You mentioned that you’re adapting the paths from the tabletop game, but you’re also adding new characters and new elements. What’s been your approach here?
AM: As with Kingmaker we’re taking the adventure path and considering ourselves the game masters for the story. We can’t share much more at the moment, but I can say that we are making it playable for characters of any alignment.
The tabletop adventure path is very good-oriented – it assumes most of the characters are good-aligned, some are neutral. We will have both good and evil choices – a full spectrum available to you, with all the consequences. This is a major change to the adventure process and goes more along the direction of classical RPGs.
What are the incentives to make use of your free-form class-building? My issue with such systems has always been that mixing skills from different archetypes often makes an unfocused hybrid that’s weak in battle and has no clear identity.
Some players like to role play through the mechanics – they like to create different characters or combinations of characters. Maybe it’s not the best in terms of efficiency, but it allows them to role-play their own story better – perhaps by creating a party full of dwarves, or where every character has a pet.
On the other hand, some people like to optimise everything and create a masterful combination of classes and archetypes that destroy enemies even when playing with just one main character without any companions.
So when you’re designing a system like that and balancing these abilities, do you find that tabletop balance carries over well to the digital game, or do you have to take a fresh look at them?
We try to transfer many elements from the tabletop to the videogame. This should feel like Pathfinder, like the tabletop experience. So most mechanics remain the same, apart from being translated to real-time with pause. For example, feats like ‘you may reroll dice once a day’ convert to feats that work automatically, without stopping gameplay.
With respect to the original adventure path, the main storyline remains, but we think of ourselves as GMs for the adventure, fine-tuning it to our players. We allow players to be of any alignment, offer more side stories, choices, and consequences. We introduce companions and their stories as well. Lore-wise, we double-check everything and consult with Paizo [Publishing, owner of Pathfinder] to be sure that we are correctly telling the story in the world it created.
Nevertheless, we want many players to experience the adventure, not just those who know Pathfinder. This is why we are going to provide an extended tutorial that will not only describe how to play the game but also introduce Pathfinder mechanics and nuances, explain how particular mechanics work, or assist with character creation. We are doing so without sacrificing any depth: we are helping those players that want our help. We also help with the lore with special notes to get the player accustomed to the Age of Lost Omens.
We try to translate the experience that you’re having at the table with different party members. We do this with companions and how they interact – the way they discuss their plans before going into a major dungeon or the results of a previous encounter is very close to the experience we have at the table. We are trying to provide this tabletop feeling throughout the game.
We are taking the same approach that worked in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Some players said that when they decided to try the turn-based mod for Kingmaker, it felt like they were playing Pathfinder at the table. For us, that means we are on the right path.
What other elements from the tabletop do you think you executed well on in Kingmaker and you want to improve on in Wrath of the Righteous?
The focus for us is on the mechanical diversity and versatility that Pathfinder provides. It’s really hard, because it [comes through] an enormous number of abilities, feats, spells, etc. In Pathfinder: Kingmaker there were about 1,000 such entities, and we are taking this as a foundation for Wrath of the Righteous and building further, with new abilities, new feats, new classes, everything. It takes a lot of time and effort.
On the point of comparisons with tabletop, what would you say Pathfinder has over rivals like Divinity, Pillars, or games inspired by D&D?
We really like the Age of Lost Omens setting. When you just open the setting book and read about the different countries, you want to have an adventure in each of them. They’re really different, with great hooks for adventure or experience. I’ll just give one example of Galt, which is a country that is mentioned [in the setting] but not covered by any of our games.
It’s a country where the French Revolution happens every other year. They revolt, select a new government, and destroy part of the previous government. There are people in the streets every time – everything you’d imagine from the French revolutions. They even have guillotine called the final blades, which suck the soul of the killed person into the blade to prevent resurrection. And there are 20 to 30 countries like that which are brilliant settings for gaming experiences. The lore is very rich, very detailed, and very different.
What points of differentiation would you highlight at a mechanical or gameplay level between Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous, and other rival CRPGs on the market?
One of the great differentiators is mythics, and how they affect everything in the game. So at a certain point of your adventure, you will be able to become not an epic hero but a really mythic hero, with the ability to gradually change into very powerful entities. Right now I can reveal the angel, demon, and trickster, but there will be more.
These change a lot of your experience from the game: they change some parts of the storyline, your progression, your companions. They change you mechanically, giving you new abilities and disabilities. It’s really different from the usual Pathfinder mechanics, especially so for trickster.
Tricksters don’t trick other people, but the world itself. At a certain point, a trickster understands the laws that put this world in motion – that it is actually governed by dice. Say they roll a critical failure, a one on the dice. They’re able to change it instantly to natural 20, transforming critical failure to critical success. You will be able to see the dice changing the results right before your eyes.
How have your own experiences playing tabletop RPG shaped the narrative of Wrath of the Righteous?
We play it a lot – every member of the team plays Wrath of the Righteous at the table. We have six campaigns running simultaneously, which allows every member of the team to share the vision of the game. Then there is a special channel where the game masters discuss what happened in each session, and whether we can use something [that happened] in the videogame – the best encounters, the best resolutions to situations, what we want to do more of on the screen, and what may not be a great experience on the screen that we could translate into a different encounter that’s similarly thematic.
This is the essential gap that CRPGs can never bridge when recreating the tabletop experience. Since you can’t actually simulate all the actions human players can imagine, how do you create the illusion of similar freedom?
No, we cannot simulate every solution, but if one of our tabletop players has some crazy idea, it can possibly find a different way into the game. I’ll give you an example from Kingmaker because I cannot spoil Wrath.
When we were playing the Kingmaker Adventure Path at the table, there were lots of discussions on the Paizo forums about how other GMs were running the campaign. We found some nice ideas there that we playtested, including one where trolls and kobolds were building their own nation. A party of ours played it at the table and tried to befriend them to welcome into their kingdom, and we thought that it would be great if the player could do that. So that became a special answer, that ‘reinforces’ certain alignments, allowing players to make really interesting choices for the alignment they currently have. This one is for Chaotic characters.
It took it took us a while to figure out how to put this option into the game and how it affects everything afterwards, but it made it in. Another thing we noticed when we started playing the Wrath of the Righteous was that not all of the players wanted to be good and nice. So we ran a campaign that specifically and solely ran evil characters to try and see how it could be possible, how we could make it interesting, and why evil characters would want to fight a demonic invasion [which is the main challenge in Wrath of the Righteous]. We found some of the solutions in that campaign, and some of them found their way into the game.
What happens when these tabletop sessions give you a ton of cool ideas to implement? What are your criteria for prioritising them and putting them into the videogame?
Do we want other players to experience this choice? Will
they want to? How many people can we find that will enjoy befriending trolls and kobolds? Of course we have to make assumptions, it’s not like we have a great poll of players. But if it sounds cool, and if a lot of people at the table in this particular party had a great time doing so, then most probably we will consider putting it into the game.
We have to solve other questions, like how are we going to do that, will it cost too much, or can we do this with little effort? Ultimately, the decision to take something and put it into the game goes through the leads – narrative lead Alexander Komzolov and myself will decide if we really want something in story-wise. If it’s some other type of experience, like a mechanical experience, we go to our mechanical lead and discuss it with him, and ultimately put it into the schedule and into the feature list.
