Expeditions: Rome - the final Expeditions game from Logic Artists

[Abu Antar]

Man, this is Expeditions in name only.
I was hyped at first. Now, it's wait and see.

 

[Infinitron]

Next dev diary on July 26th: https://community.expeditionsseries.com/calendar/event/9-devdiary-5-strategymeta/

DevDiary focused on some of the bigger meta-game systems on Expeditions:Rome

 

[Infinitron]

Hmm, it was quietly delayed to August 2nd.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Better for them to take their time if they need it rather than rush development.

 

[Ludwig von Eisenthal]

I was thrilled by the idea at first. Then I saw the elements of modern socio-political ideologies in this game. If you chose a historical scenario for your game, try to make it historical. I find it very unfortunate how contemporary ideologies try to change the popular view on history. The only adaequat representation of ancient Rome I ever found was in HBO's ROME. I would like to see stuff like that in game form.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Eh, Rome is an excellent TV show (season 1 in particular, season 2 suffering due to it compressing too much of its envisioned plot in light of the cancellation), but it's certainly not a veridic representation of the society it portrays either.

As to how close to historical fact a fictionalization of Roman society has to be in order for it to be labeled as 'adequate', it's up for debate. I'm going to wait for the game's release before passing my personal judgement, but I'm not too distressed from what I've seen so far.

 

[Ludwig von Eisenthal]

Eh, Rome is an excellent TV show (season 1 in particular, season 2 suffering due to it compressing too much of its envisioned plot in light of the cancellation), but it's certainly not a veridic representation of the society it portrays either.

As to how close to historical fact a fictionalization of Roman society has to be in order for it to be labeled as 'adequate', it's up for debate. I'm going to wait for the game's release before passing my personal judgement, but I'm not too distressed from what I've seen so far.

Well sure it's a fictional story they tell, but the whole environment, the cultural, architectonic, religious, habitualistic background was extremely elaborated and researched and they catched some the mental specifities of Roman life very well. At least it's the closest I've ever seen to what I've learned in my studies of ancient history.

 

[Abu Antar]

https://community.expeditionsseries.com/index/dev-diaries/devdiary-5-metagame-legion-battles-r11/

DevDiary 5 - Metagame: Legion Battles
Ave! Welcome to DevDiary #5, where we take our first detailed look at some of the metagame features of Expeditions: Rome! In our previous DevDiary, we made a brief expedition into the world of art direction to show you how we’ve approached the challenges of bringing the ancient world of Rome to life in a way that feels authentic, yet vibrant and exciting. Today we’ll return to the world of gameplay and system design as we delve into the meta systems of Expeditions: Rome and explore how we’re selling the fantasy of being a Roman legatus on a campaign of war. This time we’re dealing with some systems that are still very much under development, so buckle up for some serious inside baseball.

Our 2nd DevDiary, which focused on our core combat design, should have made it clear that while significant improvements – as well as some clever and risky innovations – have been made in the core combat, our focus there has always been to deliver a solid, challenging, and satisfying take on traditional turn-based combat. By contrast, the meta gameplay has always been the area where we’ve pushed ourselves to think differently and try crazy new things to separate the Expeditions series from other RPG and strategy games. Expeditions: Rome continues this philosophy.



Let’s start by defining what we mean when we say meta. The meta is the game systems that track your overall progression and allow you to interact with it. Our core game loops such as combat or dialogue are self-contained bubbles of content that begin and end discretely, whereas the meta spans the whole game and ties all the content together. Every core game loop always interacts with the meta in many ways, but in game development it’s useful to think of them separately.

(Side note: Although the overall story and the personal development of each character spans the whole game and ties together all the dialogue, in this diary we’re purely interested in game mechanics.)

The meta of Expeditions: Rome can be roughly divided into two parts: the character systems, and the worldmap systems. Both aspects of the meta are quite different than previous instalments, but the worldmap systems are what really sets Expeditions: Rome apart from other games.




