I'm going to take a moment to compare the strategic layer of Sengoku Rance to grand strategy mainstays such as Europa Universalis or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. During a given turn in a grand strategy game, you gauge the strength of your enemy and then build up the appropriate forces to take a territory you want. You are likely to be victorious on the field, but there are other factors which determine if the attack will have been worthwhile. For example, what resources were lost to ensure the victory? Were your best officers and units used up in the attack, leaving only scrubs and depleted troops available to defend what you won during that turn? What enemy resources were captured that would make the losses acceptable? How will the rulers of opposing factions react? Will your enemies seek an alliance, declare war, offer tribute in the hopes of staying neutral, or act in the shadows in an attempt to weaken your forces? There’s a lot of complexity in a typical grand strategy title, but Sengoku Rance is probably one of the most accessible and easy to learn of this genre.

There are continuous choices and consequences to your actions as the game unfolds. For example, one industrious clan sells powerful weapons to its sole ally but also offers to sell rifle units to you. However, if you attack the ally of this arms dealing territory they will begin to sell their weapons to everyone in the hopes of slowing your conquests down without having to actively engage you. To avoid this you could make the allied clan your vassal instead of invading them, but then you miss out on having greater control of their territory.

During the latter part of the game you find yourself having to fight on multiple fronts, but you have the option to shut a large gateway and trap one of your opponents behind it. Doing so protects your flank, but the gate cannot be opened again and you lose the opportunity to claim more territory and capture its powerful commanders. Most of the more well-known grand strategy games are sandboxes where events are essentially random. Sengoku Rance has a much more static world, but it compensates by having tons of scripted events, most of which are impossible to witness in a single playthrough. You will likely have to beat the game more than a half-dozen times to see the majority of its hidden lore.

Sengoku Rance's characters are some of the most distinct and memorable in the history of video games. The leaders and subordinate officers of the game’s various factions each stand out in their own small way thanks to its well-drawn art and visual novel storytelling. One of the first factions you go to war with is led by the leader of a strong unit of archers who has one of the best special skills for ranged units, but he’s beaten down by life and constantly pushed into making poor military decisions by his beautiful and spoiled wife. Another faction is led by a giant creature called a raccoon dog and his army of smaller furry ninjas. They inherited their territory after capturing it from their human oppressors and hope to take advantage of Rance’s rise to weaken their neighbors. A third faction is led by a corrupt court, but their greatest officer is the game’s equivalent of a virtuous paladin who will lead her unit in support of factions Rance declares war against. Ironically, she and her best friend end up having more to fear from the machinations of those she serves. Later in the game, Rance will come into contact with a nation of undead soldiers led by a samurai eyeball and his harem of supportive, monstrous wives. Most of the officers and units of this particular faction are subpar, but they lead huge forces and battles with them become particularly difficult if one of the wives is part of the attacking army. I can think of no other game where there are so many factions with such distinctly drawn characters, each of which gets their own small moment to shine. Sengoku Rance is one of the few games out there where the visual novel style of storytelling feels well-integrated with the flow of gameplay.

[...] Your ultimate goal is to take over this world's version of Japan during an alternate Warring States period, in which the historical figures have been replaced by political parodies. Combat is a simple affair. Place your melee fighters on the front row to protect support units that operate in the back. During battles, you can place up to six commanders and their units onto the battlefield to slog it out. You start off the game running the Oda Clan with a few basic types of units, such as warriors like Rance who have high offensive attributes and skills that allow them to perform special offensive maneuvers. Complementing them are commanders of foot soldiers, whose attacks aren’t as powerful, but have high defensive attributes and specialized skills for protecting allied units. You are also given a commander of archers, whose attacks are not as powerful as warriors either, but can attack from the back row and strike any enemy unit regardless of location. Archers are quite useful for disrupting spell casters who are preparing their more powerful spells from the enemy’s back row. Finally, you are given a tactician commander, whose skills can be used to enhance the fighting abilities of allied units or diminish those of the enemy.

