THQN Brad

Ave Legate! The day has finally come! Today we are releasing the DLC expansion we’ve been working on for Expeditions: Rome. Pop open a flask of passum or mulsum and get comfortable because this DevDiary will have a lot of information. The DLC is called Death or Glory and will center on gladiators and gladiatorial combat. Death or Glory introduces the new playable Gladiator character class to the game with its own unique armor type and an exotic “Scissor” off-hand weapon (pronounced “Skee-sor”). It also adds a new set of side quests to each of the three campaigns – featuring new characters – where you visit gladiatorial arenas and rise through the ranks to face the champion. Once you become the champion of each arena, you will unlock the option to continue to play randomized matches to your heart’s content, and if you don’t have time to replay the game’s story, you can also access these new quests directly from the main menu as a special Gladiator Mode where every fight will level you up and award randomized loot and legendary items. Work on this DLC started in earnest right around the release of the game. We had already settled on the gladiator theme, and the art department had started making assets and setting up the levels before Rome was released. Once Rome was out, we were able to informally poll our fans on Discord about how they would like a DLC for Rome to work, and the overwhelming consensus was that it would be best to add new features and content to the main game to shake up the replays. With this in mind, we designed the structure of the quests to fit into the main game as well as to work in a stand-alone Gladiator Mode, and we set about applying all our knowledge of Rome’s existing character classes to designing a new class that would fit into the existing features and feel different and exciting to play. Let’s break down all this exciting new content. First off, the Gladiator class. When you start a new game with the Death or Glory installed, you will have the option to play this class yourself. Alternatively, you may choose to change Deianeira into a Gladiator. If you disable that option, she will remain a Princeps as she originally was. Gladiators can also now be recruited from the barracks, and if you assign them as Centurions they will apply a unique bonus in the new legion battle system if chosen to command just like every other class. The Gladiator class comes with a full set of 24 class skills and is no doubt the most diverse class in the game, with each of its skill trees focused on a distinct type of play: the Secutor is a heavily armored defensive fighter; the Retiarius is a cunning and mobile skirmisher with many tools to manipulate the movement and positioning of enemies or allies; and the Provocator is a bold showman that can bolster the morale of allies or wear down the morale of their opponents. Setting the class further apart from the existing classes, the Gladiator’s special class stat is Retaliation. This is a percentage probability that the Gladiator will get to make a free counter-attack against any enemy who hits them in melee. This is different from a mere Attack of Opportunity in that there is no limit on how many Retaliations can be made per turn. The Gladiator has an inherent Retaliation chance which can be further bolstered by the new Gladiator armor, helmet, and the exotic Scissor weapon. The Scissor is an off-hand weapon which is essentially a gauntlet with a hooked blade affixed – like a punch-dagger, but weirder! Only the Gladiator can wield it. In addition to a full set of new weapon skills, it also introduces combo skills for all the existing off-hand weapons in the game. A particularly fun combo is to use Retaliating Strike to apply a couple of stacks of Retaliating to yourself, which increases your Retaliation Chance, and then follow up with Riposte which deals extra damage for each stack of Retaliating you have. Legendary scissors with new charms can also be found throughout the game, such as the scissor called “Invictus” that allows a second counter-attack to trigger against the same attack. As if that weren’t enough, Death or Glory also adds a couple of new tactical items that can be purchased from the arena merchants: the Acid Flask, which eats away enemy armor, and the Hunting Trap which can be placed on the ground to damage and cripple the first enemy who moves into it. With all these new toys to play with, you’re going to need some worthy opposition as well. To this end, Death or Glory will add a new arena to each of the campaign maps where you are invited to participate in matches against formidable gladiators. These opponents will test your tactical cunning in encounters using the new Audience Approval mechanic: every fight in the arena imposes certain conditions that will raise or lower the Audience Approval depending on your actions. Reaching a certain level of Audience Approval or gaining enough of it in one turn will grant powerful buffs to your whole team, allowing you to turn the tide of a tough fight. If Audience Approval falls to -100 you will lose the match, but if you can raise it to +100, you will be victorious. Humans are not the only opponent you’ll have to contend with. In the famous Lion Arena of Lower Egypt, you will face ferocious beasts that will test your tactical skills in entirely new ways. Male lions hang back and wait while female lions work together to take down their prey. Lions do not choose sides, however, and if you are cunning in your positioning, the beasts may be just as dangerous to your human opponents as they are to you. Each arena has its own champion that you must defeat in the end if you wish to become the champion yourself. Doing so will earn you special prizes, including the privilege of using the unique color themes and emblems of the arena for your praetorian guard or your legion. Moreover, you will unlock the option to engage in repeatable, randomized matches to defend your title. Return to the arena any time you’d like after you become its champion and simply request a match. Random enemies will be spawned, Audience Approval conditions will be chosen at random, and there will even be a chance for catapults or traps to appear to shake things up. Don’t worry, any tactical items you spend in a randomized arena match will be refunded at the end of the encounter. If you access the arenas directly from the main menu through the Gladiator Mode, you will get your full party of companions starting at level 5, with complete freedom to assign all your skill points as you please. You will also be given a random drop of items, and between each fight you will gain 1 more level, another random loot drop including 1-3 tactical items, and exactly 1 legendary item. In this mode, injuries are automatically cleared after every encounter as you are not allowed to leave the arena to treat them, but tactical item charges do not replenish. Only when you become the champion of an arena are you permitted to leave the level and move directly to the next arena. Becoming the champion of all three arenas in Gladiator Mode will reward you with a unique Victoria Statue trophy for your tent or villa. As you can hopefully tell, Death or Glory adds quite a significant chunk of new stuff to the game, but that’s not even all. At the same time as we’re releasing the DLC, we will release a patch with a new content update that includes new companion dialogue sprinkled throughout the game, four new Roman legendary armours to find as loot, three new dagger-dagger combo skills, two new hair options for each gender, some new portraits for certain NPCs, and a slew of new quality of life improvements all over the place. Plus of course more bug fixes and balance tweaks than you can shake a tersorium at. We’re extremely excited to release this big new update to you all alongside Death or Glory, and to read your reactions to everything. It’s been a hectic but wonderful time for us since release, balancing our work on the DLC with the ongoing response to your feedback, and we’re very proud of everything that Death or Glory adds to the game. Please drop by our DevStream today at 9:00 AM Eastern / 2:00 PM BST at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic to chat with Senior Producer Brad Logston, Creative Director Jonas Wæver, and our hard-working combat designer Hans Emil Hoppe-Rauer about Death or Glory and the big update, or whatever else you’d like to ask us about. Until then, Valete! View full article