As we showed in our story diary, Expeditions: Rome casts you – the player – as the legatus of a legion of Rome. Our foremost priority in designing the campaigns of Rome was to make you feel like you have an army at your fingertips, and to make that army feel useful and necessary. When we set out, we immediately ran into a certain important tension: as the game is fundamentally a party-based RPG, most of the gameplay will revolve around your own group of a dozen Romans meeting new people, engaging in diplomatic talks or investigating plot points, and getting into skirmishes on that small-party scale. A lot of the worldmap gameplay of previous Expeditions games has centered around resource management and survival mechanics, but when you have a legion of 6000 men at your beck and call, what difficulty is there in feeding and otherwise supplying a dozen more people?

To solve this, we have redesigned the survival aspects of Expeditions: Rome dramatically. When you return to the worldmap, you will see not just your own party represented by your character on horseback, but also your legion – typically garrisoned at a fortified camp. You can and will often visit this camp to manage the affairs of the legion as well as the status of your own party. It is here you can recruit new praetorians for your group, treat those who have been injured in combat, craft new equipment for yourself and your praetorians, and even leave behind a praetorian to rest and recuperate at the baths if their morale has fallen too low. Our aim has been for the camp to feel like a place of resources and opportunities, where you visit when you want to do something, not a chore that you have to perform at regular intervals just to survive the game.

Spoiler

All facilities of the legion camp can be upgraded, which changes the appearance of buildings or entire sections of the command area, but to do that you must secure the necessary resources. Fortunately, unlike previous Expeditions games, the legion is not just a narrative element in Expeditions: Rome. This time around, you can deploy it to missions all across the parts of the worldmap under your control.



The worldmap of each campaign is divided into regions. When you control a region, you unlock the ability to build farms, tanneries, iron mines, or lumber yards, which grant you resources needed to upgrade your legion’s camp. We are not building a 4X game here, so the underlying mechanics are straight-forward and easy to understand: Sending your legion on a mission takes a certain amount of in-game time, and has a cost, for example in denarii (salary) or manpower (casualties). Missions also have a difficulty rating that results in a success probability based on the current strength of your legion. If a mission is succeeded, you gain the resources you were promised.



Capturing a new region is where things get a little more complex. You deploy your legion to capture an enemy outpost just as you would send it to perform any other task – however, when the legion reaches its destination, a battle begins. First, you must select which centurion should lead this battle – your legion can have up to 4 centurions which are recruited from the same pool as your personal praetorian guard. The character class of each centurion, as well as any perks they might have to improve their suitability to command, determines the likely outcome: the probability of success, the expected loss of manpower, how much loot you can expect to get out of it, and the probability that the centurion himself will survive the battle.



Next, you select what formation your legion should deploy in. Formations are a type of stratagem, which are randomly made available to you from your strategic pool to represent the unpredictable nature of war. Once you’ve decided how to deploy the legion, the battle is on, and you can follow along as the armies are arrayed against each other and clash. At certain intervals, new decisions pop up, asking you to choose new stratagems for the different phases of battle. If you find yourself unhappy with your options, next time you’re visiting your legion’s camp, you can build a workshop and develop new stratagems to add to your pool. As the game progresses and your workshop is upgraded, you will even be able to upgrade your existing stratagems with better outcomes.





This legion battle system is our way to represent large-scale warfare in a game that is otherwise mainly focused on elite small-unit tactical combat. Our challenge has been to make a simple system with enough depth to stay fresh and interesting throughout the course of a 40-hour RPG, and which ties into the other systems of the game so it doesn’t feel too isolated from the rest of the experience.

This system is one of the areas of the game that we are most focused on expanding and improving as we get closer to finishing Expeditions: Rome. During testing, we have found that there seems to be clear dominant strategies, and that certain choices that do have valid uses don’t feel as useful as they really are – perhaps because their effects are too long-term or too abstract compared to other strategies. Often these problems are easy to solve by adding new mechanics to the system, but the ideal solution would be to address it within the scope of the current feature set, since every new mechanic we add must be supported by UI and tutorialization, which can quickly clutter the interface and overwhelm the player.



Another problem we’re working to solve is how to give the player more ways to affect a battle ahead of time. Going up against a much stronger army can feel like a slog right now, as you throw your legion against them, suffering repeated defeats to whittle down their strength. Though this is in many ways accurate to the Roman republic’s historical approach to warfare (refuse all offers of peace, and instead keep throwing lives at a problem until the enemy is worn out), it isn’t a particularly fun way to win. We want you to have many options to improve your success chance or reduce the enemy strength before you even begin the battle. We’d love to hear what you think we should do to solve this in the comments of this DevDiary – as mentioned, this area of the game is getting a lot of attention right now, and we can always draw inspiration from your suggestions and requests!

