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Will Schick

Will Schick

Head of Studio / VP of Creative Development & Strategy at Atomic Mass Games (Asmodee) and game designer of Marvel: Crisis Protocol.

Sep 1, 2026

31:12
I
31:12
do.
31:12
It's your turn.
31:14
Yeah, I mean, the only thing that I would add to it is like, this is the reason that we always preach patience.
31:19
Yeah.
31:20
You know, we talk a lot about how there's always folks who are like, they're too slow with updates.
31:26
They should be faster.
35:28
You know, if you look at
NorbertHOST
20:48
And of course, the unspoken part of this is, you know, how much is it more for the non-competitive players that are out there, which we all know is probably the bulk of the audience of any miniatures game.
20:59
So I think the first part to answer that's easy is that we don't design for competitive play.
21:06
We're not trying to create a character.
21:08
We don't set forth to create a character that's going to suddenly break through the meta or be a top-tier world's inclusion into most lists.
21:17
That thought process doesn't enter into the design and development process at all.
21:22
We're not trying to create characters that will break existing metas or things like that.
21:29
What we do do, though, is of course we're taking the data from competitive events and competitive environments.

18 MINS LATER

JamieHOST
39:59
great, but there's so much to it.
NateHOST
16:49
Shaq, what about you?
16:52
I mean, I think the Captain America one is obviously hugely impactful, not just because I do think it got better.
16:59
It is more of a. I think it is a more interesting leadership in that it allows you more consistency throughout the rounds and now it works on X powers and one cost and things like that.
17:13
But it doesn't, you know, and from the developer end, the big thing for us is that we finally don't have to like plan every single superpower around the turn one play with Captain America, which is a big reason why it changed.
17:24
And I think we've talked about that a bit, but the outsized impact that he had on the game because of what he could accomplish in round one um kind of a big deal the other one that kind of fits into that vein which also i think is um really good for health and longevity of the game in general and character design is the black bolt changes um obviously one of our big things is trying to eliminate the pre-planned turn one as the internet calls it jank and require players to really play the game and not have a perfect plan going in.
18:01
That's one of the biggest things is we want players to be able to make a strategy and to know what their tactics are going to be.
18:09
But there has to be things when the game actually starts that throw that off.

10 MINS LATER

NateHOST
28:14
But given the changes that we also saw with both Peerless and Cap's leadership change, why was Gamma Leap pushed up to four power?
JeffHOST
9:49
But if a changeover seems too drastic, what's the timeframe for looking at possible revisions to a character?
9:56
It really depends on... how new the character is, how the data comes in for the character, that kind of stuff.
10:06
At the end of the day, we're not going to make changes just based off of initial knee-jerk reactions or initial discussions.
10:15
We've never done that.
10:19
We want to see how things play and get as good of a data set as we can before we start discussing what needs to change and where do we go.
10:28
there's a lot of times where players will initially identify quote unquote, uh, something wrong with a character.
10:36
But as you kind of watch how the play patterns emerge or what they're doing with it, you can discover that it's not the thing they identified.

16 MINS LATER

BenHOST
26:50
We love it.
18:09
So things like that, I guess, are the examples that I point to.
18:12
I think as far as like looking at the competitive meta and trying to influence it the place where that probably happens the most although it is not The specific focus is with the crisis design and more specifically, the crisis rotations that is designed specifically for a specific segment within the game that is competitively focused.
18:32
Right.
18:32
So the challenger crisis rotation, as we always tell people, that is not crisis protocols.
18:37
It's meant to be played.
18:38
That's crisis protocol.
18:39
If you want to play within a tournament competitive environment.

19 MINS LATER

37:59
Yes.

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