Alex Davy, one of the lead designers on X-Wing, and now also Armada, grew up in Fargo, ND gaming at Paradox Comics n Cards. I go to Paradox at least once a week to get my comics and to play games.
Paradox has had some great support for the local X-Wing community since the game came out, so the owner of the place reached out to Alex Davy, since he knew him from years ago, and asked him to come to the store championship and meet us and do a Q&A.
After I heard this was happening I wrote down some questions, charged up my six year old digital camera and was ready to to some hard hitting journalism. Sorta.
My ancient camera only managed to capture around 15 minutes of content before the memory card filled up. I got a bit more of the Q&A session recorded audio-only on my phone, so hopefully we’ll put that audio in the next episode of our show and try and get those videos up somewhere.
For the rest of it I took notes as best I could, since both before and after the Q&A he was mingling with players and chatting. Alex was a really awesome guy to just get to chat with.
Here’s what I’ve put together based on the notes I took and my memory.
No Card-Only Expansions
Someone had asked if FFG had any plans of ever doing just card-only expansions for X-Wing or anything like that and he said that wasn’t something that would likely ever happen as the business model for X-wing is cardboard and plastic. That’s where the money is at in the game and separating the cards from the models isn’t something that’s going to happen.
Wave Seven will be the Bomb
We got on to talking about bombs, since they’re really fun, but not the most useful upgrade to take when there’s so many other things you could be using instead. (I’ve always loved bombs. They’re so fun.)
“Bomb’s need some sort of fix,” Davy said. When prodded for more information he simply said that there “…may or may not be a fix already in the works.”
To the number of us who said that we really liked flying Tie Bombers, he told us “You will probably enjoy wave seven.”
Bringing Ships Back up to a Competetive Level
Along the lines of giving bombers some love, we talked a bit about “fixing” things in the game to make them viable again. We talked about the Chardaan Refit and the new title for the Tie Advanced.
He told me that if he could slash the cost of missiles and topedoes he would, but he can’t. He mentioned how it’s not like a video game where you can just change some numbers and be done. You’ve got to work around what’s already in place. Keeping things balanced and viable as the game grows is a huge design challenge.
He said it’s “…difficult to bring ships back into competetive play.” But is is obviously something that they’ve been doing, and doing well as far as I’m concerned. I love flying A-Wings now and I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of Tie Advanced’s on the table soon enough.
Coming back to the topic ofWave seven and bombers, he said that “Bombers need a reason to shoot missiles and bombs.”
Awesome news for bomber lovers and people who want ordnance to be worth taking again.
He’s almost Done with Wave Eight
Some people thought that Alex had moved on to Armada exclusively, but he said they’ve been pulling him back to do X-Wing stuff still. He’s got feet in both camps at the moment.
He let slip that they’re almost done working on wave eight. I don’t think he meant to mention it. I called him on it since he’d mentioned wave seven a bunch throughout the day. He just kinda shrugged and talked about something else.
The HWK is an odd Bird
We were talking about different design aspects and he mentionend that he thought “The HWK could have two [attack] dice and be just fine,” he said at one point.
The HWK isn’t going to be getting an updage or anything like that, it’s not something that’s a problem that needs a “fix,” but in retrospect he seems to think a two-attack value on the HWK wouldn’t have changed anything too much.
He talked about how doing a ship with 1 attack is interesting as they tend to want to keep ships at either two or three dice for attack.
“Four dice is scary from a design perspective,” he said.
I’ll be curious to see if we ever get any more ships with an attack value of four, epic ships excluded.
The Starfield Game Tile Kit was Garbage
We talked about those infamous game tiles that FFG had announced a while back and had quietly cancelled.
Davy said that that was the farthest a product has ever gotten in production before being cancelled.
“The old tiles were garbage,” he said. “They were just the worst.”
He laughed about how bad the prototpes they got were. He said they drifted apart during play, but not only that, the cardboard they were made from warped and they just weren’t any good at all. With a chuckle said he’s glad they’re gone.
Davy Wouldn’t Mind Some Sort of Objective Based Tournament Play
We were chatting about Imperial Assault and how much we liked the Skirmish mode objectives. If you’re unfamiliar with Assault, basically in the competetive two-player mode, rather than just duking it out in your standard deathmatch, there are other objectives that will earn you points and bring you closer to victory.
It really adds a lot of variance between games. It’s really awesome.
Davy said that was something they were thinking about for X-Wing, and it’s something he would still like to see happen, though at this point it’d be really tricky.
Initially they figured the tournaments could just be the standard 100 point deathmatch and they’d do that for a while until people got sick of it.
Turns out people didn’t get sick of it.
He’d like to see some sort of objective based tournament modes, but it’s particularly tricky to impliment in X-Wing since the pieces are moving so fast and other intricacies of the game.
While it’s something he’d like to see happen in the game, he doesn’t think it’s anything that’ll happen any time soon, if ever.
Furball is Fun. Just not Competetive
Along the lines of alternate competetive modes, we talked about “furball” variants (which I think should be called “Fuzzball” in honor of Chewie). Basically this is just a free for all with each player controlling one small ship.
