Whoa! From these screenshots alone Blood Bowl 2 looks leagues beyond the last installment. Cyanide Studio's new graphics engine really makes it look like you're playing in a giant stadium that's mere seconds away from tearing itself to pieces.
Blood Bowl 2 is based on the Games Workshop tabletop game of the same name, a sports game that combines American football with Warhammer. It's as nuts as it sounds and leads to bloody, brutal match-ups where a team is as likely to win by destroying the other team as by scoring points.
As you can see, these stadiums are absolutely gigantic and filled with fully-rendered fans. They're scalable and can be upgraded as you earn winnings in solo and multiplayer campaigns, allowing you to build it up from a tiny training ground to huge, imposing structures. New structures and stands give you more spectators and thus more reveue, as well as opportunities and bonuses for the team. That adds to your strategy as your fans can get involved with the matches- invading the pitch and trampling the players during heated matches.
It's no Football Manager but there will definitely be some managment involved with making your Blood Bowl the bloodiest possible one it can be. It will feature a solo mode that sees you taking control of the Reikland Reavers, a rookie team that you're given to manage, making champions of the team and expanding their stadium as you go. Online multiplayer will now include a persistent League mode to give more interaction between the player's coaches, and a Player Marketplace is implemented as well that allows coaches to buy and sell their Blood Bowl players to the highest bidder to build up their own dream team.
Blood Bowl 2 includes new animations, dynamic cameras, and commentary from Jim Johnson and Bob Bifford. Sadly these screens are pretty blood-free but we there will surely be new screens and videos released shortly.
As far as release date, all we know now is that it will be released sometime in the fourth quarter of 2014. Blood Bowl 2 will be shown off at the GDC in a couple of weeks so expect much more news on it soon, including (hopefully) what platforms it will be released for.