Ave! After a small break, we have another DevDiary for you with an update on two of the major things we’ve been working on for Expeditions: Rome. Since our last update, we’ve made excellent progress on the new legion battle system, and we’re pleased to report that it’s shaping up to be a lot more interesting than the old minigame. At the same time, we’ve been working to improve our gamepad support to get rid of the cursor emulation in most parts of the game, to make it a better experience to play Rome from the comfort of your couch. First, let’s take a look at the state of the legion battle system. If you didn’t read our last DevDiary where we talked about our plans, you may want to go and skim over it now so we’re all on the same page before you read on. All caught up? Great. Now: our technical designer Casper finished a prototype implementation of the improved legion battles a week and a half ago and started working on some basic rebalancing. Once this was in place, we were able to play around with the system and get a sense of how it feels. As hoped, the changes have both made the legion battles easier to understand and greatly improved the sense that your stratagem choices really matter. One wrong decision or reckless risk taken can cause the death of one of your centurions or mean the difference between the enemy army scattering or retreating to fight another day. The fact that you now interface with the system entirely through the specialisation points from your centurions and stratagems, gives you a better overview of the ebb and flow of battle. The unpredictability of the previous behind-the-scenes dice-rolls is replaced by which stratagems are played by your enemy, but since you get some up-front information about that, you can adjust your choices based on what the enemy does. This adds a feeling that your enemies are working against you, which supports the fantasy of legion command much better than the randomness of the old system (and makes you curse your enemies when they counter your Artillery points, preventing you from reaching the next tier in that specialisation). One discovery we made as we were testing was that we still needed to keep the more specific direct effects on the outcome cards. As you may know from playing the current game, the stratagem selection you get at the end of each battle changes depending on whether you won or lost. Since these cards take effect after the outcome of the battle is already determined, it made little sense to keep adding more points to the specialisations, since many of the specialisation effects are no longer relevant once the battle is won or lost. For this reason, you’ll still see specific effects on those cards in the new system, such as Show Mercy costing you a few Morale points while replenishing your Legion Manpower with fresh recruits. Once we knew that we had achieved what we wanted with the new system, Casper started working with our intrepid UI designer Anca to update the interface to look good and communicate the new features. A lot of work was put into adding new animations to help the player understand what’s happening. The tutorials have also been updated, explaining the legion battles in substantially more detail than the old system was. The other major update we’ve been working on is proper gamepad support. As you know if you’ve tried to enable controller input while playing Expeditions: Rome, the current version relies heavily on cursor emulation. Our first priority was to remove cursor emulation from the exploration, worldmap, and combat parts of the game. The character is now controlled directly by the Left Stick outside of combat. Movement uses the same sort of pathfinding as you get if you hold down the left mouse button when playing on mouse and keyboard, so your character will automatically move around objects, avoid obstacles, and so on. It can take a little getting used to, but it feels very organic after a moment, and prevents you running into walls. In combat, the camera moves freely but the cursor is replaced by a crosshair at the center of the viewport that selects characters and tells them where to go. You can of course still cycle characters with the bumper buttons as you’d expect. Skills are cycled with the D-Pad by default, and the face buttons swap weapons, toggle the character tooltip, and reset the camera focus. The next big task before we can consider the controller implementation final is to update most of the UIs to get rid of the cursor emulation as well, allowing you to navigate with the D-Pad and the sticks instead, and assigning new shortcuts to common functions. We’ve already updated the dialogue panel so you cycle the options with the D-Pad and continue or skip with the face buttons, and we’ve just updated all the UIs related to character creation as well. We’re probably going to keep the cursor emulation in the party panels (the skill and inventory screens) since it allows you to read all the tooltips and frankly makes inventory navigation faster than if you’d have to navigate with a D-Pad, but we have other solutions for all other interface panels. The legion battle system may be released within the next couple of weeks, but you should expect full gamepad support around the beginning of April. Thank you so much for playing Expeditions: Rome and giving us your feedback, and please do join our DevStream this Wednesday, March 16th, at 1:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. We’ll show off a little of the new legion battle system and answer your questions about it, about playing Rome with a controller, or really about anything you’d like to ask about the game. Valete! View full article

Ave, and welcome to our 18th dev diary – the second after the release of Expeditions: Rome. As we mentioned last week, the first major update is currently undergoing testing. We were hoping to release it last week, but QA did their jobs well and found a new issue that had slipped into the game due to one of our stability fixes, so we had to push the patch until this week so we could get that fixed first and give QA time to re-test the build. In the meantime, those of us not already working on the first piece of DLC have set our sights on a much-requested set of improvements to a certain system in the game, namely the legion battles. The legion battle system has been a challenge right from the start. We knew we wanted to represent the large-scale battles of a Roman legion somehow, and give the player a feeling of being a grand strategy commander handing out orders from on high, but at the same time we didn’t want to cram a whole wargame into our tactical RPG. During the prototyping phase we intended battles to simply be resolved by a die roll based on the strength of each army – but it seemed too simple. Later we briefly considered representing it by a re-interpretation of a Roman dice game called Tali – but we decided that would be far too abstract. We knew we needed to do something that would sell the fantasy without ballooning out of scope to take over the whole project. What we settled on was a resource management system where you balance your losses against the risk to your centurions, a desire to scatter the enemy troops, the likelihood of getting some loot out of it, the morale and experience of your legion, and so on. Success is still essentially a dice roll based on your legion’s strength compared to the enemy army, and you would always be able to win as long as you paid just a little bit of attention. However, you would have some control over how well you come out of it in the end: how great your losses, how good your loot, and whether the enemy survivors would retreat to fight another day. Now that the game has been out for a few weeks, it's clear that the system was not received well. Although Expeditions: Rome is a premium single player game, we’re committed to giving it the post-release support it needs to remain an excellent and beloved game for years to come, and the big thing we need to address is how to make this legion battle system more interesting. There are limits to what we can do. We are still not planning to turn this into a real-time grand strategy game. It must remain a relatively minor part of the game loop that doesn’t overstay its welcome and get too much in the way of the core gameplay of Rome. We have perused all your feedback and identified the following two major criticisms: First, it’s too difficult to understand what’s going on and how it works; second, it feels random, not giving you enough agency over the outcome of battles especially in the beginning before you have a chance to unlock new stratagems and level up your centurions. With that in mind, we’ve decided to make the following changes. First, we will remove the “challenges” that pop up during each phase of a battle. These are the “attacks” and “defences” you see getting either succeeded or failed by your chosen commander, based on his character class and his command specialisations. This will also have the benefit of making each phase shorter, for those who don’t wish to skip them entirely. To replace this system, we plan to add new trackers that compare how many points your centurions have in each specialisation compared to the enemy commander. To refresh your memory, the specialisations are Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, and Logistics. Each specialisation your centurions have will be added to your count, and your chosen commander will get their specialisations doubled for this purpose. The enemy’s specialisations are deducted from your count, and each tracker can go into the negative this way. To help you visualise it, here is an early mock-up of what two of these trackers may look like in the UI. Each line marks a point where a new effect will be unlocked: In each subsequent phase, every stratagem you play will add points to or remove points from these trackers. This will simplify the stratagem cards as well, reducing the plethora of largely unexplained effects to a combination of specialisation points. The enemy will also play stratagems that affect these trackers, and you will be able to see at least some of what the enemy is going to do before you make your own choice. At certain tiers, each tracker unlocks a new effect: a bonus to your defence or aggression, a new loot crate, a morale bonus, ultimately even forcing the enemy army to scatter rather than retreating. This means the new system allows you to aim for tangible goals: rather than a card just making you lose slightly less manpower, you might be trying to build up to reach a certain tier of Artillery in order to unlock a particular effect, and which cards you draw in the following phase will determine whether you succeed or fail. Inspecting these effects and deciding what to aim for based on what the enemy seems to be focusing on, and what stratagems are at your disposal, will give you a better sense that you’re formulating and following an overall strategy, and that you’re going up against another commander