Burden of Command - WW2 tactical leadership RPG - coming Q1 2025

[Abu Antar]

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://burdenofcommand.com/figures-of-speech-choosing-the-rights-words-in-burden-of-command

Words matter. The right words can inspire. The wrong ones… do otherwise.

The way a person talks does more than tell you who they are, it also reflects how they think. In Burden of Command, the members of your company will talk differently if they are aggressive, wary, friendly, or under mental strain.

Units with high morale will react calmly and rationally under fire.

Units with low morale… won’t.

We try not to put words in the Company Commander’s mouth. Outside of simple “yes sir”s and “no sir”s, it is important that the vast majority of words that the Company Commander says are chosen by the player verbatim.

Now imagine doing the whole damn speech like this.

This works great for back-and-forth dialogue where participants volley sentences or sentence fragments. Conversations involving exposition or longer passages are a bit harder. A sequence where the player character speaks for minutes on end, like General Patton did in the above scene from the 1970 film? That sort of thing is almost impossible.

So naturally, we decided there had to be a scene where the Company Commander does precisely that.

Here’s Ike addressing some of his men just before they go into battle. Burden of Command will let you follow his example.

It would have been easy to simply write a selection of canned speeches for the player to choose from, but that would have also been antithetical to the idea of letting the player choose what to say. Instead, I looked at an example from Bioware’s Mass Effect series for inspiration. Early in the first game, your player character, Commander Shepard, has the opportunity to give a speech to their crew. The player takes Shepard through this process sentence by sentence. The choices the player makes during this segment influences Shepard’s “Paragon” and “Renegade” personality meters, to represent Shepard “revealing” their inner biases and worldview.

Burden of Command takes those principles and goes further. When the Company Commander addresses his men, your choices influence his character. For example, you might choose to open with a sardonic quip and that pushes the Company Commander towards higher sarcasm. However, the Company Commander’s personality, as established through previous choices (Sarcasm, Verbosity, and Directness), also pushes back against the player’s choices. If you choose speech options that don’t match the Company Commander’s personality, your words might not go over as well: public speaking is particularly difficult when you don’t believe the ideals you’re selling.

When you finish talking, you don’t want your audience looking like this.

Based on the player’s choices, the Captain’s speech might prove genuinely inspiring.Or it might fall falt, demoralising his company just moments before they have to risk their lives in combat.

Choosing the right words for the occasion, and making sure that you and your men believe what you’re saying, that too is part of the burden of command.

On the eve of battle, the men look to you for reassurance. How will you respond… Captain?

edit.
http://archive.is/akU7N

 

[Makabb]

Wasnt this supposed to be released by now

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

edit.
http://archive.is/0c15d

 

[Burning Bridges]

Wasnt this supposed to be released by now

They became "overburdened" with it.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I hope this doesn't imply that indirect-fire will be instant magic button stuff.

edit.
http://archive.is/R1DIx

 

[Comte]

How come this doesn't have a vaporware tag?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Burning Bridges]

WTF are these guys doing?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

WTF are these guys doing?

Posting very actively on Twitter.
They really don't seem have clue about that game making stuff.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Yeah to me it looks like they made some green hexes, run pictures of Damian Lewis through photoshop artistic filters until they looked a bit like paintings and then called it Burden of Incompetence Command.

 

[Nutria]

Like with any indie game, the question is if they're biting off more than they can chew. I don't know yet, but it seems promising. He's spending his time on stuff that matters and not going into autismoland over whether an 85mm round would bounce off of a Panther at some angle, assuming that German steel in 1944 was high quality (which it wasn't) etc. etc. etc.

 

[Strange Fellow]

I'm still hyped for this. You won't get me that easily, Codex!

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Nutria]

I really like this guy and what he's trying to do. It's about fucking time that we make wargaming go beyond the rut of boardgaming autistic nerdboys in the 1960s pushing pieces of cardboard around a table and jerking off about armor penetration tables. The war wasn't about which tank was better against frontal armor at 500m or some shit like that. It was a total war involving the whole military, industrial, and moral strength of the whole population of the world. It was decided by every individual, their muscles, their brain, their heart.

WW2 was a really fucking big deal for a few billion people. They've all died off and now those of us who heard about it from them are dying off too. It's really important to preserve the truth of what happened while we can so that it doesn't become some mythical era that you invoke to make arguments about current politics (Nu Wolfenstein). We have a duty to remember our ancestors' sacrifices, and this guy making a niche indie wargame isn't going to move mountains but if we all followed his lead maybe we'd get somewhere.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

edit.
http://archive.is/g3Rw2

 

[Nutria]

Note that this is a feature not seen in games made by fat neckbeards in their basements in the 1960s. If you came to wargames because you're an autist who likes pushing pieces of cardboard around and looking up numbers in tables, this will probably make you flip the keyboard and repetitively smash things until you can calm yourself down. But if you appreciate wargames as a way of understanding history better, this is makes perfect sense.

It's nice that there's at least one guy in the world who is actually trying to justice to what really happened and not just using WW2 as the setting for an FPS or an abstract puzzle game (Unity of Command).

 

[Mexi]

Did anyone tell this guy that posting shitty pictures on Twitter doesn't finish a game? This shit looks like garbage.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

edit.
http://archive.is/XfijR

 

[Nihiliste]

I wonder if this will turn into a grimoire style never ending quest. Minus Cleve of course

 

[Elephantman]

Note that this is a feature not seen in games made by fat neckbeards in their basements in the 1960s.

??? what are terrain modifiers
Btw, Airburst is -1 in ASL

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I wonder if this will turn into a grimoire style never ending quest. Minus Cleve of course

For WW2 games there's always All American:The 82nd Airborne in Normandy.
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Shrapnel_Games/AA/AA_page.html