Sengoku Rance starts you out with these basic units and gradually adds more diverse character classes as you proceed through the game. The ninja behaves in a similar way to the archer, but can quickly learn the assassinate skill which allows it to instantly wipe out enemy units. Monks are decent front row melee fighters who also have an assortment of skills, such as the ability to heal themselves or make foot soldiers drop their guard. Diviner commanders can throw up barriers to guard their allies, or spend some time chanting in order to cast a spell that strikes at each of the opposing enemy units. Musketeers are the most deadly units on the battlefield, but they can't take much damage and can only attack once or twice before exhausting all of their actions for the entire battle. Cavalry units are the ones I fear the most, since they can attack multiple times, have great offensive attributes, and can strike any unit regardless of whether they’re in the front or back rows. I still haven't touched upon some of the more unique commanders and their abilities, nor have I talked about the non-human units. In short, there's a lot of variation in the opponents you will face.

The handful of officers you start out with are a dubious group of misfits that you are forced to rely upon to survive (although Rance himself is the backbone of your offense at this stage). One of the game’s more charming aspects is how even the minor officers on both sides of the battlefield have their own personalities and quirks. By improving your relationship with your officers, upgrading their ability scores with books, and equipping them with items, you will have a chance to turn some of the more mediocre recruits into a respectable fighting force. Every officer has several attributes which determine how fast they can act, how hard they attack, how well they defend, how well they search, and how effective they are at diplomacy. Some officers also have unlockable special abilities, such as the ability to fire a volley of arrows that peppers an entire enemy force instead of just one opposing unit. You can only have thirty officers in your roster and by mid-game you'll find yourself having to make hard choices about who will make the cut.​

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App Trigger 8.5/10, Ars Technica
Attack of the Fanboy 4/5, AusGamers 8.5/10
CGMagazine 9/10, COGconnected 91/100
Critical Hit 8/10, The Daily Dot 4.5/5
Daily Star 4/5, Destructoid 9/10
DualShockers 9.5/10, EGM 5/5
Eurogamer, GameCrate 8.25/10
Game Informer 9.25/10, GamingTrend 65/10
Game Rant 4.5/5, Gamers Heroes 9/10
GamesBeat 91/100, GameSpace 9/10
GameSpew 8/10, GameSpot 9/10
GamesRadar+ 4/5, Game Revolution 4.5/5
God is a Geek 8.5/10, Hardcore Gamer 4/5
IGN 8.5/10, Kotaku
Mashable, Metro GameCentral 9/10
MMORPG.com 8/10, PC Gamer 79/100
PCGamesN 7/10, PC Invasion 7/10
PlayStation LifeStyle 10/10, PlayStation Universe 10/10
Polygon, Press Start Australia 8.5/10
Push Square 9/10, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
RPG Site 8/10, Screen Rant 4.5/5
Shacknews 9/10, Stevivor 9.5/10
Time, The Digital Fix 7/10
The Indie Game Website 8/10, TheSixthAxis 8/10
TheXboxHub 5/5, TrueAchievements 4.5/5
Twinfinite 4/5, USgamer 4/5
VGC 4/5, Wccftech 7.8/10
We Got This Covered 5/5, Windows Central 4.5/5
Worth Playing 9/10, Xbox Achievements 92/100​

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Matt: George, you were just telling me that you are opening a new studio. Wonder if you could tell us a little bit about.

George: Correct. So we are called Digimancy Entertainment.

Matt: Digimancy?

George: Yes, like digital-mancy.

Matt: I see what you did there.

George: Indeed. We're gonna be making RPGs and RPG hybrids, with a focus on great narratives and strong characters. Basically the kind of stuff that we've been doing in the past, for the last 15, 20 years. Something that I've been talking and thinking about for a long time.

Obviously I've worked on a few spiritual successors in my time. I've worked on quite a lot of sequels and franchise games. So I'm really interested in working on some new and original stuff. Original settings, new IPs. We're actually starting on something that we're super excited about. We are also interested in doing existing IPs, but especially stuff that hasn't been done in a long time or maybe that's never been seen in RPGs before. So if you think of like, Wizards of the Coast has all these cool properties laying around that they haven't done anything with for a while. Ravenloft, gosh, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, like, I'd love to work on any of those. So if WotC is listening let us know. We would be we would be very happy to work on that stuff.

Technically we're based in Columbus, Ohio, so we're a Midwestern studio, where it's actually affordable to live which is another really nice thing. We are also embracing the remote model of work so it's more like, I don't really care where you are and as long as you are super excited about RPGs and you really want to work on these games, I am happy to find a way to work with people no matter where they live.​

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Lesquin, France, October 19, 2019 - On the heels of Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood, Bigben’s catalogue is expanding its presence in The World of Darkness with the production of a new video game based on the famous franchise Vampire: The Masquerade. Already teased at Bigben Week 2019, this new game titled Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong will release in 2021. It will be developed by Big Bad Wolf studio, a narrative RPG specialist and author of the award-winning game The Council.