with their own strategy. To give you some idea of what these effects could look like, here’s a screenshot directly from the design document. Please note that this is extremely work in progress, subject to all sorts of pending iterations, and reproduced here over the dead body of the technical designer (he will be missed): Since we’re removing the challenges that were formerly based in part on the chosen commander’s class, each class will instead apply a specific overall bonus to the outcome of the battle, similar to how certain perks (namely Cautious, Reckless, and Medicus) already add specific bonuses or penalties to a battle when a character with those perks is selected. These bonuses will not only be more significant and tangible than the previous effect of the commander’s class, but will also be completely orthogonal to the specialisations, creating more variation in possible outcomes based on who you choose to command the battle. In addition to these core changes, we have a few minor tweaks planned. First of all, losing battles will now affect the legion’s Morale directly: before, the morale effect was tied to the specific set of stratagems you would have to choose from if you lost a battle, but this just seems like the game is forcing you to make a bad choice. Simpler to just deduct the Morale directly if you lose. Second, winning a battle will always give the legion Experience. In the current system, Legion Experience is based on relative losses during a fight: if you loose 100 more manpower than you kill, you lose 10 Experience, and vice versa. However, losing Experience feels bad, so we’ll remove that. And finally, this is not a simplification but rather an effort to bring the system in line with expectations and with the core fantasy: attrition during each phase (how many men you lose or enemies you kill) will be based on the relative active manpower of each side, rather than now where it is essentially a predefined random range that increases in each phase. Once we have these changes in place, we need to test it and iterate on it, paying special attention to how well we explain how the system works and what you as the player should be thinking about during a battle. Though we are removing some of the more confusing aspects of the system, we are adding new elements to it as well, and we want to make it clear this time what’s going on during each phase and how your decisions have affected the outcome. We’d love to hear what you think of these changes. Please leave your comments and questions below and we will be guaranteed to read them. We will as always have a Dev Stream on Twitch this Wednesday, February 9th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic, where Senior Producer Brad Logston will host Creative Director Jonas Wæver to talk about our plans for this system and what other things we’re working on for future updates. We will answer any questions left on this diary, and we’ll of course try to answer any other questions you throw at us during the stream. Until then, Valete! View full article

Ave, and welcome to another DevDiary – the first one since the glorious release of Expeditions: Rome in fact. We skipped last week due to being rather busy with the launch, but this week we are back to talk about the reception and our support plans. It’s been hugely exciting for us to finally let you all play the game we’ve been making for the past 3 years. We’re loving the discussions on Steam and Discord, and it’s been particularly fun to see you guys compare notes and gradually realise how far-reaching the effects of your decisions throughout the game can be, and how many things change depending on your choices and even your gender. We’ve spent a little more time than we perhaps should over the weekends watching Cringer, Bikeman, BurkeBlack, CohhCarnage, and others play Expeditions: Rome on Twitch, and chatting to their communities about the game. All of us at Logic Artists and at THQ Nordic have been very pleased with the game’s reception – the critical reception and the player reactions have both been overwhelmingly positive. There’s no doubt this is the best and most successful game in the Expeditions franchise so far, as we always felt it would be. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for playing our game! Since the release, our main priority has been to keep an eye on the reception of the game and what you’re all saying about it, fix the bugs that have surfaced, and make whatever tweaks or improvements we could quickly do to improve the play experience. We’ve worked hard to ensure that we would be releasing a stable and polished game, and it’s very gratifying to see that we haven’t received all that many bug reports. As you may have noticed though, two hotfixes did go out last week to address the few major issues that popped up early on, and a more significant update is currently being tested that will fix many smaller issues and add some quality-of-life improvements overall. That update will be released as soon as we feel certain that it doesn’t introduce any new problems. One of the major things this update will do is to loosen up the structure of Act 3 a bit. Many players have expressed that the campaign feels too linear and drags on for a bit too long, and we agree. The upcoming update will reduce the amount of mandatory regions you need to capture to complete that campaign, and it will also make it possible to do some of the main missions in a different order, so it isn’t as linear. That way if you just want to get to the finale as fast as possible, you can skip some of the pacification content. If you do decide to stick around and complete your conquest, there’ll be a nice new colour theme available for your legion as a reward for your efforts. The other major piece of feedback we’ve received is that the legion battles are just super difficult to figure out. A lot of you really want to understand what’s going on under the hood, and the game doesn’t do much to explain. Addressing these issues will take a little longer, so this next update will not have anything for that yet, but we are discussing what to do with the legion battle system in general – how to better communicate what’s going on and what your choices are doing, and how to make it feel less random. Now that the initial reactionary bug fixing and improvements are done and being tested, we are able to set our sights on the next thing – which leads us to the answer to a question that has been burning on many players’ minds. Expeditions: Rome will have DLC, and we are working on that as we speak. We can’t yet talk about what the DLC is going to be, nor when it will be released, but it’s going to be very cool. For this new piece of content, we have chosen to add something more to the existing game rather than making anything self-contained. It will add something new for you to do as you replay the game’s story to see where other choices would lead you, and it will add new ways for you to engage with the combat system that we are so very proud of. That’s it for this one! Despite the lack of DevDiary last week we had a great time hanging out with you on Twitch in our usual DevStream timeslot, playing a bit more of Rome, and answer all the questions you guys had for us. Let’s repeat the success this Wednesday, February 2nd at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. If you have any particularly pressing questions, please remember that you can post them as comments on this article and we will prioritise getting you some answers during the stream. Valete! View full article

Ave! It’s release week! In a mere four days (count them!), Expeditions: Rome will be released to the world in all its glory, and you will finally be able to continue your demo playthrough into the full game. Will you manage to save Cotta from the clutches of Mithridates? Will Archelaus prove to be a useful hostage if you left him alive? Will Julius Calidus ever drop the act and admit to very clearly being a woman? You’ll find out soon! Today’s subject is one we’ve been deliberately saving for last, since it concerns our most impressive set-pieces. One of the main challenges we’ve always had in the Expeditions series has been how to represent the full scale of the war that you usually end up causing or escalating throughout the story. The squad-scale turn-based combat system that we’re so proud of is all about micromanaging individual people and isn’t designed for full-scale warfare. In Rome, our main solution to this was the addition of the legion battle system, which uses the resource management mechanics of the game’s meta systems to give a taste of the grand strategy you’d expect to have to deal with as the leader of a Roman legion. It’s a complex little minigame that ties into a lot of other systems, but once in a while you want something more. When the story culminates in a big battle, you don’t want to watch it play out in an abstract way: you want to feel like you and your praetorian guard have been thrown into the fray. You want to see the chaos of a major assault up close. To address this need, we’ve introduced a new way to use our tactical combat on a larger scale, which we call Sieges. Sieges are big set-piece battles that play out in the same small-unit turn-based mode as our more typical encounters, but with several layers of extra production value on top, and with new systems introduced to help sell the scale of the fighting. First off, what makes the sieges really stand out is the level design. Every siege consists of multiple encounters played sequentially or even occasionally in parallel, but every encounter of a siege takes place in the same enormous level. Even if you’re only fighting with one group in one corner of a city, you can