Space Hulk: Deathwing Reveals Fearsome First Screens

[Alexei F. Karamazov]

Speaking for myself, I'd like to see them do something more RPG-like with the 40k license, especially now that they have a full line of RPG books and supplements out there. It's not that "Space Hulk" is bad, but it occurs to me that there is a lot more that can be done with Space Hulks as a concept than just have space marines shoot at Genestealers in hallways. I think half the problem is that everything they do is a wargame or a shooter it seems, and viewed through that limited lens it doesn't convey much of the flavor of the setting, and it comes across as being rather generic even when it's pretty.

I mean for example, a Space Hulk is a chaos-warped mass of ships that have fused together in the warp, generally full of valuable ancient and xeno technologies, which happen to be forbidden by The Imperium and it's minions. In theory there could be all kinds of things in there, alien defense systems, robots, surviving crewmembers living as cannibals and fighting the survivors of other ship crews like gangs, demons... etc... Given that it's made up of a number of different ships fused together the areas should feel different and in many cases be recognizable to what they were once for on the ship they came from (assuming the ship wasn't too alien). This is to say nothing of the fact that some ships have even been removed from Space Hulks (such is the possible history of a Rogue Trader Vessel) in functioning condition and such can make a huge prize.

While the graphics look good, and it fits the original board game, none of that awesome potential for storytelling really comes out when it's a simple matter of "We are brain dead space marines, we do not think for ourselves, we simply pursue the glory of the emperor, we shall shoot Genestealers in these fairly generic dark hallways...". I guess I shouldn't make fun, since I do like Space Marines... but really, I think so much more can be done with 40k. I mean an independent developer is making this game "Starcrawlers" all about looting abandoned, drifiting, space ships in a sort of science fiction dungeon crawl environment (I contributed to the kickstarter) and that seems like it's conceptially more like "Exploring a Space Hulk" than the bloody "Space Hulk" game itself.

THAT is a good idea! I would pay much money for a 40K game that starts out as a "standard" clearing of a space hulk and turns out into a "how-deep-does-the-rabbit-hole-go-clusterfuck" inside the Hulk. Since it's tainted by the warp, the physical space inside doesn't even have to make logical sense, it could be larger on the inside and have all sorts of stuff. There would still be genestealers, but the other enemies such as the xenos or cultists would juxtapose the genestealers well. Maybe genestealers would be mostly insta-kills, and would have radically different AI than the other enemies, which would make them stand out a lot more, preventing them from becoming run-of-the-mill.

OT: Yes please! This sounds like fun! Looks nice too! I'm interested in how they'll have the PC be a psycher rather than a more typical space-marine-shooter-man.

 

[Grabehn]

I kinda want this to be good, since I've heard that a lot of games based on the 40K stuff is simply shit.

But even though I know nothing about this stuff, I got really hooked with the Space Marine game, and having an FPS in the same universe (if it turns out good) would be really cool.

 

[Rot_At_The_Root]

Going to have to check that out when it's released, like a lot of others here I was a fan of the board game.

What I would really like to see is something like Xcom:EW done 40k style. Necromunda or Inquisitor are just begging for something like that!

 

[Frankster]

Well at least this game looks like it has some decent production values in it.

So hopefully this game won't suck.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

Going to have to check that out when it's released, like a lot of others here I was a fan of the board game.

What I would really like to see is something like Xcom:EW done 40k style. Necromunda or Inquisitor are just begging for something like that!

Have you played Chaos Gate?

It plays like X-com in terms of the shooty bits, probably a bit closer to the original though. Your guys also level up if they survive the mission and have enough xp. You can pick squad members, squad type and weapon loadout. It does lack the overall strategic elements of X-com, there's no research or choices over which objectives to defend etc, you just acquire new weapons and ammo in the course of your missions. There are optional side missions that can get you more equipment but the only risk is getting guys killed. TB said it doesn't run on modern OS, but I'm still rockin XP and it works fine and it's available as abondonware so at least you don't lose anything if it doesn't work.

OT: Don't quite know what it is about them but those screenshots look a bit off to me, there's something I don't like about them. Still, early days.

Also, while termies v genestealers might get kind of boring in an FPS you could always add genestealer hybrids. IDK if they had them in the later versiona of Spacehulk but they were added in the last expansion for the 1st ed game. IMO it didn't really work too well as it messed with the simple but well balanced asymmetric gameplay, but in an FPS that is unlikely to matter, a variety of enemies makes things more interesting.

