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The Great Whale Road (historical, turn based, cards, hexes, C&C, management)

Self-Ejected

Bubbles

I'm forever blowing
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Well, let's see what we have here. Promotional material is still sparse, even though the game goes into Early Access on July 28th. The devs are coming off a miserably failed Kickstarter; maybe the EA version will be more attractive to gamers. This is straight from their website, because I'm lazy:

  • Story driven single-player game combining RPG with lite management elements
  • Discover the stories of your settlement's characters along the North Sea coast
  • Authentic historical setting
  • Combat featuring turn-based tactics and cards
  • Our first settlement will represent the Danes, and we will add more playable settlements and their cultures throughout Early Access
  • We are planning to add:
    • Mac and Linux support
    • Multiplayer arena
Gameplay:

  • After selecting a culture and its playable settlement the player manages an annual cycle consisting of a two seasons:
    • Summer is the sailing season, when a warband is selected and sent on a mission. This is the time to discover new locations, stories and trade.
    • Winter is spent at the home settlement and is the season for planning and management decisions.
  • Characters have fixed classes, roles and attributes. Roles are aligned to the characters' backgrounds - for example warrior, boat builder, hunter or priest. While character attributes and classes cannot be changed, it is possible to modify armour sets and weapons. As a character level up their health, endurance and disposition thresholds can be upgraded.
  • Characters earn renown by completing their quest objectives, combat and trading.
  • The seafaring game is real-time. There are seasons and day-night cycles.
  • Tactical turn-based with cards

Setting:

The Great Whale Road is a video game set in a historical context. We have selected 650 AD because it is an interesting period of change in European history, and one often overlooked by popular culture (Beowulf aside). There are just enough sources available to create historical context and content, but also sufficient uncertainty to give us room for interpretation.

Joachim is a nearly fully trained historian (short of completing his master thesis 18 years or so ago), and we also had Belén, our history intern, review the literature for anything Joachim missed - ranging from general history of the period, trade and economic history, social history, art history, archaeology and even some palaeogeographical articles on early medieval coastal landscapes.

There are certain aspects of history which historians, archaeologists, geneticists, reenactors etc. do not agree on, and in these cases we go with what we think is most plausible and works best for the game. In the end (even historical) games are supposed to be fun.

----

Steam Early Access will start with the Danes. In the mid to long-term we are planning to add more playable settlements. The second will be a village in Bernicia, representing the Angles in Northumbria.

  • Story-driven quests for each playable settlement and main characters
  • Early longships, trading ships and curraghs (Celtic skin boats)
  • Historical locations and trade goods
  • Unique champions for each culture

Here's a gameplay video from last year. It's quite outdated, but it's the most recent gameplay footage I could find:



It looks like a hybrid of playing cards and traditional combat. More recent screenshots show off mechanics like morale and "crew affinity" meters and status effects, as well as some C&C and an art style that looks quite Banner Saga-ish:



We probably need to wait until the EA launch to know whether the game's any good, but the pitch sounds reasonably interesting.

And finally, the info the Codex is really interested in:

Women: While Christianity has taken hold in most areas already, the typical morality and gender separation of later centuries is not yet dominant. This only changes during the high middle ages, but even then it is possible to find the occasional female warrior and leader. During our period the differentiation between free and unfree is often more important than the difference between male and female. That doesn't mean that every woman was a warrior, but that they had a strong and independent position in most of the societies in the game. Let's assume that most early medieval women could do more chin-ups than most men today.

LBGT:
Sexuality is not one of the key topics covered by the available sources, in Christian texts it is usually bad and in sagas it is usually further down the list compared to naming as many people and relatives as possible as well as the description of drinking games and violence. Luckily there are archaeologists, and those folks have discovered quite a few graves which held an unusual mixture of goods. The conclusion is that some Germanic tribes were quite relaxed about the definition of gender, and that there were men defining themselves as women and vice versa. When even the Irish can vote for gay marriage, gamers should be able to deal with lesbian, gay and transgender characters too.
 
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Mustawd

Guest
When even the Irish can vote for gay marriage, gamers should be able to deal with lesbian, gay and transgender characters too.

These idiots will never get that this kind of holier than thou attitude is counter productive.

I'm for gay marriage. I was way back when. So what? What does it have to do with video games? Beyond the fact that you feel like you need to educate us that is. Ok, I'm not gonna get triggered. I promise...I promise...
 
Self-Ejected

Bubbles

I'm forever blowing
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Messages
7,817
Found a "story preview" that's really just a cutscene with text - pretty atmospheric, though:



Meanwhile, the devs have started a "facebook battle" trying to beat certain other games in the total number of likes:

This is as tough as any fight in Dark Souls ... life would be boring without challenges. Reaching for Tyranny's position this week, but closing the gap to The Banner Saga seems 'a bridge too far'.

vjNBl50.jpg

Contest's stupid of course, but their choice of references might be insightful.
 

SausageInYourFace

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The Great Whale Road is a video game set in a historical context. We have selected 650 AD because it is an interesting period of change in European history, and one often overlooked by popular culture (Beowulf aside). There are just enough sources available to create historical context and content, but also sufficient uncertainty to give us room for interpretation.

Joachim is a nearly fully trained historian (short of completing his master thesis 18 years or so ago), and we also had Belén, our history intern, review the literature for anything Joachim missed - ranging from general history of the period, trade and economic history, social history, art history, archaeology and even some palaeogeographical articles on early medieval coastal landscapes.