rotate your camera and see exactly where you are in relation to the other encounters. Our world builders really went above and beyond on these levels, crafting jaw-dropping sets that dwarf our typical encounter areas. As the battle progresses, the lighting will change to show the passage of time. You may begin an assault at dusk, fight throughout the night, emerge to seal the victory at dawn’s first light, and regroup for your celebrations at noon. Because sieges consist of multiple encounters, you should make use of your entire praetorian guard. Ahead of each siege, you are given a thorough briefing followed by a hand-drawn map of the layout of the battle. Here you must choose which praetorian is assigned to which group, with each group responsible for completing a certain set of encounters, each with their own objectives and their own purpose in the overall strategy. Complicating matters, wounds incurred and health lost carries over between encounters, so if you burn through all your skill charges and tactical items in an early fight, you may be faced with a grave challenge later in the siege. Every siege has its own unique encounter structure. We won’t give any of them away here, but suffice to say we have a lot of fun with the idea that your praetorian guard is split into multiple teams to carry out different tasks within the same battle. Your performance in one encounter may affect your options in the next one, or in some cases you may even have to switch back and forth between two different encounter groups to play their separate fights at the same time. The stand-out feature of the sieges is something we’ve been hinting at in previous trailers: catapults. The closest we’ve ever come to featuring siege equipment in an Expeditions game was the small cannon you could build in Conquistador and deploy as a tactical item. In Rome, you finally get to call in real artillery support, but it’s not quite the win-button it might at first seem to be. Catapults get their own place in the team turn order. Each catapult has 3 different types of ammunition: a big ol’ stone to smash your foes; a fire ball to set the battlefield aflame; and a scattering projectile that pelts a wide area and attempts to knock all characters within it on their butts. However, catapults take a while to aim and loose – when you call in a catapult strike, the actual impact won’t happen until the next turn, giving enemies time to flee the impact area. Finding ways to predict their movements, box them in, or keep them in place until the catapults hit is key to successful use of your artillery. A truly effective commander will learn to think of artillery support as an area denial method: if you call in a fireball behind the enemies, you cut off their avenue of escape. Likewise, calling in a catapult stone on an elevated platform used by enemy archers will force them to vacate that location or die before their next turn. It’s a tremendously fun and destructive mechanic which adds an exciting layer of chaos to every siege. The icing on top of the cake is how narrative the sieges are. One of the best new features in Expeditions: Rome is our flexible encounter scripting system that has allowed us to trigger dialogue and scripted sequences during fights, which means combat is much more of a storytelling tool for us than it’s ever been before. Sieges make the most of this. Every siege encounter has dialogue to establish the situation, characters react to new developments and comment on the progress towards completing the goal of each fight, and they even comment on the performance of their friends that were assigned to other tasks. Above all else this adds personality and drama to the mix, but it also helps to tie the encounters together and make it clear what’s going on and how well you’re doing. Sieges are the climactic battles that your conquest builds towards. They usually (though not always) mark the transition from one act of the game’s story to another, and winning a siege is a monumental achievement that further cements your character as one of history’s great figures. To find out more about how sieges were designed and maybe even catch a preview of how it looks in action, please join us on the THQ Nordic Twitch channel this Wednesday, January 19 at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic for our DevStream, where Senior Producer Brad Logston will host Creative Director Jonas Wæver and Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer. Any questions you post as comments on this diary will be answered on the stream. We’ll also be streaming throughout launch day, January 20th, on the same channel, so feel free to drop by! Many of the development team will be jumping into the stream as Brad plays through different sections of the game. Until then, Valete! View full article

Ave! Welcome to DevDiary 15, and boy do we have a doozy for you this week. It’s companion week! Every day starting today, we’ll be releasing a new video about one of our five companion characters, introducing the role they play in the story as well as in combat, and hinting at the personal problems they’re saddled with, which you will hopefully help them deal with throughout your adventures together. We have a lot to get through today, so let’s get started. Companions are a staple of the roleplaying genre. Originally an attempt to emulate the dynamics of a tabletop RPG group, they have become one of the most beloved and distinct aspects of the genre, and we daresay its greatest storytelling asset. With a sufficiently compelling set of main characters, a story can really tug on the player’s heartstrings – and one of the keys to making a group of characters appealing is to give them enough screen time for the player to get to know them. RPG-style companion characters are perfectly suited for this, as they typically follow the protagonist everywhere, participating in every scene and every crisis. We’d love to say that we wanted to place our companions front and center in Expeditions: Rome right from the start, but that would be untrue. In fact, we originally envisioned something much more like Conquistador: a large pool of bare-bones praetorians who were mostly just a collection of names, portraits, and stats. The player would be able to assemble their team from these praetorians, and as they were all able to die permanently or be kicked out of the group at any time, none would be integral to the plot. Four of these praetorians did have a slightly special status as the starting party that we would use to tutorialize the four character classes, but once the tutorial was finished, they would be treated the same as any expendable praetorian. But soon we ran into a problem: if we couldn’t count on the player to have at least 4 people on their team at any time, certain content in the game simply didn’t work. We decided to promote our four starting characters to “companion” status, making them functionally immortal in that their deaths would result in a game over, and then we added a fifth character to the group to ensure that you could fill a whole 6-person team with companions only. Once we had made this decision, we found ourselves investing more and more personality and agency in these four – after all, if we know these characters are always around, we can use them in dialogue and make them important parts of quests. But let’s take a step back. Having decided that 5 is the number of companions the game will have, how do you decide who they should be? Well, a game – even a heavily story-based RPG – is first and foremost a mechanical thing, and since Expeditions: Rome offers 4 base character classes in combat, of course all classes must be represented among the companions. This spread of combat roles was the seed upon which we built the player’s tight knit second family. A good short-hand that we like to use to steer our creativity when designing characters is to assign a single title or nickname to each of them that hints at an archetype. Then each companion is fleshed out with details that either support that archetype or counter it, until you have a well-rounded character. Let’s go over them now: The Centurion: Caeso Quinctius Aquilinus Every Expeditions game is set in a particular culture at a particular time, and in our view that culture must be properly represented within the companion group. In Viking, we invented Asleifr as the stereotypical ruthless macho viking warrior. In Expeditions: Rome, Caeso represents the archetypical Roman centurion – a dutiful and disciplined veteran soldier who loves the Republic and will happily die to defend it. But Caeso isn’t a stiff professional, he’s a bon vivant who likes wine, women, and for that matter men when the mood takes him. When you meet Caeso, he is well set in his ways, but eventually the consequences of his easy living will catch up to him, and his sense of duty and loyalty will be tested in equal measure. In combat, Caeso is a Princeps (heavy infantryman). He wades into battle wielding the gladius and scutum of the Roman legionarius, his polished breastplate and his pristine helmet plume providing a fixed point in the chaotic skirmish for his friends to rally around. The Spy: Julia Calida Ancient Rome was a sternly patriarchal society with strict gender roles inherited from the Greek culture that they admired and condescended on in equal measure. What then is a young woman of the patrician class to do if she cannot and will not fit into the role that society has thrust upon her? Calida’s answer was to disguise herself as a man and join the legions. Her deception did not hold up for long, but fortunately, those who discovered her were impressed by her talents. She was given a role away from the front lines where she could work