GOD

[GOD]

This isn’t about artistic purity. What we’re looking at is how certain design decisions affect how the game is experienced. Death of the author has nothing to do with it. It’s the difference between arguing about how a book should be read and how a book should be written. Right now, we’re arguing about how the book should be written in order to achieve its desired effect on the reader. That’s what I’m talking about when I keep mentioning design decisions.

It’s also the point that I’m making by referring to re-picking your perks. I’m recommending the writer not to add a certain character, because that character doesn’t mesh with the story that they’ve made so far. He could be really interesting and some people might come to like him, but his presence dilutes the strength of the book as a whole. Now a book is different from a game, but the way you have to carefully pick features is not dissimilar to how you craft a story; they need to fit the kind of experience that you are trying to create. If you’re not careful, adding a certain character to a novel can break the unspoken agreement between writer and reader about the internal world of the book. Adding a wizard to a book that is intended to be a serious story about the pains of transitioning from woman to man, would be jarring and cause the reader to wonder why the wizard doesn’t just fix everything. You could make it work, but it would end up being a very different story compared to the original.

The same applies here. Being able to casually re-pick your perks does not fit with a game that wants to have actions have consequences – the fundamental principle that I was referring to. It causes a contradiction between the feature and the rest of the game, that breaks the agreement of internal consistency between the player and the developer, resulting in the game being less enjoyable to play. This also what the smacking away the king was about. It’s not the point that you’re infringing on the enjoyment of the other player, but that your own enjoyment would only be related to screwing them over and not to the actual playing of the game. You wouldn’t be the winner, because there’s nothing to win anymore.

[GOD]

It depends on how you interpret it. Take the cabal of necromancers. You can approach that in many different ways, like having it be a singular boss fight against all of them, or seperate boss fights, or as the search for an artefact to stop them, or as a search for magical ingredients to fuel a ritual that will undo their magic, or as an attempt to find and destroy the artefact that helps them maintain their grip on the undead, or as a race towards library of secrets/ ancient artefact/ skull of arch-lich that they are trying to claim or bribing one of their members so that he’ll undo the spell for you.
Each of those you can approach differently as well. Like having to gather information on where the hideout of the necromancers is before you can attack them, or needing to escape the waves of undead while you search for a way to destroy the artefact. You just need to get creative.

[GOD]

It’s the idea of maintaining the weight of actions by removing the ability to undo them, in a game where consequences are a major source of tension and enjoyment for the player. Many things you can say about saving at will, you can say about being able to redo perks, or re-rolling levels, or undoing character death. It’s a single-player game, so who cares? The point is that once you start undermining these kind of fundamental design elements the player eventually stops caring about the game and stops having fun. It’s like how I can win any chess game by just smacking his king off the board, but that wouldn’t be according to the arbitrary rules we set and therefore be pretty boring. Another example is how in this game hitting in combat is satisfying because you can miss, it wouldn’t be exciting if you always hit.

Xoatl wrote:

I might have misunderstood the OP. If you can save during a battle, quit the game and come back later means you can save, fuck up then load up the save and try again. Besides you can always Alt+tab and close the game then load the save regardless of how you do it. I’ve done that a couple times especially due to the fact you have to retreat in order to load so it’s not as inconvenient.

Jago was referring to my suggestion on saving on exit. If you want to avoid the Alt+tab issue, you could have the game delete the save upon loading it.

[GOD]

I´ll answer your wink with a serious analysis. ;)

It depends on the lore really. My impression is that skeletons are supposed to represent the long dead, rather than the more recently deceased. Since these are human land, it seems unlikely for there to be ways to get access to old Orc corpses from crypts and such, so you could leave skeleton Orcs out if you wanted to.

It depends on how you want to rationalise it though. You could say that the bodies from previous Orcish invasions might be around, though you could also reason that the humans would have burned them or otherwise gotten rid of them. So they could add them if they wanted to, but of the two more wïedergangers would be the more important pick.

[GOD]

I agree that it´s not a high priority feature, but more of a finishing touch. However, I do feel like details like that, when they come up, add a lot of flavour to a game. It´s one of those small, but logical things that makes a game world feel like it works according to certain rules that are consistent. A game like Dominions 4 has tons of these and it is part of what makes it special – though I´m aware that adding units is much easier in that game because of their much more limited capacity to act in battle, and the relative simplicty of their designs.
The main issue is how much effort it would take relative to what you get out of it, which is tricky to estimate since I don´t know how Psen made the current Wìedergangers or how difficult it was to program them. If Psen essentially takes the base human model and retouches it, then making more is a fairly efficient process. However, making it from scratch means an amount of effort similar to making a totally new unit model. You can skip part of the design phase due to similarities, but that´s still a lot of work.
If it´s relatively easy to introduce, then you get more diverse encounters and added flavour for little effort. If it takes a lot of effort, then it should be something kept for last or not be implemented, rather than spend time on it better spent on other features.

[GOD]

Why not? The more the merrier. A re-skin of existing units with mechanics based on an established template, but tweaked to suit the unit, should be easier than making completely new units. It would add a lot of variety to the kind of encounters you could have and make different groups of undead feel more unique and appropriate to the region they originate from. You’d prevent it from becoming too diverse by only having them pop up when appropriate to the region and their encounters.
Granted, I don’t know what kind of development process they have, so I might be overlooking something that makes this a lot more difficult than it seems.

