James Hewitt has an impressive resume. I roll out a list of the games he's designed for him (Blood Bowl 2016, Adeptus Titanicus, Silver Tower, Gorechosen), and he chimes in to add a few more (Necromunda, Betrayal at Calth). His decades-long career in the tabletop gaming industry is iconic, and if you've played a Games Workshop boxed game released between 2014 and 2017, he probably had a hand in it.
While his tenure at Workshop is what most gamers will know him for, Hewitt's work on the likes of Hellboy and Blitz Bowl is just as commendable. After coming on board with Modiphius as a contractor to work on Fallout Factions, a skirmish-based adaptation of the popular video game, he now works in-house on its games four days a week. I sat down with him to talk all things Warhammer and Nuka-Cola.
“I would never consider any game I've worked on finished,” Hewitt tells me via video call. He explains that there is a point when all your changes and tweaks produce diminishing returns, and done is better than perfect. This goes double when working to tight deadlines at companies like Games Workshop, and aside from Adeptus Titanicus, Hewitt never had long to perfect his creations. He created Gorechosen in just two weeks between returning from some time off and switching roles within the company.
Hewitt had more time on other projects, but the success of Blood Bowl put the spotlight on the Specialist Games team he was part of, and suddenly their long playtests and relatively quiet environment became frenzied and hectic.
He's been away from Games Workshop for seven years now, and his experience at Modiphius has already proved a tonic to the frenetic design process. Fallout Factions: Nuka-World will be the first game he hasn't abandoned as soon as it hits the shelves. This time he will be there to support it going forward rather than watching others thrive with his baby.
“With Factions,” he explains, “it's the first time I've co-developed a game that I designed. Looking back at Games Workshop, the first thing I did there was Betrayal at Calth, which is a Horus Heresy tactical, team-based combat thing. It was kind of a throwaway, like they wanted a game that they could sell was like a miniatures design, 'No,' I. a game.” And so I'm really proud of that, and I would have loved it if the series then continued with that set of mechanics, changing it differently each time.
“Blood Bowl I did a little bit, but it was mostly pre-release and I moved on to other things. Necromunda I designed it and then left the company. Titanicus, there were huge delays because it was supposed to be resin and then it moved to plastic so it was redone. It was originally supposed to come out when Necromunda did, but they released it and then I left it.
“I keep seeing these games that I design, and then other people pick them up and do cool things with them. That's wonderful in itself, but it's so satisfying to be here and, with Factions, we have all these plans and I'm here to help them move forward.”
Built like Necromunda, more like Blood Bowl
Factions is an interesting game because it's meant to appeal to such a wide range of people. It's a skirmish game for Fallout fans who have never played with miniatures before, it's accessible in its rules and campaigns, it exudes that iconic Fallout style. You have a dozen or so models that you can upgrade between missions, along with bottle caps and SPECIAL stats, chemicals and Deathclaws, but they may not work exactly as you imagine.
From a gameplay perspective, Fallout Factions began life as a “Necromunda/Kill Team” game to act as a foil to Modiphiu's dense, granular Fallout game, Wasteland Warfare. However, Hewitt's explanation of the league's game mechanics is more reminiscent of Blood Bowl.
The balancing mechanic means you can upgrade your team of wasteland raiders and not worry about being overpowered against a new player. Similar to Blood Bowl's incentive, if your roster is one level below your opponent's, you can buy out your local Commonwealth merchant to stock up on stimpaks and RADs to level the playing field.
Matches should be short, about half an hour long and played on a 2'x3' board. Installation is quick and the game is as frenetic as it is fun. It sounds perfect for a night at the pub, and tournament play can be more exciting still.
Hewitt emphasizes the importance of creating the “vibe” of a game, especially when adapting an existing board game or IP. Translating mechanics, even from digital to tabletop, doesn't always work in the new medium. Hewitt has learned this over the course of adapting dozens of games, from Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower (based on Warhammer Quest and Hero Quest), Hellboy (based on, yes, Hellboy) and Blood Bowl 2016 (you know where this is going), a process he refers to as “gamer archaeology.”
While Modiphius has plenty of remote employees, Hewitt and the seven core members of the design team work from the Nottingham office. “When you're working on a board game or something, it's just easier to get around a table and try things,” he explains.
Despite this, he always goes back to the video games when making decisions about factions. “I have different saves in Fallout 4 where I can go lay the cheats to travel there to look around, or go to the weapon crafting table and roll up some weapons so I can see what we're doing in the game.”
Hewitt says Factions is up there with Titanicus as his favorite game he's ever designed (he'd say so), but it doesn't strike me as a coincidence that the two games he had nine straight months to design are his favorites. The process seems less stressful, the design could yield more iterations and tests, and the final result is more polished as a result. Who would have thought that giving your designers plenty of time and resources results in better products?
- Released
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June 26, 2009
- ESRB
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m
- Developer
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Cyanide Studio
- Multiplayer
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Local multiplayer