Winning a legion battle isn’t the end of conquering a territory. There are always loose ends to tie up – pockets of resistance to exterminate; local aristocrats, tribes, or clans with whom to forge new alliances; or prisoners of war to rescue. Sometimes you can send your legion to handle these things, other times you must send one of your companions in charge of your praetorian guard. A conquered region is pacified only once the loose ends have been dealt with, and then you can safely redeploy your legion to another region without losing control again.





Despite this already being our longest DevDiary yet, we have barely touched on most of the meta systems of Expeditions: Rome. The triage system from previous games makes a return, although field triage is no longer as punishing as it used to be given the existence of the infirmary tent in your legion’s camp, where injured praetorians can be treated for free. The crafting system is a complex and rewarding system in its own right, and new features for it will be unlocked by outpost upgrades all the way up to around the half-way of the game. Praetorians can mutiny if their approval of your choices becomes low enough, and the way they leave will be determined by their personality traits – but fear not, you can upgrade your legion’s barracks to increase the level range of new recruits available to replace them.

As you can hopefully tell, Expeditions: Rome is a sprawling and complex game with many interconnected systems, but we are working hard to make sure it is accessible and that every individual system is fun to play around with. We hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the innards of our worldmap systems, why they are being designed the way they are, and what we’re doing to improve them and ensure they remain fun throughout the course of the game.

Hopefully this diary has raised as many questions as it has answered! Please post all your questions as comments here, and we will do our best to address them on this week’s DevStream on Wednesday August 5th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. This time, Senior Producer Brad Logston will once again be joined by Creative Director Jonas Wæver to delve further into the design of the meta of Expeditions: Rome.

Until then, Valete!

 

[Infinitron]

Whoops, forgot about the devstream:

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[fantadomat]

LoL Egyptians were/are not negros lol. You can't expect historically realistic shit from those clowns.

 

[Shadenuat]

Do developers themselves, for real, enjoy these yellow piss filters hiding everything, and truly believe thats how dry areas or deserts supposed to look like?

 

[Infinitron]

https://community.expeditionsseries.com/index/dev-diaries/devdiary-6-side-quests-r12/

DevDiary 6 - Side Quests

Ave Legate. Side quests! What are they? Where are they? Why are they? And how did they come to be? These are the questions that we will answer in this, our sixth DevDiary. All the way back in DevDiary 3, we gave you a glimpse into our overall approach to storytelling, and an outline of the plot of Expeditions: Rome as well as the major characters that drive it – but when you’re playing a roleplaying game, you don’t expect to just follow the main questline from the menu screen to the credits, you expect distractions; tangents; quirky adventures. You expect side quests, and so help us Jupiter, we will meet those expectations.

First off, let’s all get on the same page by establishing what makes a side quest a side quest. To us, a side quest is any piece of content that presents the player with a goal to pursue, but which is fully optional. Sometimes the main quests arrive a few at a time and you get to choose which order to do them in, but what defines a main quest is that you must complete it to continue the game – at some point, you cannot go any further in the game until you finish your current main quest. Side quests are less demanding of your time – they appear when it makes sense for them to be available, and if you don’t complete them before they stop being relevant, they simply fail themselves and go away. No harm done to the plot.



There are many good reasons to have side quests. From a design point of view, the purpose of side quests is to make full use of the large, beautiful levels we’ve built, and to encourage the player to explore them and engage with them through deep content. It’s all well and good to litter a level with treasure chests, but that doesn’t make the world feel more alive – it’s characters and the stories we can tell with them that bring a world to life. Not counting the player’s legion camp, Expeditions: Rome features no less than six so-called “hub” levels which are particularly large locations ripe for exploration.

Our amazing art team has really made these locations pop. They are packed with interesting environmental details and fascinating nooks and crannies to explore. That inspired our writers to fill these places with characters and side quests that would do them justice.