He said he really likes playing those, but once you try and make that a competetive thing it all falls apart since people then just take a ship as tanky as they can make it and run away from everyone, which is lame.
So a competetive free for all mode probably isn’t something we’ll be seeing either. In case that was keeping you up at night.
The Design Team Pays Attention to the Forums
I know a lot of you out there wanted to know the answer to whether the things being discussed on the forums have an impact on the design of the game.
Well yes and no.
He told me that they do look at them, they’re not necessarily just lifting people’s design ideas and putting them into the game. The biggest thing they take away from reading the forums is finding out what’s working, what’s not, what things seem to need fixing, the state of the game etc., and use that information to inform the future of the game’s design.
So they’re definately reading what’s being posted online, but they’re not lifting ideas straight from the forums.
He said there’s a lot of great ideas on there, and a lot of bad ones.
Alex Davy’s Favorite Ships
I asked him what his favorite ship was, and he couldn’t seem to settle on just one.
He said he prefers to fly Imperials. His favorite ships are the A-Wing, the Interceptor, the Firespray, and the Agressor. He said how fun the Agressor is to fly. Since it only has the front arc, getting shots on people can be a challenge.
“It’s like a shuttle with a better dail.”
After he said that he seemed to remember that he really likes the shuttle as well.
Alex Davy Plays in Tournaments
I asked him if he played in X-Wing tournaments before he was assigned to X-Wing (the game was out for a year or two before he started working on it) and he said that he didn’t, but as soon as he started working on X-Wing he started going to the tournements.
He explained that he really wanted to get a sense of what the players were doing at these tournaments and what the competetive scene was like in order to help inform his design decisions.
X-Wings Need a Boost
That’s what it says in my notes.
“X-Wings need a boost.”
From what I recall of the context of the chat going on, this was meant moreso that the X-Wing needs a “fix” like the A-Wing or Tie Advanced, or at least a bit of a nudge. I’m pretty certain he didn’t mean that the X-Wing needed the boost action.
This is really interesting nonetheless. I wonder what we’ll see instore for the game’s titular ship in the future.
Rebel Aces 2 perhaps?
He did mention that if he could pick another Ace’s pack he’d love to see an E-Wing/Tie Defender Ace’s Pack.
Uglies in X-Wing?
Someone during the Q&A asked if we’d ever see Uglies in X-Wing as part of the Scum & Villainy faction.
“Uglies? I don’t know…”
He said that he would really love to design some uglies as “junky 11 or 10 point” ships.
That said, he doesn’t think FFG would want to make uglies, and even if they somehow did, they need permission from Lucasfilm before working on a ship, and LFL probably wouldn’t be interested in letting them use those ships either.
Davy would love to design Uglies for the game, but it’s not something that’s going to happen in all likelyhood. Maybe. But probably not.
Math Wing
I was curious what Davy thought about “Math Wing,” so I asked him about it.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s essentially breaking down the elements of X-Wing into mathematical statistucs and values and what not. Most usually a ship is assigned a “Joust Value” which is its rating in a straight on head to head fight.
Davy was really impressed that Math Wing is even a thing; that someone is so invested and interested in the game that they would work all that out. He mentioned MajorJuggler from Nova Squadron Radio, the guy behind it all really as far as I know. (I’m honsestly not that into the whole Math Wing thing so forgive me if I got some facts wrong.)
He said that it was useful to know the stats behind each ship, but that he felt it doesn’t consider the whole picture.
A ship’s “Joust Value” only consider’s a ship flying straight at another ship, and there are a lot of ships that simply don’t want to do that. It also doesn’t consider how your ship interacts with other ships in your squad, he explained.
Basically he said that “Math Wing” is useful, but doesn’t really get the whole picture.
FFG Won’t be selling Acrylic Templates and Tokens
I asked him if he thought FFG would ever produce their own sets of acrylic templates and tokens for sale, since they seem to be such a poupular product.
He said he doesn’t think that’ll ever happen for a number of reasons. He mentioned that those types of products were better suited for smaller manufacturers. Producing them on a large scale for massive distribution could be a manufacturing concern. Or something. I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at with that.
But more importantly he said that if they produced those sort of things for sale, they’d be stepping on OP’s (Organized Play) toes.
OP creates a lot of acrylic tokens and templates and things like that to give out at tournaments. If those things were available for sale those items would lose a lot of their rarity and specialness essentially.
But Wait There’s More!
Everything I covered above is pretty much from the notes I took. Like I mentioned I also did my best to get some recordings made, both audio and video.
In the part of the Q&A I managed to record he talked a lot about the Raider, especially FFG’s relationship with Lucasfilm. He also talked about other ships and the Clone Wars era, even Star Wars Rebels.
We’ll be doing our best to get that content out to you in whatever way we think will work best.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned to the Jodo Cast for more in the future!
UPDATE: Here’s the video I managed to take during the Q&A:
Fantastic interview, I really dug the format
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Great stuff. Lots of good articles on here lately.