Expeditions: Rome - the final Expeditions game from Logic Artists

[oscar]

The novel setting of Conquistador I think helped advertise it and people remember it too. Type Rome or Vikings into the steam search bar and ten million games with that in the title pop up.

 

[Infinitron]

OK, it's a music-related special event:

 

[Infinitron]

Gay promotional event it is:



https://community.expeditionsseries...editions-rome-is-hosting-a-music-contest-r17/

Blow Your Rome Trumpet: Expeditions: Rome Is Hosting a Music Contest

Vindobona, Noricum / Hafnia, Daniae, Novembris XVII., MMXXI: When in Rome, you want it to sound right. Logic Artists has worked together with composer Thomas Farnon, who created music for movies like The Dark Knight Rises, Hacksaw Ridge and Wonder Woman, TV-Shows like The Crown and Sherlock, and games like Assassin's Creed 3 and... Expeditions: Rome. Two orchestras with over 130 musicians and 6 soloists made the compositions come to life - Expeditions: Rome will feature over 75 minutes of music.

Spoiler

Check out the teaser for Making the Music of Rome on YouTube:

If you want to learn more about music and audio in Expeditions: Rome, check out



- Download the all assets: http://n.thq.com/Hv9K30rFV7x



Music Cover Contest

From November 17th, 2021 at 10 AM EST until December 10th, 2021 4 pm CET, a music contest will be held. The music sheets and full stems for three tracks of Expeditions: Rome's OST are available for download and THQ Nordic is looking for musicians to come up with their own interpretations of the tracks.



Participation and Exclusion

Participation is allowed for individuals 18 years of age or older, except for (i) individuals working at THQ Nordic and members of their family, individuals in any way associated with THQ Nordic or the development team “Expeditions: Rome”, their partners and staff are excluded; (ii) residents of countries where participation to such game is not allowed under applicable laws; (iii) residents in countries to which EU or US trade sanctions apply; or (iv) individuals who are not of legal age under the applicable jurisdiction. To such excluded individuals no prize will be awarded.

Participation requires either Facebook, Twitter or Discord membership.

Each participant may participate only once with respect to one and the same Cover, however a participant may enter several Covers on the social media channels, multiple entries of one and the same Cover on the same or different social media channels will be disregarded. The use of automated entry software or any other electronic means of repeated entry is strictly prohibited. THQ Nordic reserves the right to exclude individuals from participation who try to gain advantages through manipulation or disrespect of these conditions. In such cases, the prize may also be subsequently revoked and a replacement winner will be determined.

The contest is free to enter, no purchase is necessary.

Participants can enter the contest starting from November 17th, 2021 at 9 PM GMT until December 10th, 2021 4 pm GMT. Any entries received outside this time will not be considered.



How to participate:

• Download the stems and/or sheet music for the track you’d like to cover from either of the following:

http://expeditionsseries.com/downloads/rome-concert-score.zip

https://expeditionsseries.com/downloads/rome-mix.zip

• Create an original music cover of at least one of the music tracks (“Cover”). You are allowed to use any of the supplied stems in your Cover, as desired.

• Upload your Cover to any publicly accessible site (YouTube, Soundcloud, Google Drive etc). The Cover must be playable from the site (i.e. without needing to be downloaded) and be made available via a link.

• Submit your Cover by posting your link to one of the three Expeditions: Rome social channels – Facebook, Twitter, or Discord and include the hashtag “#SoundOfRome”:

o https://www.facebook.com/ExpeditionsSeries/

o https://twitter.com/ExpeditionsGame

o https://discord.gg/expeditions



Selection of Winners and Prize

Two winners will be selected by the THQ Nordic team:

• One (1) Winner from the Community submissions, selected by the THQ Nordic team

• One (1) winner from the Influencer submissions, selected by the THQ Nordic team

One (1) Grand Prize winner will be selected by popular vote run on Facebook and Twitter from a list of finalists selected by the THQ Nordic team among all submissions made on Facebook, Twitter or Discord.

THQ Nordic will announce all three winners live during a special Twitch stream on December 15th, 2021 hosted on https://www.twitch.tv/thqnordic and thereafter contacted directly as indicated below.