Secondly, from a player’s point of view, the purpose of a side quest is for the player to have more agency over the way the game is played – to wrest some control over the pacing away from the designers. Sometimes you want a breather from the high-stakes work of unravelling a complex political conspiracy, the tendrils of which stretch from the city of Rome to the most distant corners of the Republic. When you need a break, it’s nice to visit a local city and wander around, talking to people and following strange tangents away from the main plot for a while.

The work of creating our side quests happened relatively late in the project. In what was a bit of a departure from our previous methodology, we wanted to have the full main story finished before beginning work on the side content. This had the additional advantage that our levels were largely done by the time we began working on the side quests, giving us a very clear picture of which and how many we would need. The design department claimed a meeting room and spent a whole day just brainstorming ideas.

Spoiler

To guide our creativity, we formulated the following rules that all our side quests had to live up to:

1. A side quest must be “pull” content. Whereas many of our main quests are “pushed” upon you by messengers seeking you out, our side quests almost all begin with you walking up to an NPC and choosing to talk to them. That way, side content is something you find and which you choose to engage with; you are not made to feel obligated to spend your time on it. It should be perfectly fine to just miss a side quest.

2. All side quests must respect the player character’s station. You are the legatus of a Roman legion. You will not be asked to deliver messages, recover lost heirlooms from sewers, or catch petty thieves. Whatever an NPC asks you to do, it should be something that requires the attention of a general of an army, or a member of the nobility of Rome.

3. All side quests must meet at least one of the following requirements: it features a combat encounter; it presents the player with an interesting and important choice; it contributes to the portrayal of major supporting characters; it contributes significantly to our world building; it strongly supports one of the core themes of the game or relates directly to the main plot. The more of these boxes a side quest can tick, the better.

Let’s look at an example side quest from the game and how it lives up to these rules. Mild spoilers follow!



As you are exploring the city of Memphis (Egypt, not Tennessee) with your praetorian guard, you wander into a cluster of buildings on the edge of the market district and discover a small group of Berber warriors who are being held captive by Egyptian soldiers. As you approach, one of the Berbers calls out to you. He explains that he and his friends are legionaries who have joined your legion as auxiliaries. The Egyptian warns you that the Berbers are proven criminals who have been extorting money from the citizens of Memphis. The Berber insists that he was merely collecting taxes for Rome, but generally demonstrates a poor understanding of how the chain of command works. Your auxiliaries plead with you to secure their release and promises a cut of their “taxes”, but the Egyptian soldiers seem unwilling to cooperate.

This is clearly a situation that calls for someone of high rank within the Roman legion, and you are the highest possible rank, so already we can see that rule number 2 has been addressed. The quest began when you walked into this situation and chose to talk to the captured warriors, so this is clearly “pull” content rather than being pushed upon you. The situation presents you with an interesting choice (do you accept responsibility for this criminal, given that he technically works for you?), and indeed one possible outcome leads to a combat encounter. Further, the quest shows us something about how this part of the world feels about our legion, and it strongly relates to two of our central themes: “Conquest” and “The burdens of command”.



Not all quests are quite so fire-and-forget, of course – some side quests chain together into little side plots that you can follow across multiple campaigns. This is the case for our companion quests, which follow the personal problems of each of your five closest companions. Companion quests can take years of in-game time to resolve, but in doing so you will learn more about your friends, and they will naturally be grateful when you help them sort out the troubles that haunt them. The completion of a companion’s quest may even come back to play a part in how the end of the game plays out.



Finally, there is one more type of side content that isn’t quite a side quest. We call these “unlisted quests” as they are structured much like a side quest, but they do not appear in your quest log. When we’ve chosen to treat a quest this way, it’s to make it feel more organic or create a sense of exploration or mystery. Often they involve clues that lead you to unique items, or steps that must be taken to reforge ancient weapons. This is a design element that we made good use of in Expeditions: Viking, and which we wanted to bring back in order to make the world feel more alive and imbue it with a sense of mystery.



Side quests are great fun to create. They can be much more self-contained than the story quests, but they can also illuminate minor themes and aspects of the story that the main quests do not have time to deal with. Moreover, we can get a little more creative with the structure or gameplay of a side quest precisely because it isn’t constrained by the overall plot. We hope that when you play Expeditions: Rome, you will take the time to explore our beautiful hub levels and find these little nuggets of content that we’ve created for you, and we hope that you’ll have as much fun playing them as we had in making them.