Vampire: The Masquerade is the most iconic role-playing game of its generation and sets the standard for many tabletop gamers. The first setting in the World of Darkness universe created by White Wolf Publishing in 1991, Vampire: The Masquerade transposes the vampire myth into modern societies. The player takes control of one of these immortal creatures hiding in the shadows of our cities. They struggle to control their bloodthirsty instincts by leading a life of both predator and outcast, in a world where the boundaries between reality and the supernatural are always blurred. Vampires in The World of Darkness are nothing like the solitary monsters of the ancient legends. They are superior and sophisticated creatures who live among humans behind a shield of secrecy: The Masquerade. Organised into complex secret societies, they create their own laws and are members of distinct clans with contrasting visions of their role in the world.

Thrilled with the success of The Council, Big Bad Wolf studio intends to continue specialising in narrative RPGs, a new genre that they are helping to define with their creations. With this adaptation of Vampire: The Masquerade, the team is working on its most ambitious project. The game will feature a strong story, supported by solid RPG mechanics that respect the rules of the fifth edition of Vampire: The Masquerade and the universe of The World of Darkness.

"At the studio, we're long-time and passionate fans of the tabletop role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade. We have wanted to create a video game inspired by this universe for several years now. This project fits perfectly with Bigben’s desire to expand its catalogue of narrative games. We are very happy to be unveiling it together," says Thomas Veauclin, Creative & Art Director at Big Bad Wolf.

"My past experience as an editor and author of role-playing games, and also as Editor-in-Chief of an RPG magazine, is proof of how important this project means to me personally," adds Benoit Clerc, Head of Publishing at Bigben." Just like me, many fans have been waiting a long time for a new adaptation of this cult game, which will be developed by one of the most talented studios of its generation."

In this narrative RPG adapted from the 5th edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, the player takes control of 3 vampires belonging to different clans of the Camarilla, the secret society to which most vampires belong. Weaving between their intertwined tales, the player has to confront the different points of view of his characters to unravel fact from fiction. With whispers of conspiracy, murder and power struggles, the player must protect his clan, discover the truth and above all enforce the Masquerade, the vampire law designed to conceal the existence of creatures of the night from humans.
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To all fans of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2

For the last three and a half years, we’ve worked hard to bring you a worthy successor to Bloodlines 1. To us, that meant not only making good on the ambitions of this remarkable game, but also a duty to ensure we would not repeat its mistakes. Today, we have to tell you that we need some more time to get you the game you’ve been waiting for. Although Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 will still launch in 2020, we have decided to value quality over making the Q1 launch window.

There are some things we wanted to hit under all circumstances when we set out to follow in Bloodlines’ footsteps: A deep, branching storyline; fascinating and amazingly acted characters; the rich universe of the World of Darkness. We firmly believe that we’re on the right track to get you all of this.

On the flip side, there’s the responsibility to avoid some of the issues that plagued the first game, which was famously launched too early. Over the last few months, it became clear that to stick to our original date would risk repeating that mistake. We won’t do that. In the end, everyone working on this game wants to offer you the best Bloodlines 2 we can.

This hasn’t been an easy- nor our first choice. Throughout 2019 we have been improving our processes and growing our teams, however it soon became clear that this alone won’t allow us to deliver the quality we want at the date we promised.

Your feedback was invaluable in this. It helped us give the proper weight to what we saw, as well. We’d like to thank you, and hope you’ll support us in the decision that came from it.

Many of us from Hardsuit Labs will be in Berlin for PDXCON. For those of you going, we look forward to seeing you there! We will be sharing insights into the development of Bloodlines 2 along with other steps we’ve taken to strengthen our development team to realize our ambitions for Bloodlines 2.

For those of you who won’t be there, we will be sharing more about this during the PDXCON Announcement stream on Saturday the 21st. We are also opening up a Reddit thread to answer any of your questions in the Bloodlines stream on the following Sunday.

Thanks,

Andy Kipling and Brian Mitsoda, on behalf of the team at Hardsuit Labs

We want to hear from you! Join the discussion on our Discord channel or Reddit to ask your questions. We will compile them to be answered on October 20th during our special Dev Q&A stream live from PDXCON.

