WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes - turn-based tactical RPG on WW2 Warsaw Uprising - now a free game

[Reinhardt]

I just want to lead cavalry charge against tanks.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/warsaw/gameplay-tactical-rpg

Warsaw is a harrowing Darkest Dungeon set during WWII
Pixelated Milk's tactical RPG documents a dark but defining event in Polish history

There are many different depictions of war in videogames. You have the bombastic spectacle of the FPS genre, which uses war as a launchpad to create action-packed experiences. There are strategic war games that test you tactical instincts and tend to favour either the depiction of historical battles or some far-flung future conflict. Then there are narrative-driven games like This War of Mine and Bury Me, My Love that depict a devastating account of war from a civilian perspective.

Pixelated Milk’s Warsaw, is a mix of all three. It’s a turn-based, tactical RPG that documents the tragic event of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising in Poland during World War II. You play as a group of civilians who are trying to defend their city from the German occupying forces. Pixelated Milk’s producer, Krzysztof Paplinski, explains how the Poland-based studio is navigating the tricky territory of creating a game that’s based on such a loaded moment in history.

>“It’s not a spoiler for anyone from Poland or people who are knowledgeable about history,” Paplinski tells us. “The Warsaw Uprising lasted 63 days and it ended in tragedy: total destruction of the city, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. This is something that we don’t expect everyone to know when they start playing the game. But they will know that after they finish.

Warsaw certainly doesn’t shy away from the horror of the events that took place: “Your goal in the game is to get your hero characters to come out as survivors and not victims,” Paplinski continues. “We want you to get close to those characters, to get a feel for them, learn their backstory, learn their skills, promote them, and care for them so that they make it to the end of the uprising.”

It’s harrowing stuff, but the Warsaw uprising demonstrated the courage of the Polish people in the face of overwhelming German forces. To ensure this is also communicated in the game, Pixelated Milk wants the heart of Warsaw to lie in its characters, and lots of work has gone into making sure they respectfully represent the events, and people, of the uprising.



“When you see the key artwork of the game there are three characters, and one of them is a woman,” Paplinski says. “Obviously, some would think, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s a poster girl.’ But actually, she’s there because she represented 30% of women that were taking part in the uprising.”
In all, there are 15 different characters for players to select from and build a team, and Pixelated Milk has paired them with classic RPG archetypes.

“We set up certain personas for each of those groups,” Paplinski explains. “We tried to nail every single group that consisted of more than just one person. We then made sure that they were also structured around an RPG class that players would recognise. We’ve tried to make it work for both. On the one hand, there are classes and skills that you understand as a player, but, at the same time, there’s a flavour to them that is fully influenced by what happened in the uprising.”



“So on the one hand,” Paplinski says. “You have this one type of character, who has skills that you recognise from tactical RPG games. But on the other hand, there is a layer of why is a particular character is doing something and why they have certain skills, and it’s based on reality. We are hoping that with every hero character you will see those little details that are not there just for the sake of the game. But rather, they’re based in certain events from history.”

Developing a game about local history has been a particularly emotional journey for Pixelated Milk, and special care has been required due to the fact that the events profoundly divided opinion within Poland.

“Some people say that the Warsaw Uprising was a beautiful romantic gesture,” Paplinski explains. “Where young people rose up to their oppressor. The second group of people considers it a great historical crime where commanders sent young people to their deaths because no one expected the uprising to be a success. These are two lines that deal narratively with different political options, depending on who views what as something good.”

Warsaw, Paplinski goes on to explain, is not taking either side. He wants the game to tell the story of a population that fought back even though the odds were stacked against it. It’s a defining part of Polish history and, no matter what your take on the motives behind it, it’s a story that deserves to be told.

“What we want to do is put only the facts in front of players,” Paplinski says. “We will not tell you whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. Constantly, during the development of the game, we’re juggling two different kinds of things. First of all, we want to make sure that it’s a compelling game first. Second, we want you, even unwillingly, to soak in all the information on the Warsaw uprising.”

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[abnaxus]

So you lose at the end?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

So you lose at the end?

Naw, I saw the movie. The Germans lost this one.

 

[Darkzone]

So you lose at the end?

Naw, I saw the movie. The Germans lost this one.

