Warhammer 40K: Kill Team – Metawatch Provides Interesting Developer Insights
Are you a Kill Team fan? Perhaps a wannabe Game Designer? You should check out the Kill Team Metawatch and learn a thing or two.
Games Workshop released a new Metawatch video for Kill Team. And I’ll be honest, I skipped watching it until today. And boy, do regret that decision now.
Meta Worth Watching
Obviously, if you’re a Kill Team fan you should check out this update. It’s about a game you’re playing and has a lot of info about changes coming and the reasons behind the changes. If you’re not a Kill Team fan, but you do like to learn about games or game design this video has some really insightful information for you.
I won’t spoil the whole video but I wanted to touch a few important things. One of the big things to note is Kill Team is a game with a LOT of factions. Balancing all those factions can be tricky. It’s not always good to add a new faction to a game if they aren’t bringing anything new to the table. And it’s at least acknowledged that there are factions that are outliers and recurring problems in Kill Team.
Another big thing is that because the data set of Kill Team isn’t as easy to get as say 40k tournament data, the designers have had to reach out to their respective community. I think this is possibly one of the best takeaways for anyone looking to make games: get feedback from people who play your game. Don’t just take the word of some random internet comment — seek out active players and get feedback from them.
It’s not just important to get feedback, it’s also important to act on that feedback as well. And I gotta give props to the Kill Team uh…Team. They took some feedback and made some good changes to the game. One of the pain points has been the new rules for the season. In particular, the movement around the gantries became a bit too oppressive and franky unfun for a lot of Kill Teams. So they changed it for the better.
I think all of these changes are good, particularly the removal of jump tests. While it was thematic to have your units jumping from platform to platform it was a real “feels bad” moment when you failed a jump test and the model just sorta …stood there. I gotta give props to the design team for accepting the feedback that a key element about the season wasn’t fun and then having the guts to change it.
Even More Changes For Kill Team
Again, you can watch the video for a lot more details on why the changes are what they are. There’s also the WarCom article you can read that really highlights all the things coming as well. I think Kill Team is in a good spot and these tweaks are only going to make the game better. There’s even some looks ahead to the future of Kill Team. You can expect even more balance passes to happen as the game progresses.
We’ve also got Kill Team Nightmare coming very soon (pre-order this weekend) and Kill Team Termination around the corner, too! Will these new teams shake up the meta? We’ll have to wait until the next one to find out!
Listen to the active players and then act on the feedback. Good Job, Kill Team Team!
