Interview: How Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters “Ramps Up The Cool Factor” Of The 41st Millennium

thegamer.com:

“We have this connection to [Games Workshop] and we were talking on a regular basis,” explains Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters creative director Noah Decter-Jackson. “They're always open to creative pitches from solid developers that they know. But it's a long process.” Decter-Jackson’s Complex Games had previously worked on mobile title The Horus Heresy: Drop Assault when the developer pitched another, more ambitious game to the tabletop giant.

“Where we started fundamentally was with the conflict itself,” says Decter-Jackson. “So at the high level, strategic level, what kind of conflict do we want to handle? And how do we want to build a game around that - we didn't want to deal with a conventional conflict.”

Related: Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters Preview - All Out Destruction

Decter-Jackson and his team wanted to be sure that this wasn’t an opponent you could just shell into oblivion with artillery; that’s how the concept of fighting a galactic plague came about. From there, Nurgle was the obvious choice for a villain. (This was years before the pandemic, too - Dexter-Jackson did say it’s a long process.) But it also allowed Complex Games to combine the individual battles synonymous with the genre with a bigger, overarching tactical narrative.

“There's very few games that do combine turn-based tactics with a larger strategic layer beyond mainly linear narratives, which you see in a lot of TBT games,” Decter-Jackson says. He notes that the original Chaos Gate’s larger strategy was something he wanted to recreate, and during Complex Games’ discussions with Games Workshop, the idea of a “spiritual successor” was formed.

As the idea evolved, Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters would aim to “modernise”