Tune in to Paradox Interactive Twitch or Mixer channels this Sunday at 4pm CET to watch our dev team answer your most burning questions
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When it comes to setting, Stygian makes the same mistake games like Neverwinter Nights, Bloodlines, and Shadowrun Returns did by cramming in as many references as it possibly can, turning it into a Lovecraft theme park. Cthulhu, Randolph Carter, The Outsider, one of Herbert West's reanimated zombies, Pickman's models, the Terrible Old Man and the Strange High House in the Mist, the Dreamlands, the Witch House, the Mi-Go, the Elder Things, they're all here. I would prefer a more focused story that relies less on direct references, though I recognize the temptation is high to put in everything you can on your first and perhaps only attempt at an adaptation.

It's not all bad. The writing isn't brilliant or deep, but it is superficially entertaining and well-paced, which is a low bar many other modern traditional RPGs have been unable to reach. You won't get plagued by walls of exposition and prose descriptions during dialogue here. There are a few typos and English-as-a-Second-Language mishaps here and there. If your character goes insane, sometimes your dialogue options are replaced with Malkavian-esque lines which can be funny but are occasionally too childish. Sometimes non-player characters react specifically to the different line; other times their reaction remains unchanged. There are a good number of other "false" flavor options that lead to the same dialogue node, which is a shame.

Quest design isn't anything too ambitious: you find plot coupons, investigate a murder, infiltrate a cult, and engage in other Lovecraftian activities. How you're able to carry out these tasks is determined by your character's skills; you'll be locked out of certain interactions if you don't have the right build for it, but there's always a way through. There can be quite a bit of combat, but most of your time is spent walking and interacting with people and objects. As I wrote earlier, Stygian reminds me a lot of the first few hubs in Bloodlines; there's quite a bit of freedom in terms of supported character concepts and playstyles, but the story is on rails with only cosmetic narrative reactivity, no significant branches.

While the journal does give directions, it doesn't hold your hand; there's no quest compass here, so there were times where I felt lost as to what to do next, though I wasn't actually lost since exploring the world and following a thread on any active quest would continue the plot. It's a good feeling rarely found these days.

[...] The combat encounters themselves are incredibly lazy. The first potential fight in the game is against six people. Then you enter an abandoned bank and fight six lunatics up to three times. This is what you can expect to experience for the rest of the game. To the developers' partial credit, the bank had one additional encounter in the demo that was seemingly removed due to negative feedback. Additionally, there are only three of these lousy copy-paste-filled combat crawls (i.e. any location with multiple battles in succession), but going through them is still far more annoying than the usual one-and-done areas.

In addition to being lazy, the encounters are also pretty easy. Granted, I made a combat-oriented character, and I have an above-average (though not great) understanding of how to play cRPGs. There were only two fights that gave me trouble; the first involved reinforcements that pop in behind you after two turns, and the second was an annoying gimmick boss where reinforcements are constantly trickling in behind you while you have to dig up the boss before it can be damaged. Both were manageable once I figured out the ideal positioning within the environment.

Bad news for would-be brave diplomats: you can't totally avoid combat in Stygian. I encountered 21 battles, and you can sneak and potentially talk your way past most of them, but there were at least two on the critical path that can't be avoided (one of which is that annoying gimmick boss I just mentioned). A solo run seems implausible if not impossible on account of that one fight.

At least the endgame isn't an annoying combat crawl in its entirety. Unfortunately, what it does have is comparably annoying: a series of rooms where you have to do the same time-padding pattern matching puzzle over and over again. After a brief reprieve, you're thrown into an area where you have to navigate around real-time patrols. Cultic made the same mistake here Harebrained Schemes did with Shadowrun: Hong Kong; real-time stealth gameplay is inappropriate and out of place in a turn-based RPG. It's like the developers forgot they were making an RPG and decided to make an adventure game complete with stereotypical action-oriented gimmicks.

