The launch of Blood Bowl 3 in spring of 2023 was something that a lot of Blood Bowl fans would rather forget: disgruntled community organizers faced game breaking bugs, inadequate admin tools, and communities split between the new game and the still-live Blood Bowl 2. I’m not about to forget it, since I’m terminally embarrassed by the naïvely positive review I gave to the game – and neither is Mathieu Valero, a programmer at Cyanide Studio who worked on the game. “It was a mess, like there’s no two ways about it”, he says, when I meet up to interview him about the next entry in the series, ‘Warhammer: Blood Bowl’.
Valero is a programmer, and he’s here for the interview because the team member Cyanide Studio originally planned to send was called away for a family emergency. Programmers are usually locked up far away from journalists, toiling in the code mines while game designers or executive producers talk to the press using small words we can understand. I find Valero refreshingly frank about the coal face of game development.
“Blood Bowl Three and Blood Bowl Two should not have coexisted”, he admits. In 2020, Games Workshop released a major update to tabletop Blood Bowl in the form of ‘Second Season Edition’, which meant that Blood Bowl 2 was now running on an outdated version of the rules. “In a vacuum, if we had been apt to do it, it just would have been an update [to Blood Bowl 2]” Valero says, “but at the time, we were not doing live ops, we had no idea. The tech couldn’t follow, Blood Bowl 2 was way too old, and we needed to update everything”. If they wanted to keep developing Blood Bowl, it had to be in a new game.
Valero remembers the launch of Blood Bowl 3 as “dark times” when some people left the company. He says he stuck it out “because I’m stubborn”. That was the low point for Cyanide – but the studio stayed afloat, Blood Bowl 3 stayed online, and Mathieu stayed with the team. And as the old saying goes, when you’re at rock bottom, the only way is up.
The right stuff
“From that point on we learned so much”, Valero says. He’s not certain exactly when things began to turn around, but he thinks that September 2024’s Season Six – which added halflings and goblins – was a likely point. It was still “a little bit bumpy, still super demanding on the team”, but “from the outside, [the game] starts to look like something”.
He doesn’t say it explicitly, but I put together from context that this is the point he thinks Cyanide began to successfully deliver ‘live ops development’ – a way of handling a game’s code that makes it possible to continually inject new content to the live game. It’s the foundation for most contemporary online multiplayer games.
“From season six [onwards] we’ve had six more seasons of live ops, [learning] what it takes to make such a game”, he says. “That’s been a learning process, a demanding one”.
The upcoming Warhammer: Blood Bowl is more like a definitive edition than a new game, given to all BB3 owners as a free upgrade, running on the same videogame engine but implementing the updated ‘third season edition’ of tabletop Blood Bowl rules that Games Workshop released in 2025. Valero calls it “a unique chance to redo [the game] with all we’ve learned… starting from almost two years of live experience”. He repeats himself emphatically: “this is a unique chance, it doesn’t happen”.
Fundamentals
In the first article I wrote up about the new edition of Blood Bowl, I focused on just the new and updated features Valero described for the game. In our interview, he’s remarkably candid about all the areas where Blood Bowl 3 has been lacking, before describing how Warhammer: Blood Bowl will improve on them. Here’s how he describes improvements in player onboarding between the two games: in BB3 “we had none – now we have some… It’s hard to advertise because it’s so obvious, this was such a blatant blind spot”.
“The UI has been significantly revamped”, he adds, “first and foremost the homepage, which was a gigantic waste of space, now it’s going to be a customizable set of tiles”. These will include shortcuts to the current seasonal competitions, and “when you go on the main page of a competition you can pin it to your home if you wanna go back to it”. The tiles are being driven by two years of user data about what players actually interact with.
User data also gives the figure that players play 70 to 80 percent of their games solo, against the AI: AI which was, at Blood Bowl 3’s launch, so lacking that Valero dismisses it entirely. “We didn’t have an AI – now we do”, and it’s apparently capable of beating new players and giving experienced players a decent match. “There are still a bunch of factions and builds that it’s more able to play well: you want to give it Guard and Block, and don’t go fancy with the combos that a human would be able to do”, but “give something reliable to the AI, and you’re gonna have a game to play”.
New ways to play
If this gives the impression that Valero is cautious or downbeat, that’s hardly the case – his excitement for the game comes off him in waves. It helps that he’s a massive tabletop Blood Bowl nerd, preferring fast and squishy teams.
Later, when we’re at a meal hosted by publisher Slitherine’s marketing team, he enthusiastically analyses the changes that Games Workshop made for Blood Bowl Third Season edition: he had expected the new ‘Secure the Ball’ action to be a free boost to bash teams, but finds there are often interesting decisions to make when securing would cost a few extra spaces of movement compared to attempting a pick up.
He’s particularly nerdy about fast playing versions of Blood Bowl. “We’ve been looking into how Games Workshop makes Blood Bowl palatable [for new players], simpler, more streamlined version: Blood Bowl Sevens is one, Blitz Bowl is one”. He says “I’m a super fan of the scoring system of Blitz Bowl – you don’t score touchdowns, you score points for SPPs”. “We have this mode [in our test builds]”, he whispers conspiratorially. “It’s not going to be released for the demo, I don’t know if it’s going to make it [in the release version], but maybe it’s going to happen later down the line”.
And then there’s Blood Bowl Rumble, a seven-a-side mode that is similar to Blood Bowl Sevens. “It’s an attempt inspired by different sources to make a more streamlined version of the game, and it borrows a lot from Sevens, but it’s not exactly that”, Valero says. “This is a thing we overlooked for years – we are a digital version of Blood Bowl, and what’s easy for us is different from what’s easy for Games Workshop”. So while Cyanide has been “hardcore” about implementing the original Blood Bowl rulebook for Elevens, when comparing Sevens to Rumble “the name is different because we want to keep some leeway about what the streamlining actually entails”.
He outlines a vision to me, though emphasises that this is his preference for the mode, and may not be the one that ships. “Sevens is known to not stand a lot of skills; it’s really nice with fresh teams, if you want to balance a bit some factions need to start with a little bit more, but you can’t have seven players with seven skills”. So what about a version of the game without progression – indeed, without team building, like Blitz Bowl? Heresy to the traditionalists, but if the goal is to onboard players to Blood Bowl, this could be a way to introduce them to playing the game and mastering different teams before they worry about team construction and progression choices.
My impression of Valero’s openness is that he’s genuinely confident. He’s happy to talk about Cyanide Studio at its lowest ebb and acknowledge all its inadequacies because – as he sees it – the future looks good.
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Source: Wargamer
