Warhammer Quest dev Rodeo Games talks rules, random dungeons, and role-playing

Like many ultra-cool youngsters of my generation, I grew up playing Games Workshop tabletop games. One of my favourites was Warhammer Quest.

So, when I stumbled upon the news that Rodeo Games was making a version of Warhammer Quest for iOS, I simply had to go organise an interview with the studio's creative director and co-founder, Ben Murch.

During the following interview, Murch reveals all about his studio's upcoming strategical dungeon-crawler, including starting character classes and enemies (while hinting at those to come); and the challenges of modernising an officially unsupported boardgame.

Murch also reveals just how faithful Rodeo Games has kept to the vision of the original physical boardgame in this forthcoming digital Warhammer Quest adaptation.

Ben Murch: Games Workshops's Warhammer Quest was originally a tabletop game that allowed characters from all over the Warhammer world to team up and explore dungeons for treasure and glory. Although, let's face it: mostly for the treasure. Our version sticks very closely to that formula.

You travel around the Warhammer world with your group of adventurers, collecting loot, levelling-up, and hitting increasingly large monsters with a variety of increasingly cool implements.

Yes, they really are quite similar, aren't they. One of the great learning experiences for us on Hunters was creating our rule-set from scratch. A lot of work then went into balancing that whole system.

Having that knowledge was invaluable in tackling something like Quest, which comes with two rather large books full of rules and systems.

The other big lesson we learnt from Hunters was the importance of nailing the interface we used. Moving and interacting with several characters in an environment can be a fiddly process if it's done wrong. We've now iterated on our interface controls for three games.

Hopefully, players will find the Quest controls really intuitive and simple to pick up, while not taking the complexity out of the game.

Both. Some are bespoke story instances which are of the handcrafted variety. Others are randomly generated.

That's not to say the random ones are mindless hack-fests. Each one has objectives, specific loot, events, all sorts to make it feel as immersive as possible and not just some grind.

Multiplayer won't be available in the day-one release. However, we intend to support Warhammer Quest for quite a while. Multiplayer is one of the top features we want to implement post-launch.

Levelling is a rather huge part of the meta-game in the boardgame version of Warhammer Quest, so, yes, it's definitely in our game. It works in pretty much the same way as the revised Quest rules, too.

You earn XP in dungeons, then have to pay gold to a trainer in a settlement to level-up. Levelling-up not only increases your stats and makes you even more of an orc-slaying beast, but it also adds skills to your killing repertoire.

Skills come in many flavours: from Mighty Blow, which combines your total number of attacks into one massive damage-dealing strike, right through to the dwarven GoldMaster skill, which 'gifts' your party extra treasure from kills.

Your on-screen hero's appearance will change throughout the game depending on the equipment you give it. Weapons, helmets, armour sets, shields, bows all have unique models, which show up on your characters in game.

So, your level 1 Elf Waywatcher with starting gear is going to look very different in-game to your level 5 Waywatcher equipped with Eltharion's Bow and the Armour of the Wildwood.

One of the major stumbling blocks we encountered in the early stages was that the Warhammer world has come on so far since that first game was released. Barbarians don't really exist any more, so we've had to bring all those characters more in line with how things are now.

Luckily, the licensing team over at Games Workshop is a font of information when it comes to this kind of stuff, so we've been working very closely with those guys to make sure everything fits within canon and makes sense.

The four starting heroes are now the Norse Marauder, Dwarf Ironbreaker, Elf Waywatcher, and Grey Wizard. The same archetypes as in the original game, just more in tune with the Warhammer experience of today.

To tell you all the enemies in the game would be to spoilt it for you. I can tell you, though, that we have loads of different types of orcs and goblins in the starting game. Bosses, big bosses, war bosses, shamans: you name it. Also in there are all the dungeon critters from the original game, along with some larger creatures like, oh, I don't know, maybe... a river troll or two.

As I mentioned before, we plan to support Quest for a long time after launch, so new enemies and areas are certainly part of that plan. Right now, the sound of some rather large and hairy rat feet are being heard round the studio.

Yes, they will. At launch, there will be three additional heroes to get your gaming mitts on. However, we're not announcing who they are just yet.

Once again, as long as everything goes to plan, we'll be releasing more of them as DLC farther down the road.

Absolutely. That was one of the most compelling elements of the game for us. Back when we were researching the game we wanted to do next, we played weekly Warhammer Quest dungeons. Of course, the payoff for surviving a dungeon was going to a settlement afterwards and gearing up... or, more often, getting drunk in the tavern.

In our version of the game, players can traverse an area of the Empire, visiting towns to sell their hard-earned loot, buying supplies, drinking, brewing potions, and more.

We've also incorporated the "events" system from the original game into our version. Tramping round the Warhammer world is a really dangerous undertaking.

Travel time is measured in weeks. Every week the party is travelling, an event will happen to them. We have literally hundreds of these events in the game, ranging from encountering a convoy of prisoners (the player can attempt a high-risk rescue attempt, or leave them to their fate), to finding an enchanted pool which can tell the heroes their futures.