I'll avoid spoiling the details of the ending, but as Cultic themselves confirmed before release, it ends on a cliffhanger after about 20 hours. It stops after a dramatic moment, but it's not a proper climax by any means. The developers had a lot of hubris and optimism to end it like this; it was certainly within their ability to rewrite the story to give it a more definite ending with what they had available. Instead what we have is comparable to Bloodlines if it just suddenly stopped after the sewers and played a cinematic that teased what to expect in Chinatown. It's an Early Access or Episode 1 release that doesn't label itself as such, which is a dishonorable way to release a game.​

$100 - Name in Monument
$130 - Character Creation Name Pool
$250 - Name an NPC
$300 - Write a Scroll
$500 - Name a Landmark
$750 - NPC Face Creation
$1000 - Co-Design a Magic Item (plus a visit to Tactical Adventures HQ in Paris)​

$28 - Digital Game (includes one Kickstarter-exclusive item)
$40 - Digital Game Kickstarter Edition (includes two Kickstarter-exclusive items)
$65 - Kickstarter Edition with Rulebook PDF (includes all three Kickstarter-exclusive items)
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There is no city in the world with more contrasts than Revachol. The broken, magnificent, disgraced former capital of the world. A great sky on fire, reflecting off broken glass. Revachol the Suzerain, Revachol the Commune, Revachol the Administrative Region where all forms of government have failed. Revachol the Resolver, the answer to the great burning questions of history. How should we live? Will the horror ever end?

Revachol sits on a fertile island in the middle of the Insulindian Ocean, the world’s largest body of water; in the eye of a great archipelago called Face-A-La-Mer. To be from Revachol is to be Revacholian. To be deserted, destroyed. A drug addict with an immunodeficiency disorder. A joke and a clown and a loser baby.

It’s like the hanged man behind the hostel cafeteria said: there’s nothing funny about jokes.

There’s nothing funny about you either. Your swollen face in the mirror. A past you don’t recognize, a world you can’t bear to remember. The river Esperance flows from north to south, splitting the city in two. In its delta, great ghosts rise to the sky – the financial district. To the east: Le Jardin. Houses with gardens rise along the mountainside, up to Saint-Batiste where two of the world’s five largest companies keep their headquarters. But you don’t wake up there – you wake up west of the river.

West of the river, it’s funky-baby holocaust time all day every day. In East-Jamrock, wild animals roam the valley at night – giraffes that escaped from the Royal Zoo 50 years ago. Giraffes – even-toed ungulates from the savannah. The local kiosque chain Frittte (sic) employs a private army of 2000 men to guard its properties in Jamrock and Faubourg. That’s how bad the crime rate is – you need a private army to run a kiosque chain. And deregulation? They built a citizen-funded primitive nuclear reactor on the river. And it immediately entered core meltdown. That’s pretty deregulated if you ask me. Below Precinct 41 there’s a kebab merchant called Kuklov who makes kebabs that make you immortal if you can eat three and survive. In Villalobos an entire street is walled off and turned into a poppy field by a deified gangster called The Mazda, while his mortal enemy La Puta Madre exclusively employs former narcotics officers to farm his own fields. Through underground tunnels, kids descend into Le Royaume, the resting place of three centuries’ worth of the royal dead, to bring up rat tails and the pearl-encrusted teeth of civil servants. Child labour dungeoneering is a cottage industry. Someone came up with a synthetic opiate called the hunch that has a high lasting for two seconds. You only feel it while you’re injecting it.

It has not been an easy life. Things have not gone well for you. That love thing didn’t work out. Radio networks criss-cross the air, spewing meaningless, feverish political rhetoric. Beyond the curve of the horizon, where the ocean ends, there is an unknowable anti-reality mass called the pale. It has been there for as long as human beings have written down history. And it’s advancing.

The year is ’52. It’s the 5th of March and you’re lying on the floor of the Whirling-In-Rags hostel cafeteria. In Martinaise, North Jamrock. The sound of Lieutenant Kitsuragi’s motor carriage arriving on the scene interrupts what can only be described as an act of self-annulment through alcohol and amphetamine use. Your bell bottom pants make your ass look fat and, dear god, you think you’ve lost your badge.

It’s up to you – and you alone – to save the whole world. To untie the great knot. To crack the case. To resolve reality. You are the last Revacholian hero. The Revacholian hero has nothing, but he must conquer everything. If he doesn’t care, no one does. All of it will slowly roll into the heavens under the advancing pale, or it will contract into a singular miracle only the Revacholian hero can deliver.

All you have to help you in this – the last and the greatest of the cases undertaken by man on Earth, in the sheer face of death and history – is Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi from Precinct 57.
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Alicesoft’s Sengoku Rance is now available for purchase exclusively on MangaGamer.com! Get 10% off when you purchase today!

