During one of the more recent developer interviews, they were asked why the GUNBOAT took so long, given the community demand for it (which the designers have been well aware of for some time). The answer, not quoting verbatim, went basically along the lines that they needed to do a bunch of things stepwise as precursors to making a meaningful gunboat (SLAM, fixing munitions, reload, etc.), since doing them all at once would be too much to throw at players, and too hard to design simultaneously. I'm not sure I buy that as the entire explanation, but it's a reasonable explanation as far as it goes.

With that in mind, what could the explanations be for the delay in some of the community's "second tier" desires be? By which I mean a number of things that most of us can probably cite as being brought up consistently whenever people post wishlists for the next wave or unknown SKUs; things like the Skipray Blastboat, a Battle of Scarif pack, a campaign box ala Armada, etc. Nome of them have the demand that the gunboat had, but there's a real demand for these and a handful of other products in the same category. So why don't we get them? Are there mechanics holding them up the way they held up the gunboat? Is it a release schedule thing? Are they somehow incompatible with what FFG want to do with the game? Or were there simply higher priority ships? I'm curious what other people think about these, and other, similarly talked about expansions.

My own theories are that the reasons for the non-appearance of these things are pretty basic:

Rogue One has only been out a year, and FFG probably didn't have advanced knowledge at the level they would have needed to make a proper Scarif expansion.

Armada's campaign box was a test to make sure they got the basics right before releasing something for the much more popular X Wing.

The Skipray... I have no idea, but most likely it's just a scheduling priorities thing. We know from interviews that Alex Davey was personally really pushing for the ESB bounty hunter ships, and the other releases make it pretty clear that someone behind the scenes has a tonne of SW Galaxies in their gaming background. Maybe there have just been more fun ships for the designers to work on lately? Or possibly, like in the case of the Scurrg, opportunities to reuse existing art assets?

But those are just my theories. I'd be interested to see what other people think about these or other popular expansion ideas.

The answer ultimately comes down to a balancing act of priorities. There are new ships that synergize with new movies or TV. There are ideas for new mechanics and then digging out the archives for a ship they could latch it on to. There are fan requests/popular demand. And there’s a limited pipe of bandwidth.

The short answer is Because The Meta.

The long answer is that in that same interview, they stated that they don't have the manpower to do anything more than make the next wave of ships. The last 3 large boxed sets no longer included a mission, so even that token effort towards narrative play is gone. Epic is only supported in that they keep releasing Huge ships.

So, I'm pretty sure we'll never see a campaign box. And I think the only way you'll see Battle Of boxes is if those ships need a fix.

Murder In The Rocks rules the game, and I have seen nothing to make me think that is changing any time soon. Luckily, there is a lot of good fan based ideas to fill the void. Still, I wish FFG would see that some people want more from this game than 100/6.

It's been established that 2/3rds of us are in this game Because Star Wars. The argument seems to go that if the Meta is healthy, then Trickle Down X-wing will serve the fanboys of Star Wars. So, we get served very nutritious X-wing porridge with no flavor. Pardon the lumps. And could you pass the salt?

Didn’t the developers come right out and say in an interview that there’d never be a campaign box for X-wing? I thought I read that somewhere.

Some want more than 100/6 - I do. Most don’t. With limited resources, they’re going to pool their efforts where the money is. So, I buy customs and design my own missions. Shapeways and Strange Eons are like chocolate and peanut butter. Etsy is also your friend. With a little time, effort and a dash of imagination, you can make whatever you like.

They said in the same interview that up until recently they had very little control over which ships were going to be in each wave. It was handed down from corporate. A lot of it has to do with popularity (timing the new movie ships with new movie releases) and recognition (the ESB bounty hunters are the most beloved scum characters).

I think now that a lot of the more iconic stuff has been used up, they will have more direct choice over which ships will be in the game (after the yearly movie ship quota is filled).

A campaign box is possible. They've already broken several "we'll never do X" promises so I assume that it could still be a possibility as long as it includes at last one new model.

I also think Heroes of Scarif is coming and the only reason it has been delayed is the Biggs nerf. In that interview Alex said that it opened up design space to do more with the X-wing. Certainly not hard proof, but my gut tells me its coming and it will contain another x-wing fix. The Biggs nerf took some time because they had to provide a more reasonable replacement in the form of lowrick before the nerf, otherwise the rebels would have lost a big pillar of their meta.

B.I'm not totally buying the "Biggs was the problem" excuse. Especially after the change with the target lock. The only thing that would make him OP would be a boost to his defense, as in a increase to his agility. He still had to be within R1, move with the rest of the squad and even with the mech that converted hits to stress (R4-D6?) He died pretty quick. Given the new Harpoon Missile and the prevalence of bombs, flying tight formations was very hazardous. There's something else going on.

I'm hopeful that an X-wing boost is in the works. It will be fun to put 4 of them on the board and not have them be cannon fodder.

9 hours ago, weisguy119 said:

Didn’t the developers come right out and say in an interview that there’d never be a campaign box for X-wing? I thought I read that somewhere.

Not directly no. They said they had limited resources and were going to focus on what made the best product case for them.

Which 99% of the time will just mean more ships unless we all spam them as hard or harder than we did for the gunboat. They did say if you want a campaign make sure to make a lot of noise asking for it.

So where do we make the noise for the campaign? Is there a thread already? Let's just go there and continue this conversation

Because we're ungrateful nerdraging gamers, that's why.

50 minutes ago, vladamex said:

So where do we make the noise for the campaign? Is there a thread already? Let's just go there and continue this conversation

Everywhere. Just remember there is a 2 year lag in FFG deciding to do something and us actually having product in hand, so don't think an apparent lack of response is an actual lack of attention.

11 hours ago, weisguy119 said:

With a little time, effort and a dash of imagination, you can make whatever you like.

But make sure it's balanced!