independently and without constant risk of discovery: the role of an occulta speculatrix, a military spy. When you meet Calida, she is still attempting to hide her gender from you and your men, but her disguise is flimsy, and she is soon forced to drop her act. However, discontentment with Roman society was not the only reason Calida left Rome, and when she eventually returns to the heart of the Republic as part of your praetorian guard, her past will once again threaten to assert its control over the direction of her life. Calida is a highly skilled Sagittarius (archer) and assassin, and as part of your praetorian guard, she is most comfortable hanging back or seeking out high ground to pick off your enemies at a distance with her deadly shortbow. The Gladiator: Bestia Tabat The ruling class of Rome knew the importance of providing two things to their population: bread and entertainment. Whenever Bestia Tabat would enter the amphitheatre, entertainment would never be in short supply. With a flair for the dramatic and a singleminded pragmatism to keep him alive, he fought as a “bestiarius” (a gladiator who specializes in fighting against beasts) for many years until he earned his freedom. Then, incapable of imagining a life without violence, he left Rome to join the legions. When you meet Bestia, he is in search of a new purpose, but his growth as a person is held back by the brutality of his upbringing and his career. Hopefully through his acquaintance with you and the rest of your praetorian guard, he will broaden his horizons and develop a more well-rounded personality. As a gladiator, Bestia excels in the skirmish. He is a fast and quick-witted Veles (light infantryman) who moves far and makes many attacks each turn. He favours dual-wielding and is capable of devastating burst-damage, but his brash and bold style often puts him in great danger. The Mentor: Syneros Slavery was a fact of life in ancient Rome, from the kingdom through the republic and to the days of the empire. The life of a servus could be brutal, but those who were well-educated, especially Greeks who the Romans considered nearly their equals, benefited from many legal protections and could achieve a status that was indistinguishable from a salaried employee. Old Syneros has been your house servant and teacher since you were a child, and it was only natural that he would come with you when you were forced to flee Rome for your own safety. He is a wise and caring mentor, yet when you find yourself in combat, he is shockingly cool-headed and deadly with his staff or even a pike. How did Syneros learn to fight so well? The secret past of the old philosopher will not remain hidden for long. Though he is not a soldier, Syneros navigates the field of battle remarkably well, where he fits into the role of a Triarius (a support unit of sorts). He is a most natural fit for the role of a medicus, which is underlined by his perks that allow him to treat injured friends after a fight. The Amazon: Deianeira In the steppes beyond the easternmost of Rome’s provinces lay the territory of Scythia, inhabited by nomadic horse-people which were infamous for letting their women fight and hunt alongside the men. To the patriarchal Greeks, this was a scandalous idea that gave rise to the legends of the Amazon warriors. Though these legends were often fanciful and greatly exaggerated, Deianeira does not ill suit the stories. Her name means “man-destroyer”, and it was given to her by a Greek lanista who bought her for his gladiator school after she was taken as a slave. Deianeira is hesitant to talk about the events that led to her capture, but despite her seemingly kind and curious demeanour, it is clear that the warrior woman harbors a deep vengeful anger. May all the gods help those who stand in her way when she eventually choose to act on it. When you meet her, Deianeira has been trained as a gladiator. While her people are famous for their horseback archery, she now favours the spear and shield of a Princeps. When you begin the sprawling 70+ hour story of Expeditions: Rome, you will have a chance to delve much more deeply into the personality and background of each of these characters. In addition to the problems that haunt them, they all have important parts to play in your personal quest for justice. Together, you will eventually determine the fate of the republic. A mere DevDiary cannot do justice to the depth and breadth of these characters. Be sure to keep an eye on our social media to catch all of our companion trailers, and remember to join us on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel this Wednesday January 12th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT on http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. Once again, Senior Producer Brad Logston will host Creative Director Jonas Wæver and Lead Narrative Designer Fasih Sayin to talk about the companion characters of Expeditions: Rome, and everything that went into bringing them to life. We know you have questions about romancing them, and since we didn’t have time to write about that in this diary, the stream is your chance to get answers! Until then, Valete! View full article

Ave and happy new year! Although the Logic Artists office has been closed between Christmas and the new year, several members of the team have enjoyed hanging out on our Discord server to chat with all of you who are eagerly awaiting our fast approaching release date. We’ve also been monitoring the Steam forum to see what you guys thought of the demo, and the reception has been heartwarming. It’s truly wonderful to see how much you loved what we showed you of the game, and if possible, we’re now even more hyped about releasing Expeditions: Rome to the world on the 20th of January (this month!) so you can all get to experience it for yourselves. Today’s dev diary follows up on our diary from just before Christmas, which laid out how we go about designing a good combat encounter. This week we’re going to talk about how the AI has been designed. Every game is a unique challenge when it comes to AI, and turn-based tactics offer a particularly exciting type of challenge. On the plus side, enemies don’t have to make split-second decisions because of the nature of a turn-based combat system, which means the AI can make more involved or complex calculations. On the other hand, the player has unlimited time to consider their actions and attempt to predict what the AI will do on its turn, so the AI must be quite clever and somewhat predictable without being fully deterministic. The most important rule when designing AI for games is that the enemies shouldn’t play optimally all the time, but rather they should behave in a way that creates fun gameplay. It’s very easy for us to make the AI never make any mistakes – never step on your caltrops, never walk into your fire, never shoot your shield with their archers, never provoke attack of opportunity, never let themselves be flanked, etc. That won’t make for a fun game though: if you surround an archer with melee enemies, the smart play for the enemy might be to simply skip that archer’s turn, but that will just seem like a glitch. Having that enemy archer try to shoot you, only to get spectacularly skewered from three different sides is much more satisfying. To this end we have a “mistake probability” value baked into our AI, which is tied to our “AI Difficulty” slider in the options. On higher difficulties, AI will be much less likely to make mistakes, which can feel unsatisfying as certain tactics or skills become more about denying options to the AI rather than provoking and exploiting its mistakes, but does make the game significantly more challenging. The AI Difficulty setting also has more subtle effects, such as determining how good the AI is at maneuvering past your front line to reach your healer or your archer, or how often they’ll choose to focus their attacks on one specific unit on your team rather than spread out their damage. On the maximum setting, all bets are off as the AI does its level best to kill you, and we even give it a few extra advantages on this level such as extra movement for its melee units so they can maneuver more freely, or a small bump to enemy resistance stats to make flanking more important. Movement in general is the foundation of good AI in a turn-based game – especially one that takes place on a grid. If the AI can’t reach you, they won’t be able to use their clever tactics. To this end, we have fixed a few of the big problems with the AI in Expeditions: Viking. First off, if you create a bottleneck by blocking off a choke point on the map, the AI would naturally attempt to find a different path which could potentially send it all the way around the level to get you. Now, this only happens if the AI can tell that it’ll be able to reach its target within a few turns. Otherwise it’ll find cover near the chokepoint and wait its turn, or even withdraw its own unit blocking the way, so another unit with higher damage potential can reach its target. Once the AI is where it wants to be, the question is what it should do. Our combat designer has carefully designed which skills each enemy unit has, in order to create maximum tactical variation over the course of the game as you encounter different cultures and the complexity of the game ramps up. Some enemies have skills that are not even available to the player, which makes them much more interesting to fight. Every single ability that the AI has access to is associated with its own AI tactic that defines when, where, and how that ability should be unleashed. On top of this, there are general tactics available to the AI that help it coordinate between its multiple units, to ensure that the units