There are certain aspects of history which historians, archaeologists, geneticists, reenactors etc. do not agree on, and in these cases we go with what we think is most plausible and works best for the game. In the end (even historical) games are supposed to be fun.

That sounds fucking amaz-

LBGT: Sexuality is not one of the key topics covered by the available sources, in Christian texts it is usually bad and in sagas it is usually further down the list compared to naming as many people and relatives as possible as well as the description of drinking games and violence. Luckily there are archaeologists, and those folks have discovered quite a few graves which held an unusual mixture of goods. The conclusion is that some Germanic tribes were quite relaxed about the definition of gender, and that there were men defining themselves as women and vice versa. When even the Irish can vote for gay marriage, gamers should be able to deal with lesbian, gay and transgender characters too.

:negative:

Yeah, no. Holy shit, they just couldn't help themselves, could they? Why go through the effort to make everything as historically accurate as possible just to shoehorn Tranny Vikings into it for inclusivity? And on flimsy evidence at that. Would like to hear about their sources by their almost fully trained historian on this supposed Germanic gender construction. I am usually not one to rave about SJWs but this particular combination here is just tiggering. I wouldn't mind female warriors but do you really have to inject that LGBT stuff into a 'historically accurate' 650AD setting where it doesn't belong, ffs?
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
Joined
Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
Spanish team under Austrian command makes a Northern European themed game - why not.

In ship combat the characters look like the fell through the floor while in land it looks normal.

Als what's the point of cards in a single player RPG other than an unnecessary layer of abstraction?
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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From what I remember from their kickstarter pitch it looked like history studies were done by some intern.

fake edit.
. We have to thank Belén, our historical research intern this summer, who amassed a huge amount of background and reference material for the game.

Did anyone try the demo, which is no longer available?
 

Jrpgfan

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What's the point in having a timer in a single-player turn-based game? Kinda stupid if you ask me.

And I wish there was a proper inventory system instead of just picking a weapon and an armor set. That aside, the game looks good.
 
Self-Ejected

Bubbles

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I only see the timer in the multiplayer footage in the OP. The latest (singleplayer) video doesn't seem to have it.
 

Jrpgfan

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Oh, that was a multiplayer footage. My bad then, I didn't know this game is gonna have a multiplayer mode.
 
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It is always entertaining to see fellow posters lose their shit and give the same kind of phobic reactions to popularisation of non-normative/non-binary sexualities in the media that the religiously bigoted European invaders also did about five hundred (500) years ago when they found out that the Native American tribes of the New World, like many other cultures long before them, had been committing the sacrilege of not strictly enforcing or conforming to the same brand of church-enforced binary of sex and they went to great lengths to eradicate that part of Native American cultures (before eradicating their entire cultures eventually) so that none of it made it back to the old world.

Give it a fucking rest for your own sake. It was always here, long before the Greeks were writing love poems about fornicating with young boys and it is here to stay into the future. The denial and the resistance you share is a long-lasting oddity nurtured by stupid religions in human history, outworn its welcome. Meanwhile, you can try to educate yourself and come to terms with it. Play some Bastard Bonds and maybe reflect on the days when any depiction of homosexuality in any form wasn't kosher at all.
 

Mustawd

Guest
t is always entertaining to see fellow posters lose their shit and give the same kind of phobic reactions to popularisation of non-normative/non-binary sexualities i

:roll:

Play some Bastard Bonds and maybe reflect on the days when any depiction of homosexuality in any form wasn't kosher at all.


BB has been pretty well received on the codex, actually. So I don't know why you think people are getting their panties in a bunch about the gay part on this game. I dislike that they're trying to literally rewrite history just to make gay romances a thing. Just be like Bastard Bonds and make it as gay as you want. But don't try to convince me it's historically accurate. It's like that thing in 1984 where they rewrite history. It's f'in awful.
 

Modron

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May 5, 2012
Messages
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All in all what Mustawd said, nobody cared whatsoever about the ability to be homosexual in Fallout 2. It has more to do with the presentation and attitude of having to insert trannies into everything and the whole San Fran/tumblr act that other people are weird for not being LGBT like us that raises ire. To be honest we wouldn't even care that much if the option to be tranny was included in the game if the developers weren't trying so hard to show how special they were for including it. Once developers play that we are special snowflakes card you know they are a bit of a one trick pony akin to say a rock band who identify as a christian rock band.

Nobody batted an eye at the gender slider in Saints' Row 2, quite the contrary a lot of people enjoyed creating drastically different characters. For examples of done wrong see any bioware game post 2005 where you pretty much have to shout no means no not to bed another man/woman. Winter wolves' Planet Stronghold "I can't believe it's not Mass Effect TM," handled that crap better and their whole thing is pretty much including as many diverse relationships in one game as they can manage. Granted in WW's more recent entries they have kind of gone full Shawshank/modern Bioware route with the whole you'll need a baseball bat to fend off the advances of the bull queers.

ps
BB was satanic as fuck, the orc empire there built train systems out of what are essentially giant rectums (tunnels in which a living membrane were introduced). Said colon train routes formed a pentagram.
 
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Doktor Best

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Feb 2, 2015
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Why always cards? I dont want to play a game in a game to decide combat situations. Shit is breaking immersion.
 

Jinn

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Nov 8, 2007
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Yeah, this looks awesome except for card combat. Why the fuck do developers do this?
 

Jrpgfan

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Feb 7, 2016
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Probably easier to make and more cost efficient as you don't need to draw models and make animations for them.

You play "static" models during combat though, so it's not 100% card game.
 

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