 

[Rot_At_The_Root]

Cheers Zykon, I'll check Chaos Gate out!

captcha: we go forwards

most of the time captcha, most of the time,

 

[Kahani]

There's not much in the way of action going on here, or even a very good look at the setting, which based on these images can best be described as "dark."

But is it grim?

Well, you can't have a Space Hulk game without it being terminators against genestealers.

They could make it more like Space Crusade instead. Very similar gameplay and concept, just with more varied enemies. There was even an expansion that featured psykers, so it could fit with this game pretty well.

I kinda want this to be good, since I've heard that a lot of games based on the 40K stuff is simply shit.

They seem to have got a bit of an undeserved reputation for this, but the fact is that simply aren't that many 40K games in the first place. Most of them aren't actually that bad, they just never seem to make the games people that people think would really work in the setting - FPS, RPG and strategy. See here [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Warhammer_video_games#Warhammer_40.2C000]. The Dawn of War series is great, both the original and recent Space Hulk games were good adaptations of the board game, Fire Warrior was far from great but really not terrible, I thought Space Marine was a bit shit but apparently some people liked it. Other than that, there's a couple of old turn-based games and a couple of portable ones. That's it. 19 games, and 11 of those are covered by just Dawn of War and Space Hulk.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Cheers Zykon, I'll check Chaos Gate out!

I'd definitely second that...though there are some bits nobody seemed to get the hang of.

I particularly liked the way they made the Horrors of Tzeentch actually a bit creepy, not just random monsters that run around.

 

[iyaerP]

It wouldn't be Deathwing without a hunt for the Fallen.

I hope they do this good. I really really do.

 

[Tiamat666]

Going to have to check that out when it's released, like a lot of others here I was a fan of the board game.

What I would really like to see is something like Xcom:EW done 40k style. Necromunda or Inquisitor are just begging for something like that!

Have you played Chaos Gate?

I played Chaos Gate back in the day, always the first and second "story" missions, so far so good. But as soon as the random missions started I couldn't get myself to play any further. The map, some kind of industrial interior, was confusing as fuck. It was hard for me to figure out how to best move units from X to Y. Almost impossible to figure out from which position my units would have a clear line of fire or be in cover.

Maybe I could have skipped the random missions, but then I thought I would miss on all the XP and my units wouldn't be powerful enough later. So I never got past the first two story missions until I lost interest.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

I played Chaos Gate back in the day, always the first and second "story" missions, so far so good. But as soon as the random missions started I couldn't get myself to play any further. The map, some kind of industrial interior, was confusing as fuck. It was hard for me to figure out how to best move units from X to Y. Almost impossible to figure out from which position my units would have a clear line of fire or be in cover.

Maybe I could have skipped the random missions, but then I thought I would miss on all the XP and my units wouldn't be powerful enough later. So I never got past the first two story missions until I lost interest.

Some sort of indicator would have been nice for that, but then you're not really going to know if you're going to have LOS or cover on a position until you get where you're going. Urban warfare is extra confusing an difficult to predict, I think that's the point. Not all the side missions are in those kind of maps either. Can't say I really had a problem with it, it was harder doing those missions but not 'I can't carry on, this is no fun anymore' difficult. Practice for a bit on easy or if the worst comes to the worst you can just quit out of the mission if it's an industrial level and leave it, you'll probably come across one in story mode eventually but by then you should be practiced. Also, I assume you used the terrain view adjuster? It removed the higher levels of terrain from veiw, which could be pretty helpful in those levels, much easier to see what's on the floor.

 

[Tiamat666]

Some sort of indicator would have been nice for that, but then you're not really going to know if you're going to have LOS or cover on a position until you get where you're going. Urban warfare is extra confusing an difficult to predict, I think that's the point. Not all the side missions are in those kind of maps either. Can't say I really had a problem with it, it was harder doing those missions but not 'I can't carry on, this is no fun anymore' difficult. Practice for a bit on easy or if the worst comes to the worst you can just quit out of the mission if it's an industrial level and leave it, you'll probably come across one in story mode eventually but by then you should be practiced. Also, I assume you used the terrain view adjuster? It removed the higher levels of terrain from veiw, which could be pretty helpful in those levels, much easier to see what's on the floor.

Sometimes I've toyed with the idea of giving it another go. But, when I get the WH40K itch, there's all the DoW's now, which are much better games. So I don't really see a reason to go back. Also there's the problem that while it's possible to run the game nowadays, the map scrolling is way too fast on modern processors, which gets annoying after a while.