The winner from the Community submissions will receive:

• $500.00 Cash Prize

• 1 signed piece of Expeditions: Rome music memorabilia

• One single-use Steam code for Expeditions: Rome upon the game’s release



The winner from the Influencer submissions will receive:

• $500.00 Cash Prize

• 1 signed piece of Expeditions: Rome music memorabilia

• One single-use Steam code for Expeditions: Rome upon the game’s release



The Grand Prize Winner from voted by the community from the selected finalists will receive:

• $1,000.00 Cash Prize

• 1 signed piece of Expeditions: Rome music memorabilia

• One single-use Steam code for Expeditions: Rome upon the game’s release



A winner will be contacted within seven (7) days of the winner announcement via direct message on the social media channel provided in its entry. A participant hereby expressly agrees to this form of communication. THQ Nordic reserves the right to request proof of identity, age and address. It is the participant's responsibility to within 72 hours from the notification of the prize complete all information required for accepting the prize and provide shipping information via direct message or email once identified. In the event that a winner is unable to within this period provide the requested information in a reasonably acceptable format, THQ Nordic may withdraw the prize without compensation and select another winner. There is no obligation to accept the prize.

Prize will be delivered via shipping once the delivery information is provided and prizes are complete. For some prizes (i.e. signed memorabilia), these will be shipped in a reasonable timeframe upon completion of production and signing.

Non-cash prizes cannot be exchanged or transferred to a third party or delivered as cash payment. THQ Nordic’s decision regarding any aspect of the prize is final and binding and no correspondence will be entered into. Legal recourse is expressly excluded.


You can find all terms & conditions on the following website: https://tc.thqnordic.com/expeditions-rome-music-contest

Here's the full devstream:

 

[Jrpgfan]

It's mid-november already. Is this shit really releasing this year?

 

[jackofshadows]

Gay promotional event it is:

Shit, I was really expecting some actual gay stuff below. Title as "Blow Your Rome Trumpet..." didn't help either.

 

[Kem0sabe]

It was very unprofessional to imply a gay news update and then that update not having any sodomy at all. I would expect that from a random poster but not for someone who is very well payed to do this job of... Updating us on important rpg stuff going on

 

[Atlantico]

"We did a lot of research" but clearly not on stuff like the mos maiorum or the role of women.

What the fuck would you know of women? They'd rather gnaw off their arm than come close to a stinker like yourself

 

[Infinitron]

This music thing is a big deal apparently. They made an abridged version of the devstream:

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://community.expeditionsseries.com/index/dev-diaries/devdiary-11-voice-overs-r18/

DevDiary 11 - Voice-Overs
Ave! Our music event that launched two weeks ago is still ongoing, and since we’re all in an auditory mood already, we thought it would be good to stay in that general area by delving into the topic of actors and directors of voice-over.

Spoiler

It’s no secret that roleplaying games tend to be on the verbose side. Though we here at Logic Artists have always prided ourselves on writing more concise and less waffling dialogue than our competitors, our games have always been long and heavily story-based, so inevitably our dialogue word count always ends up in the hundreds of thousands. As an independent game studio, the cost of recording that much dialogue is prohibitive, and so the best we could do on Viking was to record combat one-liners and a few very select lines of dialogue to set the tone for each major character.

Thus you may be able to imagine how overjoyed we were when THQ Nordic rolled in and told us to go ahead and record every single word of dialogue for Expeditions: Rome. Now, on Rome we have made a concerted effort to keep the dialogue even more concise and punchy than before – we’ve almost eliminated use of narrator text during dialogue, and worked hard to put as much of the actual actions of what’s happening in the scene into the actual game world, so you can see characters move and animate instead of having it described to you. Even so, Rome is the largest game we’ve ever made by a pretty large margin, and so we still ended up with over 300,000 words of dialogue.



Early in the project, we needed to record some voice-over for a vertical slice – a sort of prototype that would serve as “proof of concept” to demonstrate how the game would end up looking and feeling when it was finished. We sent out some test lines and character descriptions and solicited auditions from a few different studios, but none of them really struck a chord with us. Then we found Pitstop in the UK – the quality of the acting they sent back to us was phenomenally better than the other studios we’d tried. We knew at once we had our partner.