In the far east nation of Nippon, a plethora of feudal lords are fighting for supremacy in the 4th Sengoku Era. After doing immeasurable damage on the Continent, the brute known as Rance traveled with his slave, Sill, to the island country.

For a hot spring vacation, you ask?

Wrong. While they’ll go to some hot springs, Rance’s goal is to bang all of Nippon’s beautiful princesses, samurai, miko, ninjas, village girls, and more. In particular, he wants Kouhime of the prominent Oda clan.

When Rance becomes the ruler of one of the feudal states, he charges head first toward uniting Nippon!​

New Powers Lead to New Areas to Explore
In Bloodlines 2, we are pushing the idea of vampire powers used towards vertical traversal. If a skilled parkour practitioner can scale up a building wall, so can a thinblood vampire. Vampires inhabit spaces in the shadows and areas least traveled by normal humans. Barely lit rooftops of buildings are great areas for the vampire to dwell in, but trying to set dress an area to show what a vampire leaves behind is difficult. Since they don’t eat or drink, they don’t leave food garbage lying around. Other than wet footsteps and other small clues, there is not much to go by. Instead, we decided to use other gameplay methods that enabled the use of heightened senses to find symbolic tags that vampires leave behind. These tags are similar to gangs marking out their territory with spray paint, and since Vampires are very territorial, this route of set dressing we are taking can help fill out that aspect of the narrative.

Christmas!
The storyline of this game takes place during the most festive season of all in Seattle - Christmas! Christmas trees, tinsel, ornaments, stringed colored lights, stockings, salvation army donation boxes that the player can steal from, reefs, and joy for all. It is imperative that we drive the mood of this game towards a holiday theme and that it is clearly evident to the player. Not everything that happens during Christmas is all cheery and joyful. We have some goodies in store!

Blind spots
A major aspect of this game is that breaking the masquerade has severe consequences. Causing havoc and trouble in a well-lit open area will alert the police and be a detriment to your health as a vampire. Where can you be free and enjoy your new vampire superpowers? Where is the “dark web” of these city environments where the lawless can run to? We are introducing areas in the game called blind spots that will allow the player to escape to when they need to run from the police after a dirty deed has been done. Blind spots are alleyways, dimly lit back parking lot areas, or even rooftops. To the normal eye, these areas feel dangerous and unsafe. You definitely notice that the blind spot areas will feel unkempt. Garbage might be piling up, rats are scattered about, and the walls are tagged with graffiti. The casual human would generally avoid these areas, but to the vampire these areas are freeing and feel like home.

Rain
A major misconception about Seattle, is that it is always raining. It might not always be raining in Seattle during the winter months, but it is always drearily wet and misty. If one were to stand outside in December, they would notice the ground is always damp and it seems to stay that way for vast amounts of time. We decided to have the exterior environments in Bloodlines 2 to always be wet to be faithful to the weather in Seattle during the winter months.

Horror
An aspect of vampires in the World of Darkness compared to the current climate view of them is that they are monsters. There is no teenage vampire angst happening here or a coming of age scenario. They are monsters and shall remain monsters. Without giving away too much, if there are scenes of death and dismay, there will be quite a bit of blood and horror. We want to set the narrative mood of this game to be dark and disturbing. To attain that through environment art, we tend to stick to colors that are neutral and not overwhelming. Allow the lighting team to set the mood of the given scene and allow the colors and hues of death to dominate the space. The more realistic Environment Art can make a space look and feel, the more unnerving it will be when death and horror present themselves.

New World vs Old World
In Bloodlines 2, a major storyline is that there is a power struggle between the Old World vampires and the newer generation of vampires. I won’t go into much detail about this since it might reveal too much of the story, but the current reality in Seattle is that there is an economic and cultural shift happening with the massive rise of tech companies and an influx of new people moving to the city looking for job opportunities. We have included aspects of this dynamic into our game. One way is through the set dressing of cranes dotting the Seattle skyline to help denote new construction happening next to older architecture. Different neighborhoods with drastically different looks and feel in this game assist with the story of change in Seattle.

I hope this environment art dev diary helps give some insight on how we approach the Bloodlines 2 story through set dressing and environment cues. We often ask ourselves what would someone working in the field of Crime Scene decipher from our set dressing and choice of materials and colors in a given space. Could they guess the narrative of the scene from the story we tell with the environment? The World of Darkness is hidden in an underlying area of reality. Things are not always what they seem and we have tried to push that narrative through various locations in the game. The hope is that the players can see some of those underlying themes through Environment Art when they get a chance to play the game.

