Atomic Mass Games Studio Communications Round-Up #2

When is Ministravaganza this year?

We are excited to announce that Ministravaganza will take place September 14th -16th and will feature product updates, behind-the-scenes panels, and painting streams for Marvel Crisis Protocol, Star Wars: Shatterpoint, and Star Wars: Legion

We are pleased to share that we will have mini announcement stream for MCP ahead of Gen Con on August 2nd at 9am PST at https://www.twitch.tv/atomicmassgames

What’s the cadence for announcements – when will we know when you’ll talk about things if you won’t talk about future products? 

Announcements will always happen when and how they need to in order to support the games, our plan is to have key updates twice a year alongside Adepticon in March and Ministravaganza in September.

Why have there been so many Star Wars: Shatterpoint announcements and posts compared to the other game lines?

It will never be exactly even when it comes to which game has spotlighted releases or announcements. Different games are at different places in their development and you can’t compare apples to apples in that way. This spring at Adepticon, we announced the pipeline for roughly the next six months in order to share our excitement and set your expectations on what’s coming for the our games. We are planning to build on this kind of communication in the future. While we can’t always be specific about when things are coming during panels, it should help guide your expectations regarding how many products are coming your way. There are still items that we touched on at Adepticon that haven’t been announced for pre-order, so you’ll still have those to look forward to.

In terms of Star Wars: Shatterpoint – it’s the new kid on the block. Just like we did with Marvel: Crisis Protocol at release, it’s important for us to release an increased cadence of Star Wars: Shatterpoint products to create enough variety for players at the outset. Keep in mind that you don’t know what’s coming beyond what we’ve been able to tell you at Adepticon, via social, and/or through other events. There may be things you don’t know about for other game lines coming.

Where’s __ character? 

We will never answer wishlisting questions here or on social. We are unable to speak to specific future products before they are approved and announced.

Are Epic Ships coming to X-Wing?  

We are focused on the core game at this time.

When is the new website coming?

Our hope is to launch in August. We pushed back the launch to ensure that Shatterpoint could be included in the launch. We’re excited as we have been hard at work behind the scenes to make sure our community will have a great new resource.

Why is it so hard to set deadlines and stick to them once announced?

On paper, this frustration makes a lot of sense – however we set our release dates almost a full year in advance and there are a lot of checkpoints across development, localization, marketing, factories, distribution, and customs. Any one element experiencing change can cause a delay later in the pipeline. We will always work to make sure that whenever possible we stay ahead of the messaging for you, or jump in to provide clarity when we do experience delays.

Why do my Star Wars: Shatterpoint expansions have so many cards?

Our expansion packs are designed to be multi-lingual so that we can support the global communities where the localized versions of our games are played. Combining all the languages into a single box helps to keep the costs down globally and ensures more communities have access to Shatterpoint.

We absolutely acknowledge that the language agnostic cards (here’s looking at you, order cards!) do not need to be duplicated and this has been corrected in future releases beginning in 2024.

What’s going on with Star Wars: Legion – Spec Ops?

We are still incorporating the second round of feedback from the community. When the final version of the game mode is ready to launch, we will make a formal announcement on social.

If you’re not making changes yearly to all the games, then why do you make them when you do?

At AMG our philosophy is that changes should happen only when they need to happen and not on some kind of regular schedule. Much like how people only take an antibiotic when they have an illness that needs to be treated by an antibiotic, errata, points updates, or rules updates are all ways to treat specific issues. However, just like with medicine, there are numerous ways that issues can be approached and treated beyond just updating points or card erratas. For us, doing these things is a last resort, as it may address the problem, but it is the option that carries a significant amount of risk.

It’s important to remember that we are working 2 or more years ahead. That work is all predicated on the foundation of what currently exists. And, most importantly, that 2 or more years ahead work is all at different stages of the production process. So making a change to something now, could easily have a ripple effect that negatively impacts something that is currently being printed, meaning we have no way of changing it before it hits shelves, without, you guessed it, more errata.

The more changes to the printed game, the more difficult it becomes for players to have a smooth game experience. Not all players engage with the games at the same level. Some players might not even be aware there are update documents in general, others might know that an update happened a year ago. Really only a small percentage of the most engaged players know at all times everything there is to know about the game. And even they can struggle to remember which update is what when this tool is used too often.

This is why we take our initial development so seriously. Fixing balance issues after the fact, whether with errata or points updates, is a massive undertaking that has far reaching impacts. Some of which we can adjust for, but many we simply can’t without falling down the dangerous spiral of more errata or points updates. It is always our goal and the primary focus of our design and development team that the game rules are perfect when they leave for the printers, because we know that errata and updates are a tool of last resort. And neither of them should ever be used as tools to shake up the meta, if we want the games we work on to be as healthy and long lasting as possible.

Now this isn’t to say we don’t make mistakes. No matter how much time and testing we put in, we’re still human, and, just like all humans, we are still on the never ending road of perfecting our craft. So when an issue does arise we take it very seriously, no different than your doctor takes your illness seriously. But, just like you don’t want your doctor’s only response to whatever ails you to be amputation, our response is first to dive in and do a significant amount of research and analysis. Sometimes a sniffle is just a sniffle and it resolves itself after a week or so. In the same way a lot of initial perceived issues resolve themselves either as players innovate solutions or as new releases arrive that were designed specifically to shift and evolve the meta.

