Interviews

We talk to Ben Murch from Rodeo Games about the upcoming 'The Brutal Tribe' iOS update to Warhammer Quest

Brute force

We talk to Ben Murch from Rodeo Games about the upcoming 'The Brutal Tribe' iOS update to Warhammer Quest
|
iOS
| Warhammer Quest

Rodeo Games will be updating its Silver Award-winning boardgame-based dungeon-crawler Warhammer Quest with some paid content this week.

After downloading Rodeo Games's The Brutal Tribe update, you'll unlock new regions, monsters, and loot. It'll set you back £2.99 / $4.99.

Alongside The Brutal Tribe, there's a new pack of three heroes - the Bright Wizard, the Shadow Warrior, and the Ogre Irongut - priced £1.99 / $2.99. You'll also be able to bag new legendary weapons for 69p / 99c.

All of this new content will be available on Wednesday, as well as a free update with more items, weapons, and armour.

We got a chance to chat to Ben Murch from Rodeo Games to find out more about The Brutal Tribe, what players can expect in the fire caverns of Averland, and why the Orge Irongut is his favourite of the new characters.

Pocket Gamer: First up, could you tell us what players can expect from The Brutal Tribe expansion?

Ben Murch: The Brutal Tribe is set in the region of Averland, which is to the south of where the existing game takes place.

There are nine new settlements there, with bespoke quests for players. It's mostly higher-level content, so you'll be able to increase your existing party of heroes all the way up to level 8.

Also included in The Brutal tribe are new enemies. All sorts of Savage Orcs will be battling your adventurers along with high-level Black Orcs and Stone Trolls.

You've already announced one of the three new characters, The Shadow Warrior. How do these three characters differ from the heroes we've already played as?

We always try to give all our new characters some new traits. You know, to make combat and exploration more interesting and tactile.

The Shadow Warrior can move, shoot his bow, then move again (once you fire a shot normally, you cannot move).

He also has a number of skills that enable him to vanish from combat. He's very sneaky and highly deadly.

The Ogre Irongut is like a tank rolling through a dungeon. Lots of his abilities aid his damage soaking. His cool mechanic, however, is focused on his attack. The Ogre only has one chance to attack, but he has a variety of different types of attack for individual situations.

For example, he may use "Head Crusher" to smash loads of damage into a boss, or "Mighty Swing" if he's surrounded by enemies and wants to damage them all.

Finally, the Bright Wizard has a similar skillset to the Grey Wizard, but he's all about offensive magic.

Almost all of his spells are aimed at dealing damage to enemies, including his "Burn" spell that deals out damage over a number of turns.

Have you taken onboard anything from player feedback since the game's release that's changed your approach to The Brutal Tribe?

Well, we have made a lot of UI tweaks. Simple things that players ask for that we can change to make the game better.

Aside from that, we've found that players love kitting their heroes out with vastly different combos of equipment to suit their playing styles.

With that in mind, we've included a bunch of new weapons and armours for players to quest for in the upcoming free update. This will further increase that level of customisation.

We also get a lot of people asking for more of the original heroes from the tabletop game. This is something we're definitely thinking about for future expansions.

Are we likely to see an Android version of the game any time soon?

That's literally the #1 question we get asked!

The answer is 'not any time soon', I'm afraid. We built Warhammer Quest to be an iOS game exclusively, which meant using a lot of the existing iOS libraries and architecture.

Porting it to Android would be a massive task. Having said that, we are looking at some porting options. No promises, though.

Lastly, what are you most excited about players seeing in the new expansion?

We've just got back from Games Day up in Birmingham (a Games Workshop yearly event). Pretty much everyone loved the Ogre character.

We just saw these big grins on people's faces as he went about smashing things in a very satisfying way.

Personally, though, it's all the new story quests in the expansion. We have a very talented ex-Games Workshop writer who creates all that content.

The new stories are funny and entertaining, and will really, really surprise you by being pretty dark in parts.

Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.