So I just received my first quest chain! I’m pretty excited, because I’d honestly started to skim the questgiver’s dialogue for the basics of what I would be fighting. I’m sure other people do the same; you can really only have a guy tell you to go kill goblins (and it is always goblins isn’t it) so many times before you just want the bullet points.
Anyway, I got the bog-standard “Please go kill the grave robbers” quest. Easy peasy! I’ve done those dozens of times! It’s always low-tier bandits or maybe some ghouls. Stupid peasants could do it themselves probably, but hey, money is money. This time was different. This time the graveyard was full of wider… wieder… German Zombies. A whole horde! ZOUNDS! In any case, the Dead Men (an ironic name for the company in this specific instance) survived, tired and battered but all alive. Everything was normal, except the post-battle was different. Instead of the usual “They’re all dead, let’s go get paid” malarkey, one of the mercenaries finds some weird artifact.
When we get back to town, instead of the usual “Thanks for murdering things for me, here’s money” dialogue, the guy tells me that there’s a necromancer about, and offers to double my fee if I’ll go off him too! Bam! Quest chain! As you can probably imagine, I’m pretty excited about it.
I’m especially happy because it comes on the heels of another quest-goes-topsy-turvey that happened to me yesterday. I got a “Go Kill The Orcs” quest, so off I went to kill some orcs. It’s just a handful of Orc Young with a few Orc Warriors, according to the scouts. Definitely a winnable fight. When I attacked though, I got an event message telling me that the orcs are fighting among themselves! Suddenly, the orcs outnumber and surround me, but are honestly more interested in bashing one another than in murdering me. It was a very fun battle, and really nerve-wracking.
As much as I enjoy playing Battle Brothers, in the past I did find that it got pretty repetitive: you fought the same battles over and over until your warband got powerful enough that they just weren’t dangerous anymore… and then I would get bored and stop playing for awhile. Apparently there were high-tier enemies that showed up later in the game, but I never saw them. Events like these that shake up the combat really make the game more fun for me. I don’t know how many are in the game now, or how many are planned to be added, but I hope that more dynamic battle events get added in. They really do a lot to break up the grind that I sometimes feel that Battle Brothers becomes after awhile.
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