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RapKeymasterI absolutely loved this system in Battle for Wesnoth. Really added to the gameplay.
Hopefully in Battle Brothers there will be even more uses for these traits. Will there be more to this game than tactical combat?More to this game than tactical combat regarding the character traits, you mean? Good question, but I don’t have a good answer yet. It would depend on whether we can come up with traits that influence the strategic gameplay in intuitive and meaningful ways, enough so to justify blurring the lines between tactical and strategic elements on this. As for more than tactical combat in general, take a look at this.
Do you plan to release modding tools so that players could construct their own narratives?
We’d like to. The game is engineered in a way that modding support could be added without any substantial changes necessary. It’s still work, though, writing a documentation, extending the scripting API beyond our own immediate needs, making sure our tools can be used by anyone, etc. Our priority therefore is to our core game first, but we’ll keep modding support in mind and might attend to it later depending on community demand and, well, budgetary feasibility.
RapKeymasterHello and welcome to our forum!
First of all, hello and kudos on the great job you’re doing. I’m an avid fan of this genre and so far I like what I see.
How will recruitment work?
Shall we have a large but limited pool of characters like in W40k Chaos Gate? Shall we just freely recruit up to a limit like in Mount&Blade?I never played W40k Chaos Gate, so I’m not sure how it compares to that exactly. There won’t be a limited pool of premade characters like in, for example, Jagged Alliance. Instead, all characters will be random generated. There won’t be a hard limit to their numbers, but the number of characters that can be hired at any one place at a time will be limited and likely depend on how that place fares. In other words, the player won’t be able to hire two dozen men at once, but will be able to hire more at a rich city than at a poor village. There is a one-time fee for recruiting new Battle Brothers (an incentive to leave their old lifes behind and to see that you can back up your words with silver coin, if you will), and they also expect to be regularly paid from then on. At this point we haven’t decided on a hard limit for the maximium number of Battle Brothers one can have at a time or on ways to increase that limit.
From what I’ve understood there will be no classes. But will there be any meaningful choices as characters progress?
Will character’s stats just grow with level as in Chaos Gate? Will they improve with use as in JA? Shall a player assign stat points and/or buy perks like in Fallout? Or shall their abilities be defined by level and current equipment only?Absolutely. At this time, the player can select 3 out of 6 stats to improve by a randomized amount (dice throw) on levelup. This is still subject to change, however. In addition, the player may select one passive skill (which are basically the same as perks in Fallout or feats in D&D) to further specialize the character each levelup. These passive skills are currently organized into 9 trees (such as Leadership and Mobility) and should allow for specializations not covered by stats alone. For example, there is a passive skill in the Mobility tree that reduces movement penalties on difficult terrain such as swamp, and another one in the Leadership tree that reduces morale penalties from bad events (such as allies being slain) for nearby Battle Brothers. We’ll do a blog article on character progression and details on the passive skills once we have everything a bit more refined and are satified this really works the way we intend it to.
Shall the RP element be minimal like in Myth series, where you only have a unique name for a character? Or like in Mount&Blade where you have a unique look and several stats shuffled around? Or like in JA where certain character like or dislike each other/various assignments based on personality traits? Or like in Dwarf Fortress where characters fall in love, create bonds of friendship and enmities, go berserk when their friend is killed, etc.?
In addition to the things I mentioned above, all characters also come with 0 to 2 randomly assigned character traits from the start, which should help define these characters as being unique among their peers. Character traits are essentially also passive skills but can’t be picked on levelup and aren’t necessarily all positive. Current examples are being athletic or fat (mutually exclusive, increases or decreases fatigue recovery rate, respectively) or having eagle-eyes (i.e. slightly increased view range). A character with good eyesight would make a good candidate for a scouting or ranged combat role, but even a fat man with poor eyesight could make a valued Battle Brother – he’ll just probably be the first to be out of breath in a prolonged engagement and not the one to spot incoming enemies, which, in my mind, adds to his character.
We’re also toying with the idea of giving each character a short biography of sorts, a single paragraph somewhat randomized to fit a character’s traits, to tell about how he fared before becoming a Battle Brother. However, we have no plans for character traits to influence character relations, as you mentioned, or indeed for there to be any special kind of relationships or gameplay effects based on character relationships.
Will there be a protagonist or are all squad members equal? Will there be any random personal sidequests for squad members based on their backstory? (wouldn’t that be cool? :P)
Is there a final goal or is the game 100% sandbox?There is no protagonist, so in that sense all squad members are equal. If players prefer, they’re free to rename any one of their Battle Brothers and customize their apperance in order to claim them as their personal character, although there are no gameplay mechanics that come with it.
I really liked the personal sidequests that fleshed out my companions’ background in some RPGs – but I just don’t think that this is something that fits our overall game design well.
There will be an end goal and several milestones on the way, and we’ll present them as part of an ongoing narrative related to The Greater Evil (the exact nature of which varies from game to game). However, the story will be kept rather loose and non-linear to support the open world sandbox gamestyle and not get in the way of replayability.
RapKeymasterThose are some good questions. I don’t think I can give a definite answer to every single one yet. On the bright side, if you guys have any input, now is the time to let it be heard!
1. Does player can control just one team of brothers, on world map, or there is possibility to split one group to smaller?
Yes, the player controls a single team that can’t be split up.