move in the right sequence and get out of each other’s way. To help you understand what the AI is up to, we’ve added a lot of combat one-liners. Most are related to specific events, such as morale failure, group movement, or flanking maneuvers. Some communicate the state of the AI, such as “defensive strategy” one-liners where enemy leaders order their subordinates to seek cover and stay put, forcing you to advance upon their position if that’s what the mission calls for. Some one-liners are even specific to a particular skill, such as when enemy heavy infantry uses Hunker Down to make themselves impervious to attacks from the front, or when enemy archers use Interrupt to nock an arrow and shoot the first of your units that enters their field of view. Not only does this help you understand the AI’s behavior, but it also adds a lot of personality and intensity to combat. We’re very proud of how much the AI in Expeditions: Rome has improved compared to Viking. Our AI programmer has been hard at working over the holiday, polishing and improving the AI based on your demo feedback, but since the demo is limited to the prologue of the game, where the AI has access to very few tools in order to ease you into the gameplay, you’ve only seen a small fraction of what the AI can do once the training wheels are off. We can barely wait for you to get your hands on the full game and see for yourselves. There you have it! Short but sweet. Please join our DevStream on Twitch this Wednesday, January 5th on http://twitch.tv/thqnordic at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMTfor more discussion about the AI in Expeditions: Rome and how it was designed. Senior Producer Brad Logston will be joined by Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer, we’ll show off some more gameplay, and we’ll answer any questions you might have. Until then, Valete! View full article

Ave, and welcome to our lucky 13th DevDiary. It’s been a very big week for us since diary 12 just last week – you’ll notice the schedule has sped up now that we’re getting closer to release. The Christmas break will put the brakes on that for a few weeks, but we wanted to be sure to get one more DevDiary out before the holidays seeing as how we just released our public demo of Expeditions: Rome. That’s right! If you haven’t already, you should immediately proceed over to Steam to download our demo and give the game a spin. It’s a frankly huge demo, letting you play the first 4-6 hours of the game – just enough to get you out of the tutorial and through 6-7 combat encounters, meet the main cast, get a glimpse at the outpost upgrades and customisation, and even try a legion battle. If you like it all, there is a handy Buy Now button for pre-ordering the game right there in the main menu. This isn’t an ad break though, so let’s get to today’s topic: level design. Or as we call it: world-building. Why the distinction? To us, the physical space that you get to visit in our games must feel like a real place where people live. It’s important to us that every level/instance/map/area/location feels hand-crafted and lovingly filled with personality and story. This can sometimes be at odds with the need to make our levels facilitate tactically interesting combat, but in Expeditions: Rome we hope we’ve mastered that challenge. In Expeditions, every new level begins with a narrative context. Even a random encounter level or a purely combat-focused so-called “pacification quest” level will have some snippet of story associated with it that helps guide the creativity of the world builder. This isn’t just about placing the level geographically so the environment artists will know what kind of nature or architecture to sculpt. At the earliest stage it’s just as much about creating a feeling in the player. A bustling overpopulated metropolis on the banks of the Nile will need a very different layout than a small quiet fishing village on the coast of the Sea of Marmara. This nebulous yet crucial idea of “feel” will also inform the combat design in important ways. Overwhelming the player with the size and freedom of choice of a wide-open battlefield, or making them feel claustrophobic and limited in a smaller room, are important ways to sell the fantasy of a particular scene. A mix of open spaces with narrow corridors and chokepoints creates variation between encounters and gives the player a choice of fighting somewhere that fits their tactical play style. No design choice is purely about gameplay in a game as story-driven as Rome, but the gameplay is generally the most important aspect of level design. Pathing choices is one of the driving factors when setting up an encounter area: by placing small islands of obstacles in an open space, we create smaller paths that lead to the same area. When faced with multiple paths, the player begins to think about why they should go left or right. That choice can be based on enemy positioning, what cover is provided along either path, or if one path is slightly longer than the other. Conversely, an open space gives the player more freedom to manoeuvre around enemies, but also makes it more difficult to control enemy movement and positioning. Height differences have also been a huge focus for us this time around. Encounters in Expeditions: Viking usually took place on flat planes, and several mechanics in the game were designed around that relatively 2-dimensional landscape. In Rome, we wanted to use elevation better, which involved redesigning ranged attacks to use a real line-of-sight check and giving archers a bonus to their range from high ground. The most important piece of that puzzle was to make sure the levels themselves offered high ground and permitted vertical movement. Designing levels with plenty of vertical elements such as cliffs or scaffolds creates a height difference that separates hexes from each other by their edges instead of needing to place an empty hex between them. This is another, different form of pathing choice. A landscape with a lot of verticality will block the player’s vision and occasionally force the player to rotate the camera to see the encounter area from a different angle, which gives the player new ideas for how they could approach a problem they’re trying to solve. We also added new ways to traverse those new obstacles, in the form of ladders and jump points. Using a ladder as a shortcut while another character flanks around makes you feel smart, as does spotting a jump point to get quickly from an elevated platform to a lower position. Not only does jumping off a cliff look and feel cool, it connects the different paths of an encounter area in interesting ways since you can typically only jump in one direction (thanks gravity). Traversal isn’t the only way to interact with the environment, however. We’ve also implemented a host of new combat objects to use during an encounter. Many combat objects allow you to pick up tactical items just until the end of combat, such as torches from a bonfire, water from a well, or bandages from a medicine box. Other objects can change the battlefield if damaged, such as oil jars which can make someone’s day a lot worse if targeted with a fire arrow. As described in previous DevDiaries, we’re extremely proud of our combat system, our character classes, our weapon skills, and all the other mechanics and features that underpin the tactical puzzle of combat in Expeditions: Rome. But all that work would have been all but wasted without the carefully hand-crafted combat encounters and the incredible attention to detail in our level design in general. To finish this diary, let’s look at how all these considerations come into play in a particular encounter: the Lion Hunters of Memphis. The context of this fight is simple: the temple of the cat-headed goddess Ubaste has asked you to free a small pride of lions that have been captured and brought into Memphis for use in the arena. The lions are held in cages in a compound used by the hunters that caught them. The compound is a group of buildings surrounding a courtyard that forms the combat area, though it also spills out into the surrounding streets. The intention here is to create a sense that you’re breaching a guarded compound like some kind of SWAT team of antiquity. To this end, the compound has three entrances, and your preparation area at the beginning of the fight will depend on which door you enter through. Because hunters and bows are tightly connected, the lion hunters have four archers, which are posted on the rooftops of four different buildings to give them height advantage. Because they can see almost every part of the encounter area from up there, the player will want to remove them from the fight as early as possible, but may be forced to split up their praetorians to achieve this, which could put them at great risk. The enemies that start in the courtyard are mostly militia, but with two Light Infantry characters thrown in – these are fragile but mobile high-damage dealers. Prioritising whether to lock down the archers or neutralise those light infantrymen first is an interesting tactical choice, and the difficulty of either option varies hugely based on the class composition of your own party as well as which entry point you chose. What makes this fight particularly exciting is how it evolves over time. Two more light infantrymen are positioned around the back of the large building, at such a distance to the courtyard that they will tend to arrive 2-3 turns into the fight, which may force the player to reposition. Even more threatening, two pairs of Egyptian soldiers are standing down the street on either side of the compound. When the fight breaks out, nearby civilians will run to alert them. These are much more