Other times the issue is more significant and doesn’t resolve quickly or may not resolve without some kind of development change. At that point we begin pulling in data from wherever we can, big convention tournaments, social media discussions, community streamed games, internal games, playtest games and we begin to create our treatment plan. But at every step we have to account for how that treatment will affect the entire ecosystem. Remember those ripple effects? We do, and it’s why from the outside it might seem like we aren’t doing anything at all, when in actuality we are doing a lot of exploration, discussion, and analysis to ensure that in addressing the stated issue we aren’t creating three more issues that are going to be even worse.

This is also why you’ll often see that any change we make is typically very conservative compared to the general consensus of what the “solution” should be. It’s easy to say “X will fix Y right away.” But that statement doesn’t account for what X will do to A through W or AA through ZZ. Just like when handling health, we want to be the least invasive as possible, unless there is a clear and obvious danger to the life of the patient.

All this is to say that we make errata or points adjustments only when doing so is absolutely necessary for the health of the game, and only after thoroughly analyzing and testing any changes to ensure they don’t ripple outward and cause new or even more problems that they were meant to address. Errata and points updates will never be used to simply shake things up within the play environment or meta. These are powerful tools, and just like all powerful things require that they be wielded with respect and care and only used for the job they are meant for.

Why don’t you make more game streams for all of the games on your roster? 

Game streams take a long time to prepare – from lists, to giving folks time to paint, to making sure our featured players are comfortable and want to be on stream. We have a lot of folks who love painting and playing, but not all of them want to be on camera. Ultimately, we also have to respect the fact that there are only so many hours in the day. The choice is sometimes whether to make this content or make more products and it’s a delicate balance.

Why are the guidelines the way they are on the moderated Facebook pages?

We are privileged to work with some of the most exciting intellectual properties (IP) in the world, while we make games that feature the exciting characters and abilities from these IP’s we don’t own them. As stewards of our partners’ IP we are obligated to remove any content that infringes from the lawful owner(s).

Additionally our rules are designed to ensure that the community around our games is safe and welcoming and creates an environment that reflects the values of our studio and our partners.

Why don’t you make inserts with assembly instructions?

The short answer to this question comes back to how the production timelines for the product work, and our prior experience with how those timelines interact with what it takes to create the most accurate and useful assembly instructions. When we used to put printed assembly guides in the product, the unfortunate truth was that often those instructions were less than perfect. The reason for this typically came down to the fact that the production timelines for plastic and print overlap, meaning that the printed material components (i.e. the assembly guides) were due before we actually had the final plastic frames in hand. This meant that internally we never had the final plastic parts in hand with which to inform how we created the assembly guide. The result of this was that often our assembly guides built off of our general experience of miniature assembly, not the real experience with the exact miniature in the guide. While you can build a functional assembly guide using prior experience, too often we ended up in a situation where the best way to build a miniature actually required the steps to be in a slightly different order than simply looking at the parts in a digital sculpting program would suggest. I’m sure we’ve all had those moments where we realized that the cape needs to go on before the head but after the arms.

After realizing that there was no way we could solve this timeline issue outside of simply delaying all products by 8 months to a year so that plastic would be completely done before the printed components were due, we decided that it was best for both us and the players if we simply moved to digital instructions only. We were already having to point people to the digital versions over the print versions we were making. This meant that we were spending precious time internally doing the instructions twice, and worse of all, doing so knowing that we could not guarantee the level of accuracy in the printed versions that met our acceptable standards and lead to the smoothest end hobbyist experience because they lay out the order of steps in the most efficient way possible.

What’s up with Organized Play in Australia?

We recognized there was a bottleneck where information was getting caught and not passed on to the right people, our exclusive agreement with Let’s Play Games is in its very early stages. We’re always working to improve communications as we work with new partners, thank you for your feedback and patience as we worked out some of the gaps and sought solutions. The communication pipeline has been largely cleared and we expect you to successfully request all of your info through Let’s Play Games.

Why no fall damage in Star Wars: Shatterpoint? 

Shatterpoint was designed from the very beginning to have a strong focus around verticality and the use of a lot of terrain to achieve this. While you can 100% play Shatterpoint with zero elevation, doing so is a lot like putting regular gasoline in a high performance engine. Sure it will run, but you’re not going to get the full power or performance that the engine was specifically engineered for.

A perfect example of this is how having multiple levels of elevation interacts with all of the various free movement units and characters get throughout a game. Out of the four movement types: advance, dash, climb, and jump only two allow for free movement up elevation. The mixture of different types of these moves, combined with a battlefield that features multiple instances of different elevation creates dynamic tactical challenges that players must solve each turn. Without the restrictions to movement applied by elevation, the difference between these types of movement simply becomes the flat distance the character moves. With elevation however, a whole world of tactics for both sides opens up as players ideally need to be on the same elevation as the objectives they are trying to control. Units with only an advance or dash have to think about ingress points to get from one elevation to the next. Alternatively, the decision to focus on shoves and pins over damage when resolving a combat tree becomes critical if you know that you can shove a character who lacks the access to Jump or Climb off of elevation as the distance shoved becomes less important than the elevation change.

Now, what’s the best way to get people to not use elevation and thus lose out on the many purposeful design and development choices made around the expectation of it being prevalent on the battlefield? Applying a negative effect like Fall Damage. You should never take a pillar of your design and then apply a universal negative that strongly disincentivizes playing the way the game was intended to be played. You can say, “But if the objectives are on elevation I have no choice,” which is a terribly argument for an experience that is supposed to be fun. Having to eat something you hate just because it’s on your plate only works to make you dread the meal, not be excited or look forward to the experience. In a real world application, this means that players would simply choose to use less and less elevated terrain…which if you go back to the very start of this answer you now know means that Shatterpoint would be a pale image of its true self, leading to an overall game experience that none of us likely want for a game we all hope to be playing for many, many, many years.