Game News Project Witchstone is a living world sandbox RPG that looks a lot like Divinity: Original Sin

[Infinitron]

Tags: Project Witchstone; Spearhead Games

With July coming to an end and PAX West & Gamescom on the horizon, the RPG Codex front page is about to get busy again. It begins with a game that I probably should have posted about earlier. We first learned about Project Witchstone back in March. The developers are Montreal-based studio Spearhead Games, until now best known for colorful action-RPGs such as Stories: The Path of Destinies and Omensight. They describe Witchstone as a "living world sandbox RPG" and it's certainly colorful, but it also has turn-based tactical combat and in fact looks a hell of a lot like Divinity: Original Sin. You can see that it in the 25 minute gameplay reel published by GameSpot back during GDC. A month after that the game's Steam page launched, and in June Spearhead put together a new wishlist trailer for it. I'll post those two videos here:

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So why am I posting about this now? Well, today Spearhead published another rather similar trailer announcing that the game was coming to consoles, and more importantly that it was scheduled for release in Q2 2020. That's not a long time from now, considering that they also announced from the beginning that they were going to do a Kickstarter sometime this year, as well as an Early Access release. We can probably expect details about those things very soon. Head-to-head campaign with Solasta: Crown of the Magister, anyone?

 

[ntonystinson]

Looks really promising let's hope it lives up to its potential

 

[rusty_shackleford]

What's happening at 0:30 in the first vid?

edit:
er… apparently when you attack you can follow it up with another attack by using a resource but you have a limited time to do so?
honestly sounds kind of dumb, why not just give the player an attack that does the equivalent instead of having a minigame in the middle of combat

 

[Gruia]

getting rid of DOS design choices is refreshing. i had <10% immersion with their titles

 

[Van-d-all]

So now we're going to get a shit slew of DOS2 clones. Joy. While I don't mind it graphics-wise, it's really sickening how unoriginal those games are. This trend to emulate someone else's success is pretty much a mainstay in the game industry, but it still amazes me that developers don't take issues like style fatigue into consideration. After all, even if the game proves to have decent qualities, playing the n-th same-ish title is just plain boring.

What's happening at 0:30 in the first vid?

edit:
er… apparently when you attack you can follow it up with another attack by using a resource but you have a limited time to do so?
honestly sounds kind of dumb, why not just give the player an attack that does the equivalent instead of having a minigame in the middle of combat

It's a QTE based combat element in vein of Legend Of Dragoon, it's explained around 5:00 of the second video. I hate that shit already.

 

[ArchAngel]

QTE in a turn based game ? Get that shit away from me!

 

[Galdred]

QTE in a turn based game ? Get that shit away from me!

Actually, Gladius did it well! Also it may have been the only one that managed to do so...

 

[Elhoim]

Yeah, the QTE is totally unnecessary and badly implemented. I did really like the flow they achieved with the feeling that the world is "paused" when you are selecting commands. Makes the turn based combat very dynamic visually.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I did really like the flow they achieved with the feeling that the world is "paused" when you are selecting commands. Makes the turn based combat very dynamic visually.

Agreed, it looks a lot better than the typical "idle animation while selecting tactics"

 

[Crescent Hawk]

I dislike the wow art style but at least they went all in and use nice clean textures unlike DivOS. But sandbox? I dont know man.