2. Characteristics of artifacts are randomly generated, at the beginning of the game? They have random names, values, recipes, etc.?
Artifacts are hand-crafted with set names, stats and descriptions that often tell a short story on how the artifact came to be (similar to the descriptions of magical items in Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate, if you know those). Out of a large pool of hand-crafted artifacts, some are randomly chosen to appear in a new game, and not every single one will be available in every game.
3. Crafting, and scholarship is maintained in player’s “base”?
We’re still undecided on what restrictions we’ll put on managing the crafting and scholarship aspects of the game. They both aren’t implemented yet, and I think we’ll have a better idea once we can test various ideas in the game.
4. “Light conditions” means night and day (like in x-com), or is it depended on local weather?
It means a day-and-night cycle on the worldmap that comes with changing lighting conditions. Apart from visual variety the time of day or night will influence view ranges and possibly the behavior and strength of certain enemies (like vampires). We’ll see about that. As for different weather conditions, it’s something we’d like to do (and in fact, we already have a rainstorm on the tactical map, which works quite well visually) but which will have to wait until we have the more important game mechanics down.
5. Every troop demands regular payment in gold? Followers are loyal?
Yes, followers and Battle Brothers expect to be regularly paid. They’re fairly loyal though, and while not paying them for a while will lower their morale (which makes them turn tail more easily if a battle isn’t going well), they won’t ever take up arms against the player. We’ll have to see at which point they’d actually abandon the group, but it won’t be something they’ll do lightly.
RapKeymasterNo need to excuse yourself! I think it’s awesome that we get feedback from passionate gamers such as you. Our very next blog post, which we’ll post tomorrow or the day after, will cover our plans for the worldmap and should answer some questions.
As for sandbox games in general, I think there’s been a shift in recent times towards more open world sandboxy concepts. A few good selling open world games (e.g. Skyrim, GTA) made everyone aware that there is a lot of consumer interest in those. I think we’ll only see more of them.
RapKeymasterYep. We also have agricultural assets (like farm land) we place near villages and towns, as medieval towns obviously relied heavily on those. While we don’t have natural resources on the map as a gameplay concept, we try to have towns placed near fertile land (grassland, forest, rivers) and not in the middle of some baren wasteland. If you have some further good suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them!
RapKeymasterHello again!
When we use the term world map, world refers to the known world as in medieval times. We won’t have a whole planet with different continents. What we’ll have instead is more akin to a classic fantasy realm; a single continent that may potentially have different climate zones.
We use a naive algorithm to generate a landmass that subjectively feels like something that could be real to the layman by adhering to some commonly known principles. We don’t attempt to create an actual simulation of geological and metereological forces, however. Our priority is simply to have a worldmap that looks good and feels good to play on.
I appreciate your offer to share your code but it won’t be necessary here as we already have our own solution.
RapKeymasterI enjoy games with well done stories and dialogs. There aren’t exactly many of those. I enjoyed The Walking Dead from Telltale because even though it was rather weak in the gameplay department, it was many times more gripping to be part of a well-told interactive story than just watching other people argue over mundane stuff in the TV series.
That said, different games are build around different strenghts. We aren’t ignorant to immersion through a good narrative, but I think it’s safe to say that this game will be defined by different strengths.
RapKeymasterHello and welcome to our forums!
I think Diablo is a decent example for the route we’re going to take in many ways. The story was vague, as was the antagonist. Contrary to you, I also don’t remember it having any great dialogs. Certainly it didn’t have much in terms of character interaction. However, it did an awesome job of creating a suspenseful atmosphere by its presentation – the music, the visual style and the bits of story you did get came together very well. I always felt that my actions were embedded in a story context despite the game’s comparatively few efforts to establish one.
Replayability (and hence the procedural generation of much of the game) is a key concept in our game design – but something that doesn’t go well together with heavily scripted stories or game progression. For this reason (and our limited resources) we won’t have much in terms of direct character interaction, extensive dialogs or cleverly written moral dilemmas to navigate through. We definately want to have each encounter to have some context, to have more meaning than just “enemy = loot + xp”. That’s why we want to present each with a short story and illustration, e.g. we won’t just drop you in a fight with a necromancer because why not, but we have the townspeople approach you telling of their cattle perishing, the graves being empty and such.
What we’ll have in terms of choice & consequences will be emergent from gameplay and not be pre-determined by us to occur at some set point in the story. For example, not helping a town under siege could mean it being razed and no longer available in the game world as a place of commerce and safety in the region. It’s an actual consequence of a strategic decision for how you, as the player, will continue to play the gamer afterwards in a dynamic world. Not a fake consequence that we tell you a story about. Nevertheless, we want to present a major event like this with a (minimalistic) cutscene to the player to convey the gravity of it.
Just as with the combat we’ll iterate on story, immersion and choice & consequences until it feels right. I look forward to your feedback once we have something more to show regarding these!
RapKeymasterIt’s awesome to see we aren’t the only ones who’d love to play a game like this.
You make a good point about the rogue-esque replayability of Battle Brothers. As much as I enjoy playing games with well done hand-crafted stories and levels, they have the distinct disadvantage of being based on very finite attractions. When developing a game like this, it wouldn’t be long until I’d have seen it all. With procedural content like in Battle Brothers, even after developing it for half a year now, I experience new situations all the time. It still feels fresh to me in many ways and I look forward to play the next build every week. That greatly contributes to my personal motivation.
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