Not quite. The battle for Warsaw was lost by the polish side. And what followed was the total destruction of Warsaw with around 90% of the city being raised to the ground. The parts of Warsaw which were left unscafed were on the eastern side of Wistula, like the district Praga. In the german view the Poles should never rebuild Warsaw again. And indeed it would have been cheaper to build a new city instead of rebuilding the old one. But the Poles are stubborn and said: fuck the money, our national heritage and pride is more important.
This was the old great generation of Poles and i doubt that they could say it now to the fourth Reich of EU.

 

[FritzedProcess]

Why Joseph Joestar is in my Warsaw Uprising simulator?

He's looking for Stroheim.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...aught-me-an-important-piece-of-polish-history

The upcoming RPG Warsaw taught me an important piece of Polish history

Today is an important anniversary. At 1700 hours (4pm UK time), Warsaw will fall silent. Sirens will sound and the Polish capital will grind to a halt, as it has on this day, at this hour, for the past 74 years. Today, people will remember the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who died as a result of the Warsaw Uprising. But 75 years ago, it had just begun.

The Uprising was only supposed to last a few days. Soviet help was presumed on its way. But for whatever reason - did Stalin hold back on purpose? - it never arrived, and the Poles were on their own. And alone, they could never win. Somehow, they held out for 63 days, until 2nd October, then the Warsaw Uprising was officially declared over.

To keep you coming back, Warsaw will kill you. It's going to be a challenging, try-again game like Slay the Spire, with retrying built into the loop. "We expect you to fail a number of times," Paplinksi says. The goal is to keep your Uprising going for 63 days, as it did in real-life, and doing so involves keeping an ever-depleting Morale gauge above zero, by completing missions in districts around Warsaw.

This is my hideout. It's a charismatic place with plenty to poke around. Reminded me a lot of Fallout Shelter. You can't upgrade it, however.

Missions are chosen from a Hideout hub, where you also equip and level up characters, and heal them and discover more about them. Your tasks usually involve recovering caches of supplies - a precious commodity! - or taking out Nazi patrols, and once completed, you're served with an event: a situation you have multiple ways of dealing with, and which has repercussions for your characters and Uprising overall.

Missions play out on a top-down map view of Warsaw, and you move an icon around while dodging hazards like patrols and gunfire, and investigating points of interest. The perspective changes when you enter combat, switching to a Darkest Dungeon-style, side-on, turn-based fight.

Characters are spaced along two rows of mirrored spaces - like the dots on a six-numbered domino - and abilities play around with this. Certain abilities require standing in certain areas, and certain attacks target certain areas. Ammunition is a consideration - and another precious commodity! - as is your characters' stamina level, which depletes with ability-use (the stronger the ability, the more draining). It replenishes a little each round but if you over-rely on one character, you will wear them out and they will be unable to do anything, which I discovered the hard way.

This is the mission screen. Once the patrols move, I imagine the tension will ratchet right up - you only have a limited amount of action points to move with.

You pick characters at your Hideout but they are a precious commodity too! Do you sense a pattern? Characters don't pick up diseases like they do in Darkest Dungeon but the damage they sustain on missions stays with them. You can heal at the Hideout, but slowly, so you can see how ranks quickly become depleted - particularly with new characters only showing up once an in-game week. "You will learn to care for each one of them," Paplinski says.

It's a formula which works rather well. I spend a few hours with Warsaw and the combat and Hideout, particularly, are gorgeous. Combat is challenging and the web of abilities is engrossing, while the Hideout evokes wonderful charisma, with era-appropriate music crackling in the background, as characters idle in places suited to their backgrounds.

The missions aren't quite as convincing - patrols aren't fully working so there's no tension, but I can appreciate what they're trying to do. Nor are resources - characters, ammo, tokens for levelling up, etc. - stretched as fraughtly thin as they will be in the final game. Warsaw is supposed to have you clinging to survival like other Polish games This War of Mine and Frostpunk, but it isn't there yet. But then again, the build is a few weeks old and there's time for fine-tuning before the 4th September release.

The combat scenes are gorgeous. That boy in my ranks - he's a stone-cold killer.

