Games Workshop is no longer interested in providing true support for this game.
Yet in 2009, Games Workshop backed Cyanide in its attempt to recreate Blood Bowl on the PC.
Soon afterwards, Games Workshop went further - dusting off tabletop Blood Bowl for a new edition.
Its always a great thing to be able to showcase and sustain these great tabletop games, Bresard says.
Its a new way of working for the Parisian developer.
We just have to copy what [Games Workshop] do, basically.
But on the other side, we also have less margin for creativity.
We have to abide by what theyre doing.
By contrast, Games Workshop has very specific designs for Blood Bowl.
There are the new rules, there are the new miniatures.
So they want us to support this specific version, they dont want us to be something else.
We have to support each other.
When Ifirst played Blood Bowl 3 in beta, I couldnt help but wonder why it existed.
Behind the scenes, though, Blood Bowl 2s in-house engine had gone as far as it could.
It was hard to continue to iterate, Bresard says.
We had to change to the Unreal Engine.
There are, of course, commercial reasons for building another sequel as well.
Cyanide has been bought by Nacon - before we worked with Focus Home Interactive, Bresard points out.
Obviously, we want to have a Nacon Blood Bowl.
It hasnt changed fundamentally, he says.
But it has changed enough to require a new game and to feel different.
A series of early turnovers is almost guaranteed to lose you a match.
In Blood Bowl 3, for the first time, you could make several rerolls in a single turn.
Its a change that has the potential to make a match both more dynamic and more farcical.
You have to be careful, Bresard says.
You still have to manage your rerolls for eight turns.
And in that regard it fits in a different niche than all the other tactical games you mentioned.
I dont expect Blood Bowl to become as popular as XCOM, but it has its own niche.
While Cyanide knows its game and market intimately, that institutional knowledge hasnt necessarily sped up development.
This sequel was originallyintended for releasein August 2021, and has beenpushed backonmultiple occasionssince.
One reason obviously was the pandemic, everyone was hit by this, Bresard says.
Theres also a third, more positive factor behind the protracted development.
Cyanide has run three open betas to date, and committed hard to acting on player feedback.
Matches have become slightly less colourful, too, after some complained of headaches.
This issue is there in the tabletop version as well, Bresard says.
We have the luxury to be able to differentiate [using] animations and idle poses.
Both will replace the traditional defaults, Humans and Orcs.
Having them as the new base teams really changes things, Bresard says.
They are really different [from each other] to play.
When you were playing with Humans and Orcs, they had mostly the same positions.
The plan is to keep going until Cyanide runs out of official teams to adapt.
Then, the studio will start making new ones.
We havent got that much time to think about what we would do, Bresard says.
I definitely have some ideas - more thematic ideas than gameplay ideas.