Recording all that dialogue is not done overnight. We decided to split the task into three “batches” – the first batch would include all main story dialogue up to but not including the finale. The second batch would be the finale and all side quests. The third and final batch would come after our content lockdown and would be for corrections, late additions, and anything we’d had to add or change as part of polish or bug-fixing.

The first step in the whole process was to send Pitstop all material we had on the game, and sit down with their directors to work through what the story was about and what kind of aesthetic we were going for. We sent a list of every character in the game, with demographic details, descriptions, and notes about where, when, and how they would appear. The game has 270 unique characters, so this was no small thing for them to deal with. After looking over this list, Pitstop sent us a questionnaire for each of the roles we had identified as our major characters, asking about their backstory, personality, relationships with and attitudes towards each other, and above all where their personal character arc would take them.



Now we were ready for the casting. Pitstop’s casting director Josh divided our enormous character list into 40 distinct roles. For the minor characters, he assigned actors that Pitstop already knew and had worked with before. For the major characters, sample lines from our script were sent out to agents, and we got back recorded auditions from a large group of actors trying for each part. We had a blast listening to all these different interpretations of our characters.

For some parts, the choice was self-evident – for example, for the role of the player’s patron, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the voice of James Gillies immediately stood out as having the precise perfect mix of stern authority and fatherly warmth that we had in mind when we wrote our take on the famous imperator. Other characters were much harder to nail down and required several different casting calls to find someone who hit the mark. Julia Calida in particular was a very difficult part to cast, and it took us three attempts to find Rosie Jones, who brought an appropriately brooding tom-boyish edge to the part.

Some characters we chose to deliberately cast against type – perhaps a manifestation of our natural tendency towards shying away from the expected. We have an antagonist played by an actor who always plays heroes, and a loyal old mentor played by an actor who is always cast as a villain. Their performances add a layer of nuance to their characters that we might never have got if we had gone for the obvious casting choice.




The next challenge was how to format the script. In the engine, our dialogue is a sprawling mess of interconnected branching nodes intermingled with gameplay scripting. Dialogue scripts handle not just what lines are displayed on the screen and when, but also control how characters move, animate, or rotate, what the camera is looking at, praetorian approval, resource gains or losses, UI pop-ups, doors opening or closing, objects appearing or disappearing, quests updating, characters joining the party, leaving the party, or splitting temporarily from the party, and so on and so forth. It’s a mess, and it would all get in the way of recording.

To solve this, our lead programmer Petr wrote an exporter to trawl the game for dialogue, parse all scripts with dialogue in them, and export it all in an order that would try to approximate the order in which the dialogue appears in the game. Then, our creative director Jonas went over every single dialogue in the game and wrote context descriptions for them to explain what the scene was and who was present there. This information was exported along with the dialogue and lots of other metadata, and then formatted by Pitstop into their preferred structure for recording.

Before Pitstop could begin the recordings, one last thing had to be sorted on our end: the script is littered with Latin words, phrases, and names, and we had decided to go for an approximation of classical Latin pronunciation. To ensure consistency, Pitstop would need a pronunciation guide. We approached a professor of Latin in Italy who graciously agreed to record all our Latin words with his son. In fact he gave us two entire sets of pronunciations just for good measure: a classical and an ecclesiastical one. We never did use the latter, but we were very impressed by the professor’s diligence.




The process of recording itself took months. At the peak of the process, Pitstop were recording in 2 different studios in parallel for 8 hours per day. Jonas and lead narrative designer Fasih remotely sat in on all the sessions for the major characters, helping to clear up any questions about the characters, the scenes, or the pronunciations, but in all honestly Pitstop’s directors had done an extraordinary job of sorting through the script and understanding every scene in depth as well as the overarching plot developments. It was a hugely enjoyable process to sit in on these sessions and talk to the actors about the game and the characters.

When you’re just two writers having to type up the script for such a large project, you do your best to ensure that every character comes alive on the page and leaves a distinct impression in the player’s mind, but there is only so much you can do alone when you have a whole game to write. Inevitably you end up focusing on the major characters, sometimes to the detriment of the minor supporting cast. However, each actor has a much smaller set of characters to deal with, and they are able to spend more of their time and effort on each one. It’s wonderful to see how much life and personality even the most hastily written character can gain on the lips of a talented and professional voice actor.








