You'll know this frustration if you've ever been part of the community around a game that has both singleplayer and multiplayer modes. People who prefer one to the other are always convinced the other cohort doesn't exist. "Nobody plays this game in a different way to me and my friends, and anyone who says they do is lying."
In the case of the Blood Bowl videogames, the fact the CPU's tactics are so rudimentary has always given people who prefer the multiplayer mode ammunition for claiming the other half doesn't exist. Now we've got proof they're actually the majority. As Cyanide programmer Mathieu Valero recently told Wargamer, between 70 and 80% of Blood Bowl 3 games were played solo in Eternal Leagues.
This came up in the context of Blood Bowl 3's imminent replacement by Warhammer Blood Bowl. One of the improvements, Valero suggests, will be the AI. "We didn't have an AI—now we do", as he put it. "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", he went on to say, but "give something reliable to the AI, and you're gonna have a game to play".
Valero is candid about the state of Blood Bowl 3 at launch, saying, "It was a mess, like there's no two ways about it." As well as the AI, Blood Bowl 3's ugly menus are being replaced. "The UI has been significantly revamped," he says, "first and foremost the homepage, which was a gigantic waste of space, now it's going to be a customizable set of tiles." No more hunting through submenus for the season you were halfway through: "when you go on the main page of a competition you can pin it to your home if you wanna go back to it."
Warhammer Blood Bowl is being published by Slitherine, and will be a free upgrade for owners of Blood Bowl 3. It' s currently planned for release by the end of the year.