What kind of side content do you most enjoy in videogames in general and roleplaying games in particular? Do you prefer side quests that tie into the main story or those that feel entirely self-contained? Did any questions materialize in your mind when reading about our approach to designing and writing side quests? Please write a comment below with your thoughts and questions, and be sure to join us on Wednesday the 25th of August at 1:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic where Senior Producer Brad Logston and Creative Director Jonas Wæver will once again appear on your monitor as if by magic to discuss the side quests of Expeditions: Rome and answer all your questions!

 

[Harthwain]

Oh, wow. You can't enlarge pictures directly on Twitter, because it puts a giant "Log in/Sign up" box right in the middle of the screen while also darkening the screen a bit and when you press the "X" button it kicks you back to the feed, which has smaller pictures.

 

[The Wall]

But can you enslave Judea, burn Solomon's Temple and fuck jewish pristessess of debauchery? That's true RomanExperience.TM

 

[jackofshadows]

In Vikings was possible to do plenty of nasty shit. On the other hand, perhaps THQ Nordic installed some new standarts to the design, we'll see (hope not).

 

[Infinitron]

Devstream #6:

 

[Infinitron]

https://community.expeditionsseries.com/index/dev-diaries/devdiary-7-metagame-character-systems-r13/

DevDiary 7 - Metagame: Character Systems

Ave, and welcome to our seventh DevDiary. In DevDiary 5, we gave you a glimpse into the design of our conquest and legion battle systems. We explained how this made up just a part of our metagame systems, and that we would be dealing with the rest of the meta systems at a later time. That time has come!

Today we will discuss the game systems that pertain to character progression: levelling up and spending your skill points, and finding items and equipment for your characters. These are the systems at the core of any self-respecting roleplaying game - the features that give you that sense of personal growth and ensure a steady increase of strategic and tactical complexity as you grow familiar with the game.



It all starts with good old-fashioned XP, or Experience Points. In Rome, your characters earn XP mainly for completing quests. Since you can only bring up to 6 characters on a quest including your own, we distinguish between two types of XP reward: those which everyone in your praetorian party gets regardless of whether they are around or not, and those where only those who were with you at the time gets the full amount, while those left behind get half. This creates a little bit of a difference between how much XP characters end up with based on how much you use them, while ensuring that the ones you leave behind are still mostly able to keep up.




As you gain enough XP to level up, the only character statistic that increases with every level is your Health. This makes surviving easier and gives you more room for failure. All other stat progression is purely based on your items - this is to avoid the stats increasing too much over the course of the game, so a group of level 1 characters can still be a threat to a level 20 character, as they would be in real life. The aim here is to make the combat feel grounded and deadly from beginning to end.

One other thing that improves as you level up, however, is your unarmed combat ability. Each character class has their own set of unarmed skills that they can use when they’re not wielding a weapon, and each of the companion characters has a unique unarmed skill of their own on top of this. As a character levels up, at certain thresholds they will unlock new unarmed skills and their unarmed fighting stats will improve as well. This is to ensure that unarmed combat doesn’t fall behind. If you’re wondering why you’d ever fight unarmed when you could fight with a weapon, well - sometimes circumstances might not give you a choice, but your unarmed skills can be quite useful, so leaving your 2nd weapon slot empty might not be a bad idea in some cases.

Spoiler

The main thing you get from levelling up is skill points. Each character gets 1 per level, and buying a skill or upgrading one you already have always costs 1 point. Every class has 3 subclasses with 8 skills each, arranged into 4 rows. To reach the bottom row, you must spend 7 skill points in that subclass. In designing these skill trees, our aim was to make the top row contain the skills that define the subclass. These skills should be useful throughout the game, and they should serve a very specific purpose in combat. The bottom row, by contrast, are the “ultimates” - the most powerful skills that you can really look forward to unlocking, which feel like a reward for specialising in that subclass.