A bigger concern is feeling dropped into the setting with barely an introduction. I mean, I know Nazis are the bad guys, everyone does, but I'm not sure what I'm specifically supposed to care about here - I wasn't taught Polish history at school. So to answer some questions, I read up about the Uprising while playing, and as I do so, I start recognising things I see in the game. Uniforms, equipment, names, locations, battles - it's all there, as I suppose it would be, what with three historians working on the game!

Little bells of familiarity begin ringing everywhere and I realise, with a jolt, I am doing exactly what Paplinski hopes players of Warsaw will: organically sponge the history up. "We know the story is interesting and it will 'get' everyone once they learn," he says. "This is the middle of Europe, the most recognised conflict in the world, and people are not aware of the almost total destruction of the city and the death of more than 200,000 people. People just don't know.

"You will be exposed to information and some of it will stay with you. If you want, you can then dig deeper, or you can just leave it at the surface and that's it. We don't come at this from an angle where, 'OK, finally we will educate people.' But we know if we make a good game, this will be the end result: people will recognise this event."

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, probably the largest single act of resistance in the biggest war Earth will ever see. There will be a minute's silence at 1700 hours CEST. I know that now.

 

[Mustawd]

Why make a game out of of one the most tragic stories of WW2?
Fun fact: a lot of polish freedom fighters were later killed by Russians.

A lot of people were killed on D Day. What is your point? War makes fun video games.

 

[Black]

Why make a game out of of one the most tragic stories of WW2?
Fun fact: a lot of polish freedom fighters were later killed by Russians.

A lot of people were killed on D Day. What is your point? War makes fun video games.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Devs are going apeshit on Steam forums because some people wanted to play as Germans.

 

[LESS T_T]

Delayed: https://steamcommunity.com/games/1026420/announcements/detail/1588003708929763488

Launch date now 2nd of October

Hey everyone,

We’re postponing the WARSAW launch to October 2nd.

For the last two months we took part in WARSAW's preview tour around Europe culminating in last week’s Gamescom. The goal? Showing the game to the media. The reception? So far it would seem that we have something special in our hands.

At the same time we had a growing concern that we might not be able to provide you with the game as polished as we would have wanted it to be.

Therefore – after two weeks of weighing in all the pros and cons a final decision was reached yesterday: to delay the launch of WARSAW to 2nd of October.

Please do note that we didn’t wish to postpone the game indefinitely and only commit to the date once closer to it. So let’s call the 2nd of October a first and last delay for WARSAW at the same time.

Next week we will be dropping a new trailer. Until this week it was actually “an announcement trailer”, but the decision to postpone the launch will actually turn it into a “before the announcement trailer”. But we will not stop there. We will make sure to provide a steady stream of behind the scenes info on the road to launch here on the Steam page.

For now – apologies for making you wait that one month longer to play the game. But we are confident this is a decision that will be beneficial for everyone who will want to explore WARSAW.

 

[Black]

If they had any sense they'd release it on November 11th.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Üstad]

Every time you click to end turn button a Pole dies

Spoiler

Just joking I don't have anything against Poles

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I'll buy it when they release the american dlc

 

[gerey]

Why can't I play as the good guys?

 

[Storyfag]

I'll buy it when they release the american dlc

What? The one where your planes make supply drops on the GERMAN positions?

 

[Reinhardt]

Why can't I play as the good guys?

Russians?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Why can't I play as the good guys?

Russians?

Think he's talking about the Swiss.

 

[Danikas]

Why can't I play as the good guys?

Russians?

Think he's talking about the Swiss.

Hungarians.

"Many accounts survive about the transfer of military hardware, supplies and even weapons for the insurgents by the Hungarian troops. The Hungarians also passed on information about the movements of the German army against the Polish positions. At one point, the command of the 9th German Army issued an order to shoot Hungarian soldiers captured “in the act” of helping Poles. Their graves are scattered around Warsaw, among others in the forests near the Zalesie Górne. The Hungarians also helped civilians, who were driven out in various ways of the districts of Warsaw occupied by the Germans. Over time, Hungarian troops began to withdraw from the region and move to Hungary. This was caused by two issues: the total lack of trust of the German command, obvious cases of helping Polish insurgents and the withdrawal of Romania from the coalition of states allied with the Third Reich. Hungarian Honvéds were needed more urgently in their homeland."

 

[Life of the Party]