Sarissofoi wrote:

But good sir orcs are soulless creatures and can’t be reanimated.

That’s just propaganda the clergy feeds you. Everyone knows that the Orc is a proud, misunderstood creature worthy of our respect. Sky has the right idea, we are all equal in death. #Necromancerpride

[GOD]

They wouldn’t necessarily all be mixed. You could have it depend on how close to Orcish territory the undead are placed on the world map, or when they beat them in battle. So you’d get pure and mixed groups. Humans would still be the majority though, since these are human lands and so more dead humans would be available to work with. Just imagine the occasional undead Orc Chief though…

It seems to me like a unit like this would be easier to add than totally new units, since many of the mechanics are similar to already existing units that are tried and tested. The skins would probably take the most effort to make, since you need to add a lot of those to make it work – unless you do the ol’ ‘all Orcs look alike anyway’. :P I can see that being the biggest problem, since I can imagine that Psen already has a lot on his plate.

[GOD]

Plenty of ways to add diversity. I don’t know what lore they have planned, so I’m not sure how unconventional I can be here, but here’s some simple suggestions off the top of my head that seem to fit what we’ve seen so far: magical artefact, restless spirits of the deceased out for revenge, necromancer cabal, vampire lord, ancient curse, magical plague, the spirit of a great king whose burial mound was disturbed, ancient hero who cannot accept his death and wants to conquer the world of the living, a crypt whose dead can find no rest, old Roman outpost carrying out its last duty, magical ritual gone awry or ghoul elder leads the hunt.

[GOD]

Fellow X-COM and Tactics Ogre player here. Drew’s right about Battle Brothers being a lot like X-COM in terms of the tenseness of combat and how things are meant to develop organically. Great game, very much worth getting. If you plan on buying the modern XCOM, get the expansion and the Long War mod. The normal game is not as good as the original X-COM in my opinion, but Long War improves it tremendously. You can also check out Xenonauts, which changes some things but is closer in art style and playstyle to the first X-COM. You can also just get X-COM (I think steam has it?) and improve it with the openxcom modification, which fixes tons of bugs and makes it easy to add more mods. Openxcom is the best X-COM by far if you ask me, as long as you don’t have a problem with the dated graphics and UI.

Because the game has such a small team the focus is completely on the core mercenary experience, so I don’t think that we’ll see something like mini-games. I rather like the idea of a Viking game getting added to the events to add more flavour though. It’s appropriate to the time period the game is set in and games are an important part of life that usually gets overlooked or implemented in odd ways. Anything that makes the game feel more authentic is something that the developers will appreciate, especially art related details, so do share any other details that come to mind. :)

[GOD]

No comment is good. I both want to find out for myself and have it be something that can manifest in many different ways depending on your playthrough. So there might a single leader at the head as the great evil, or there’s actually a particular warband that has gained prominence among the Orcs. Maybe there’s no boss at all and you instead have to undermine the delicate peace keeping things the enemy united, or destroy an ancient crypt from which endless undead are rising. Lots of diversity is needed to keep the game from becoming easily predictable.

[GOD]

Honestly, I don’t think this game is suitable for people who dislike difficulty and character death, because the core game experience completely revolves around the concept of lethality. Taking those away essentially makes the combat pointless, because there is no source of tension anymore. The only thing you’d have left is winning or losing and tweaking your characters so that you lose less. The game is so much more than that though and a difficulty level that lacks this does not seem like a worthwhile feature.
A casual player is probably not going to ever enjoy this game, or it’s going to show them a side of gaming that they never knew they enjoyed. It’s why I always recommend people to play the demo first and see whether they enjoy the combat. If they don’t, then I recommend them other games.

So if you have any people who you think might enjoy the game, just have them play the demo or show them one of the lets plays. See if they like it. I know the feeling of wanting to make a game enjoyable for someone who can’t deal with the difficulty, but I also know that they wouldn’t understand what makes the game special if I just gave them a watered-down version. :)

[GOD]

If saving in combat is implemented they could make it save on exit, with an autosave before the fight. That way you don’t have the constant reloading problem and people can still take a break from playing without having to restart the battle.

[GOD]

Totally with you on that. That’s why it’s good to discuss these things; hashing out these little details will make a big difference for the finished product. :)

[GOD]

Really looking forward to bottlenecks like the bridge and cramped hallways of the dungeon! There’s something really tense about a fight where it’s all about outlasting each other or holding back overwhelming numbers with a few men. I’m expecting undead to be a nightmare to fight in something like a dungeon – desperately taking potshots at the necromancer to stop him, while accidentally shooting my own guys in the head. Environmental factors like that can completely change how you approach a battle, it’s why picking a battlefield that favours you has always been one of the most important parts of strategy. I remember being really disappointed by how Rome Total War didn’t let you intentionally recreate the battle of Thermopylae.

The Orc Chief design really makes him stands out, especially the size of his tusks compared to other Orcs. Reinforces the predator theme they’ve got going on. I’ve learned by now to accept the shoulder spikes . . . just as long as you don’t put skulls on them. My poor heart can’t take anymore shoulder skulls. :P

[GOD]

True, but the scale of the areas where these battles take place seems to be on the small side. So I figured that hearing each other wouldn’t be a problem.

[Author]

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