The two middle rows are designed to synergise with tools found in the other skill sets, to make it viable to split your points between 2 or maybe even all 3 subclasses. By the time you hit the maximum character level near the end of the game, you may be able to reach the bottom row of 2 of the 3 skill sets. A highly specialised character feels quite different from a generalist, but both build strategies can be very powerful.

The final thing we should mention about skills, is that many of them can be upgraded by investing further skill points into them. Skill upgrades typically make a skill more powerful without fundamentally changing what it does, while certain passive skills allow you to modify the effects of a previously unlocked active skill. For example, the Dodge skill allows you to avoid the next attack aimed at the character - if you unlock the passive skill Slippery afterwards, this adds a probability that the Dodging status effect is not lost when it activates.




As we hinted at above, levelling up is only a small part of how your character will progress throughout the game. Equipment and other items are where your true offensive capability will come from.

Items in Expeditions: Rome advance along two axes: tier and quality. Weapons come in 3 tiers that are simply numbered. The tier of an item accounts for the greatest power spike; when the game starts dropping a new tier of items, you will really feel yourself increase in power - at least until the enemies’ power catches up to you. In addition to this, there are 5 qualities of item: Worn, Regular, Good, Pristine, and Unique. While tier determines power, qualities increase the complexity and versatility of items by giving them more statistics and (in the case of weapons) a greater number of weapon skills. The baseline item quality is Regular, with higher qualities rolling with more affixes. Worn items are like Regular, but with lower stats.

What we’re perhaps most proud of is the way items differ from culture to culture. As Expeditions: Rome spans three separate military campaigns in different parts of Europe and North Africa, each location introduces you to a new people with a vastly different culture from what you’ve encountered before, and their equipment reflects that. Armour you take from defeated Berber warriors in Nasamones will not only look very different from Roman armour, but also offer different types of affixes to match the theme of that culture.



In addition to stats and affixes, weapons also have skills that determine how they are used in combat. Weapon skills are how you attack - as we have highlighted in previous DevDiaries, there is no “basic attack” in Expeditions: Rome, it all depends on what weapons you’ve equipped. Let’s lift the curtain slightly to give you a glimpse of what’s behind there.

Which skills a weapon rolls with are determined by two hidden stats: weapon skill amount and weapon skill rank. The former determines how many skills will be on the weapon, while the latter governs which rank of skill the weapon can have. This means that higher-tier items will drop with more interesting (and often more complex) skills and makes it so you may still be discovering new weapon skills after 40-50 hours of gameplay.

Every rank of weapon skill further has a weapon skill amount, which is used to guarantee that each weapon gets a certain amount of lower-rank weapon skills, since those are often the most straight-forward and broadly applicable skills. When a weapon is dropped as loot, it checks its tier to create the pool of skills that it is allowed to have. Tier 1 weapons can only have rank 1 weapon skills, and so on.

A final wrinkle in this system is the addition of “combo skills”, which require a certain secondary weapon to be equipped in the character’s off-hand. This can be a shield or a dagger. Combo skills can only be found on one-handed main hand weapons, namely swords and spears. Since only the heavy infantry class can wield shields and only light infantry can wield daggers in their off-hand, the matching combo skills are designed to be particularly useful to those character classes.

If you want to learn more about item progression, or about how our skill system was designed, please post your questions as comments on this post, and join us on this week’s DevStream on Wednesday September 15 at 1:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. On this week’s stream, Senior Producer Brad Logston will host Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer to get really nerdy about stats and skills and all that good stuff.

Until then, Valete!

 

[Fedora Master]

Women in a game about ancient Rome -> Garbage
And a nigger too, because OF COURSE

 

[Fedora Master]

Oh so we're editing people's posts as well?

I warned you people about mod fuckery.

 

[Ladonna]

I love these historical games. Can't wait to play as a commander in the army of Ancient Rome. Shits gonna be good.

Right guys?

 

[The_Mask]

Right guys?

May Jupiter bless women, for they make our lives better through their beauty, grace, femininity and everything in between.

And, perhaps also, by dualwielding shortswords looking amazingly hot.

 

[Infinitron]

Devstream #7:



More Rome stuff later today.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Difference between character model and portraits is similar to Diablo3 vs. Diablo 2 Resurrected Hobos

 

[Abu Antar]