formidable foes, two of them wielding shields, and they will join the fight a few turns after those two light infantrymen. As a final wrinkle, several interactive combat objects are placed in the encounter area: a well in the middle of the courtyard offers water jugs, a barrel of javelins await on a rooftop, and a crate of oil jars sits beside a box of bandages around the back of the building. The enemies can make use of these items just as well as you can, so controlling access to them can be vital on higher difficulties. Hopefully you can see how the layout and enemy placement and behaviour in this fight create a sense that you are raiding a guarded compound in the middle of a well populated city with close rooftops, innocent civilians, and dutiful soldiers on standby to join the fray. It’s a complex and dangerous situation. Contrast this with a different encounter from later in the game, where you attack the command position of the Helvetii chieftain Orgetorix during a battle. Here, your team is starting at the bottom of a wooded hill and forced to fight your way up through Orgetorix’s warriors to engage your target. The elevation serves a very different purpose here, and though you don’t start surrounded and the enemy gets no reinforcements, you are still at a disadvantage – most often in Expeditions: Rome, as in life, the tactical advantage must be won, it is not given freely. This too is a complex and sprawling battlefield with many interesting options and even a choice of how to achieve victory, and thanks to clever level design that has kept the narrative context in mind right from the start, it feels very different to play. But don’t take our word for it. Head on over to Steam and download the Expeditions: Rome public demo. The 7 combat encounters included there should easily be enough to showcase the variety of our gameplay. When you’ve completed the demo, you’ll be well equipped to come and ask us incisive questions or just hang out in our final DevStream of this year, this Wednesday December 22nd on http://twitch.tv/thqnordic at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT. Senior Producer Brad Logston and Creative Director Jonas Wæver and Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer will discuss the intricacies of level design and hand-crafting turn-based combat encounters. Until then, Valete! View full article

Ave! Welcome to DevDiary 12, and this one is going to be special. This week, we’ll be discussing how we’ve collaborated with Twitch extension development expert Muxy to build the most ambitious, expansive Twitch extension to ever exist for any game. This has been an effort that has stretched across many years, with collaborations with many different entities, including some streamers themselves. We’re incredibly excited about sharing these details with you! We’ve spent time with streamers, talking with them about the challenges they have with strategy games. While fun to play, they can be tricky to stream. They are, by nature, more complex, cerebral, and slower than action-oriented titles. By using extensions in daring and new ways, we can both drive more active opportunities for streamers to entertain their audiences as well as reduce the learning curve when audiences tune-in for the first time. For those who don’t know, a Twitch extension is a piece of interactive software built right into Twitch’s video player. Viewers can interact with the Twitch extension like an app on screen. In the case of the Expeditions: Rome extension, it will provide information about the current state of the game while also providing Twitch viewers with unprecedented options to directly affect the state of the game they are watching. From in-game controls and notifications crafted to streamline how streamers interact with their audiences to a laundry list of audience interactions, Rome’s extension leverages years of focus testing, experimentation, and research to create an experience laser focused at transforming how Streamers play strategy games forever. Audiences can directly influence nearly every aspect of gameplay. During Rome’s turn-based combat, audiences can direct AI targets, heal or knock-down both enemy and streamer combatants, re-name units with their TwitchID, set fire to the battlefield, and much much more. Streamers can ask for help or beg for mercy as the audience directly influences how challenging or easy each combat encounter can be at every step of the process. Streamers can also use a variety of interaction options in the RPG dialog system to start a vote in-game on a dialog choice, allow the audience to control a specific dialog decision, or even turn full control over to their audience for all of their roleplaying decisions, all in real-time. The extension is designed with a number of in-game controls to help streamers modify and curate their interactive experiences with their audience so they can pace their streams around what type of moments they want to create. Think the next mission will be tough and don’t want the audience to mess with the integrity of the encounter? Go into the in-game options and disable combat behaviors for a time. Have a tough choice about whether you should sentence a potential traitor to death or spare him for later use? Trigger a vote right in the dialog box to see what the audience thinks before moving forward. Audiences can browse through the streamer’s quest log, inspect their unit’s builds and stats, view the combat log, send care packages… you get the idea. One challenge we had to overcome was how to streamline the way viewers get to leverage the extension. Some of the functionality is by vote, and are free interactions, but some actions are designed to be based on donations to your favorite streamer. With how the Twitch Bit donation process works, it was difficult to tie bit donations directly to actions, as someone could go to heal a combatant, for example, but then never complete the Twitch Bit process and lock out that option for all other viewers indefinitely. To solve this, we introduced a currency called Denarii in the extension. The relationship between Bits and Denarii is 1:1, so each Bit is worth 1 Denarii; we’re not trying to make anything shady here, just streamline the feature usage so that everyone can have the most fun. Viewers can donate some Bits to their favorite streamer for a pocket full of Denarii in the extension, then use that Denarii to play with some of the crazier features within the extension. This gives viewers a fun way to support their favorite streamers and directly interact with them in the game at the same time! We also give complete control to the streamer to set whatever Denarii values they want for any action, so they can customize the experience however they want to fit their audience size. On Wednesday this week, we’ll be announcing when the Beta of this extension will be available for you to try for the first time, among many other exciting announcements (and it’s going to be very soon)! A handful of broadcasters will get a sneak peek of Expeditions: Rome and will also be able to test out the extension with their audiences! If you have a favorite streamer you’d love to get involved, feel free to send them to this link to get them on the list: https://thqn.net/er-krf-dd We couldn’t be more excited for you to experience this labor of love as we look to revolutionize how strategy games are streamed. Internally, we’re already having so much fun testing the extension, and can’t wait to see how you enjoy it too! We hope you tune in to the THQ Nordic Twitch channel Wednesday, December 15th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT on http://twitch.tv/thqnordic, where Senior Producer Brad Logston will be talking with various people involved in the extension project, as well as make some very exciting new announcements that you won’t want to miss. Mark your calendars, and until then, Valete! View full article

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. 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! View full article

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. 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 View full article

Hey Guys! Thomas here, the composer for Expeditions: Rome - I wanted to talk a little about the scoring of Rome, the process, the recording, and some cool and unique things we got to do with this score. We recently recorded the entire score, around 75 minutes so we’re all done, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you guys – I started writing the score in March 2020. It was clear from early conversations with Brad, Jonas and Justin that it’s a hugely complex and challenging game. The initial conversations to do with score were centred around finding the tone for the four distinct regions and also the importance of finding our music for each of the characters we go on the journey with - having spent the last few years writing mostly for film it was pretty interesting transferring that that across to the gaming world. Aside from technicalities (not altering the BPM’s of tracks, and the need for tracks that evolve and don’t get repetitive when playing for hours) I treated it exactly the same as I would any film - I wanted to get under the skin of the characters, learning there life stories, work out why there where they were, and what makes them tick. We decided early on that the player would have their own theme to take them on the journey: something we could morph and twist to fit their journey and that acted as a reference point for the player and evolved with them. I looked at the vivid colours of the game and had a lot of conversations with Jonas about the feel and tone we were going for, and essentially treated it as a film but one with