In the end, there’s no doubt that Expeditions: Rome was enormously improved by the addition of full voice-over. It’s been a dream come true for us to finally hear all our words spoken by professional actors – a thing we could never have done without the support of THQ Nordic and the hard work of Pitstop. We can’t wait to share the fruits of all this with you, and we know you’ll fall in love with our companion characters and grow to well and truly despise our villains.

As always, we will be streaming on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel this Wednesday December 1st at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT on http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. Our steadfast host, Senior Producer Brad Logston, will be joined by the Creative Director Jonas Wæver and special guest Lead Voice Director Josh Weeden to discuss the process of writing and recording the massive script of Expeditions: Rome.

Until then, Valete!

 

[Infinitron]

Now, on Rome we have made a concerted effort to keep the dialogue even more concise and punchy than before – we’ve almost eliminated use of narrator text during dialogue, and worked hard to put as much of the actual actions of what’s happening in the scene into the actual game world, so you can see characters move and animate instead of having it described to you.

I believe this is actually widely considered to be INCLINE these days.

 

[Lacrymas]

It only inclines the budget.

 

[Infinitron]

Devstream #11:

 

[Infinitron]

Voice acting dev diary:

Learn more about the Voices of Rome as Lara Sawalha (Cleopatra) and Stephane Cornicard (Syneros) talk about their experience working on Expeditions: Rome together wit Logic Artists.

 

[vonAchdorf]

When I first discovered Conquistator, I didn't expect a third installment, even less a high budget one with voice acting.

 

[Infinitron]

When I first discovered Conquistator, I didn't expect a third installment, even less a high budget one with voice acting.

 

[Mauman]

Is that their picture of Cleopatra in the game?

If so, I'm SHOCKED that a conventionally attractive woman (with actual sex appeal no less) was allowed into this game.

 

[Harthwain]

Is that their picture of Cleopatra in the game?

If so, I'm SHOCKED that a conventionally attractive woman (with actual sex appeal no less) was allowed into this game.

Looks like it (timestamped video):

Spoiler

 

[PrK]

Why is she black?

 

[Jrpgfan]

Why is she black?

Skin tone looks more or less the same to me(actually lighter in the game portrait).

 

[Atlantico]

Skin tone looks more or less the same to me.

... that is not a photograph and her eyes were probably not twice the size of her nose either and her hair wasn't a solid block of mass either.

 

[Jrpgfan]

Skin tone looks more or less the same to me.

... that is not a photograph and her eyes were probably not twice the size of her nose either and her hair wasn't a solid block of mass either.

I doubt she was pale white though. She definitely had some tan.

Regardless, in popular culture she has always been depicted as having a somewhat middle-eastern look(most of the time atleast).

 

[The Wall]

The novel setting of Conquistador I think helped advertise it and people remember it too. Type Rome or Vikings into the steam search bar and ten million games with that in the title pop up.

Sure but this will also literally be first high budget Historical cRPG set in time of ancient Rome

 

[The Wall]

[UPDATE] Popular misconception is that Ancient Rome is overused as setting in either video games, movies or TV shows. Very few of our entertainment is placed inside times of Caesar, Trajan or Justinian, even fewer good movies or video games about Ancient Rome exist. In past ten years maybe 2-3 high budget movies about Rome were filmed, probably even less. No Historic RPG about Rome exist. Expeditions:Rome will be first

When you search for "ROME" on Steam, Expeditions: Rome is placed #6

 

[Infinitron]

The novel setting of Conquistador I think helped advertise it and people remember it too. Type Rome or Vikings into the steam search bar and ten million games with that in the title pop up.

Sure but this will also literally be first high budget Historical cRPG set in time of ancient Rome

Lucasarts also made a little-remembered console-exclusive turn-based tactical RPG(!) called Gladius back in 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladius_(video_game)

Somebody should do an Enhanced Edition PC port of that, sounds interesting.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Why is she black?

Skin tone looks more or less the same to me(actually lighter in the game portrait).

Cleopatra had either blonde or red hair.