Of all the new facts I have learned about vampires in the World of Darkness, the one opinion I have about Vampires is that they care so much about how they are portrayed by others. Image is everything it seems. I stated earlier that vampires don’t breathe air, but quite a few of them still smoke!? You might notice quite a few cigarette trays in this game. The older more refined vampires prefer to drink blood straight from a victim’s warm neck. Anything else is considered vulgar in the vampire community. If you see a glass of blood in this game, it is just for show for the player’s eye. Lou really take the whole idea about image to a new level. She is shown smoking and drinking in her mansion when the player shows up, and we know she doesn’t really care about either.
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As I’ve described it so far, Betrayal at Krondor sounds more akin to the typical Japanese than the Western CRPG. The former tend to lie much closer to the set-piece-story end of our continuum of design; they provide a set, fairly linear plot to walk through, generally complete with predefined characters, rather than the degree of world simulation and open-ended exploration that marks the Western tradition. (A Japanese CRPG is, many a critic has scoffed, just a linear story in which you have to fight a battle to see each successive scene.) Yet Betrayal at Krondor actually doesn’t fit comfortably with that bunch either. For, as Cutter also notes above, he and his design partner were determined to “give the player plenty of freedom to explore and adventure without being bound to a scripted plot.”

Their means of accomplishing that relies once again on the chapter system. Each chapter begins and ends with a big helping of set-piece plot and exposition. In between, though, you’re free to go your own way and take your time in satisfying the conditions that will lead to the end of the chapter. In the first chapter, for example, your assignment is to escort a prisoner across much of the map to the capital city of Krondor. How and when you do so is up to you. The map is filled with encounters and quests, most of which have nothing to do with your central mission. And when you eventually do finish the chapter and continue on with the next, the same map gets repopulated with new things to do. This is the origin of a claim from Dynamix’s marketing department that Betrayal at Krondor is really nine CRPGs in one. In truth, it doesn’t quite live up to that billing. Only a subsection of the map is actually available to you in most chapters, much of it being walled off by impenetrable obstacles or monsters you can’t possibly kill. Even the repopulation that happens between chapters is far from comprehensive. Still, it’s an impressively earnest attempt to combine the pleasures of set-piece plotting with those of an emergent, persistent virtual world.

And yet the combination between set-piece storytelling and emergent exploration always feels like just that: a combination rather than a seamless whole. Cutter and Hallford didn’t, in other words, truly square this particular circle. There’s one massive block of cognitive dissonance standing at the center of it all.

Consider: you’re told at the beginning of the first chapter that your mission of escorting your prisoner to the capital is urgent. Political crisis is in the air, war clouds on the horizon. The situation demands that you hurry to Krondor by the shortest, most direct path. And yet what do you do, if you want to get the most out of the game? You head off in the opposite direction at a relaxed doddle, poking your nose into every cranny you come across. There’s a tacit agreement between game and player that the “urgent” sense of crisis in the air won’t actually evolve into anything until you decide to make it do so by hitting the next plot trigger. Thus the fundamental artificiality of the story is recognized at some level by both game and player, in a way that cuts against everything Betrayal at Krondor claims to want to be. This isn’t really an interactive storybook; it’s still at bottom a collection of gameplay elements wired together with chunks of story that don’t really need to be taken all that seriously at the end of the day.

The same sense of separation shows itself in those lengthy chapter-beginning and -ending expository scenes. A lot of stuff happens in these, including fights involving the characters ostensibly under your control, that you have no control over whatsoever — that are external to the world simulation. And then the demands of plot are satisfied for a while, and the simulation engine kicks back in. This is no better or worse than the vast majority of games with stories, but it certainly isn’t the revolution some of the designers’ claims might seem to imply.

Of course, one might say that all of these observations are rather more philosophical than practical, of more interest to game designers and scholars than the average player; you can suspend your disbelief easily enough and enjoy the game just as it is. There are places in Betrayal at Krondor, however, where some of the knock-on effects of the designers’ priorities really do impact your enjoyment in more tangible ways. For this is a game which can leave you marooned halfway through, unable to move forward and unable to go back.

[...] This is precisely the problem which the player of Betrayal at Krondor can all too easily run into. Not only does the game allow you to ignore the urgent call of its plot, but it actually forces you to do so in order to be successful. If you take the impetus of the story seriously and rush to fulfill your tasks in the early chapters, you won’t build up your characters sufficiently to survive the later ones. Even if you do take your time and explore, trying to accrue experience, focusing on the wrong skills and spells can leave you in the same boat. By the time you realize your predicament, your “Plan B” is nonexistent. You can’t get back to those encounters you skipped in the earlier, easier chapters, and thus can’t grind your characters out of their difficulties. There actually are no random encounters whatsoever in the game, only the fixed ones placed on the map at the beginning of each chapter. I’m no fan of grinding, so I’d normally be all in favor of such a choice, which Cutter and Hallford doubtless made in order to make the game less tedious and increase its sense of narrative verisimilitude. In practice, though, it means that the pool of available money and experience is finite, meaning you need not only to forget the plot and explore everywhere in the earlier chapters but make the right choices in terms of character development there if you hope to succeed in the later ones.

On the whole, then, Betrayal at Krondor acquits itself better in its earlier chapters than in its later ones. It can be a very immersive experience indeed when you first start out with a huge map to roam, full of monsters to battle and quests to discover. By the time said map has been repopulated three or four times, however, roaming across its familiar landmarks yet again, looking for whatever might be new, has begun to lose some of its appeal.

And then, as Neal Hallford would be the first to admit, Betrayal at Krondor is written above all for Raymond E. Feist fans, which can be a bit problematic if you don’t happen to be among them. This was my experience, at any rate. As an outsider to Feist’s universe, watching characters I didn’t know talk about things I’d never heard of eventually got old. When an “iconic” character like Jimmy the Hand shows up, I’m supposed to be all aflutter with excitement, but instead I’m just wondering who this latest jerk in a terrible costume is and why I should care. In my view, the game peaks in Chapter 3, which takes the form of a surprisingly complex self-contained murder mystery; this is a place where the game does succeed in integrating its set-piece and emergent sides to a greater extent than elsewhere. If you elect to stop playing after that chapter, you really won’t miss that much.
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We're finally reaching the last 24h of our Campaign. On Friday October 4th at 6 am PDT / 9 am EDT / 3 pm CEST, the Solasta Kickstarter Campaign will be over! Our Steam Pre-Alpha Demo will follow shortly after, leaving our Steam Store Page on October 18th as the team will fully shift focus towards working on the final game.

Boss Monster Stretch Goal - UNLOCKED

The votes have spoken, the winner is... The Remorhaz!

The biggest monster takes out the others! With a Challenge Rating of 11, close to 200 HP, Immunity to Cold & Fire, Darkvision, Tremorsense, the ability to burrow... There is no end to the list of reasons of not wanting to fight a Remorhaz. Yet you decided to vote for it! Let's just hope you won't come to regret it...

Music Upgrade Stretch Goal - UNLOCKED

You also unlocked the Music Upgrade Stretch Goal - Live Orchestral Recordings! Be ready to have your ears pampered by a variety of musical instruments as your party explore the world the Solasta. Don't hesitate to grab the Soundtrack to enhance your own Tabletop sessions as well.

New Class - Sorcerer

Sorcerers are magic users whose powers come from their ancestry - a heritage that sometimes manifests as physical features that aren't always easy to bear. Unlike Wizards who hone their craft through long studies, Sorcerers progress through sheer force of will and talent.

They are powerful spellcasters who can reshape their spells at will to adapt to any situation. Through their hands, spells can become more powerful, harder to resist, remain in effect longer or have many other effects. Sorcerers also have specific powers other than spellcasting, that come from their Origin.

Draconic Bloodline
Descendants of shapeshifted dragons and younger Solastan races, these sorcerers are blessed with many benefits of their draconic ancestry and speak draconic fluently. Each have an affinity with one specific element, and word is the most powerful ones can even grow dragon wings and fly!

Mana Painter
Born out of the mana starvation that followed the cataclysm, certain dwellers of Solasta learned to drain magic from everything that surrounded them - locations, objects and even people. They learned to channel scarce mana to cast spells, create potions or scrolls. Their enemies may call them mana thieves, but they are truly artists of magic.

Children of the Rift
Another effect of the Rift and its cataclysmic closing was that some people around it were affected in their blood, gaining an innate ability to cast spells instinctively. The very nature of the Rift also changed them deeply as they are not only flesh and blood, but also mana, light, and shadow.
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