thousands of possible journeys and endings. Our “Player’s Theme” was the starting point for this: it was essentially a suite that I wrote at the beginning containing the player’s theme, and two other themes relating to two other key characters. I’ve shared it below - The “Player’s Theme” was essentially our Rome Tone of the game. There were three other main settings to contend with - Africa, Gaul and Greece - and whilst the player theme pass across these regions, the palettes are extremely different. We did a lot of research on the Ancient instruments used in those times and it was often interesting as there were some instruments that no one knew what they sounded like - or at least everyone had a different opinion. It was so important to us that our score sounded authentic and true to its time whilst trying to take it a step further and really try and add something extra to the players experience. We used a whole host of ancient instruments, including Lyres, Kitharas, Ancient flutes like Neys, Cornus and a Tibia - one of my favourite days on the score was working with Andy Findon - an amazing Flautist but also a specialist in playing any woodwind instrument under the sun, we spent a day recording tens of woodwind instruments and where we couldn’t find one that suited the tone of what we needed, he would invent one with us in the studio! For instance Cleopatra’s theme was originally on a Duduk, but it wasn’t getting the sultry arrogance we needed - so he placed some clingfilm over a wooden flute mouthpiece and it created a very edgy but organic sound and something totally unique to Cleopatra - you can hear it below - The most enjoyable part of the process was the final recordings - we recorded two orchestras, one in Sofia and one In Vienna, and then we had 6 Artists that we choose to represent our characters - on some of bigger battle tracks we ended up with around 140 players on a track, which is quite a sound! The soloists then added the emotion and rawness to ground us in our areas. After all the tracks were mixed, Justin (audio director) and his team have taken them and worked their magic - I’ve been lucky to work with Justin extremely closely over the last year and a half and it’s a treat hearing some of the ways the music has been used. Now I’ll pass it over him to talk a little about his process. Hi Folks! I’m Justin, the Audio Director for Expeditions: Rome. Working with Thomas on the music for the game has been a dream. We’ve worked together on a few other projects before this and while Brad, Jonas and I were forming ideas on what the game would sound like in the early days, Thomas was always in the back in the back of mind as a perfect fit! With a game as deep and vast as this, we wanted to ensure that the music helps set the tone without running away with it or getting boring and repetitive. In the early stages of composition with Thomas we discussed ways in which we could leverage his pieces into different ones, so there was a lot to consider in terms of musicality: keys that complement each other and keeping the BPM consistent across the tracks so we could transition elements and new sections in and out with ease. All of the music and sound has been implemented directly into Unreal. Our talented Audio Designers, Pablo and Anders, have built some incredible systems to manage the sounds of the game in its various states. One of the shining examples of this is the Timesynth system that we use for combat. It allows us to dial the intensity of Thomas’ music up and down depending on certain conditions within an encounter. In this clip, we see Bestia’s dramatic introduction to the game and it’s the first time we have our combat system do its thing, dialling Hostilia straight up to 10 as he makes his entrance. I recorded this myself on my own computer, so forgive the potato quality video - it's all about the music! The system was always in mind as Thomas and I were discussing the combat pieces. He’s done such an awesome job to provide us with a score that’s so versatile. There was also a lot of thought put in to how we properly translate the pieces into the game. This is a score that’s wonderful to listen to by itself, but the combat and siege tracks in particular took some careful planning to ensure we had movements within each piece that we could use in specific ways. We hope you've enjoyed this deep dive into the music and audio of Expeditions: Rome: We have an exciting, special stream this week where Senior Producer Brad Logston will be in the London Studio with Composer Thomas Farnon. We'll be doing a longer stream where we release a new teaser trailer about the music, listen to various tracks on stream, and announce a unique special event that will be super exciting! We hope you join us on Wednesday, November 17th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. Share the word with all your music friends too; this is a unique treat and we hope you tune in for a fun, exciting stream. See you then, Valete! View full article

Ave, and welcome to our ninth DevDiary. If you were expecting something spooky, you’re in the wrong place: Ancient Rome obviously did not observe All Hallows Eve. Come back on December 17 for the Saturnalia. Lately our DevDiaries have been delving into very concrete and specific game systems, with diaries discussing character progression and the specifics of the crafting mechanics. Today we’re going to take a step back from all that and look at a more high-level aspect of our game design: how we strive to support multiple play styles. Different play styles have always been an important part of our game design philosophy, and we consider it one of the most important aspects of roleplaying games – after all, roleplaying shouldn’t just be a matter of what you say, but also what you do. Play styles is a broad topic, and in this DevDiary we will touch on the way roleplaying choices affect the story; we’ll examine how quests can be approached in various ways; and we’ll even look at how difficulty settings change the player experience. Expeditions: Rome has many strategy elements but it is first and foremost a roleplaying game. As we have already discussed, key to the RPG genre is choice and consequence in the narrative, and in Rome you will often get to make important decisions that branch the way the story progresses going forward. One of the major factors we expect to inform your decisions is what kind of legatus you have chosen to play as: are you a ruthless conqueror whose only loyalty is to the might of Rome? Are you a philosopher-general who strives to mitigate the horrors of war and address the needs of Rome’s allies and rivals alike? Are you purely concerned about your own quest for vengeance, or the power and wealth of your family and friends? Most of these roleplaying choices come out during dialogue, but your agency as a player does not just flow from the dialogue system to the combat system. Sometimes you’ll make decisions directly through how you move through the game world. Approaching a combat area from a particular direction may change the objectives of the fight or drastically alter the starting conditions. Interacting with a certain object may unlock new options for you in a given scene. Best of all, even within some combat encounters, there may be multiple ways to win the fight which can change the direction of the story surrounding that fight. A lot of the time this boils down to whether you pick a sneaky and circuitous route or launch a direct assault – and of course different members of your praetorian guard will advocate for different approaches. Let us give you an example from early in the game: in one scene, you and your praetorian party have spearheaded the assault on Mytilene, the enemy stronghold on Lesbos, and you have breached the courtyard where you are ready to confront the Pontic general Archelaus, who you have had a very ill-fated run-in with in the past. Archelaus is surrounded by a large group of his soldiers. As the encounter begins, you are given two objectives: kill Archelaus, or kill enough of his people to make the Greeks surrender. Though Archelaus is a dangerous combatant who is very difficult to take down, it may be faster to kill him than to get bogged down hacking through his guard. However, if you manage to force a surrender, Archelaus can be taken prisoner and may be used as a bargaining chip in a later quest. Either solution is a valid path to victory. Before we move on to the next topic, we should touch on one final way in which your play style can affect the game itself: your character builds. We won’t delve into much detail here since we’ve written much about this in previous DevDiaries – suffice to say that you have many varied options for how to build your characters in terms of picking their class skills when they level-up and outfitting them with certain weapons that offer certain attacks. In addition, you are usually free to bring any combination of characters into a fight, which can drastically change the tactics at your disposal. Do you pack your team with shield-bearing heavy infantry and turtle your way to the enemy lines? Or do you bring archers and skirmishers to hit the enemy with some shock-and-awe? It can be great fun to try the same fight in different ways and see how drastically different things play out. Now, changing the way you play and picking and choosing from the tools available to you during the game is one thing, but there is another, arguably more important factor that will change the way you play the game: which difficulty settings you choose. As with previous games, Expeditions: Rome offers a set of overall difficulty levels, with the option to further customize the challenge of each individual aspect of the game. If you just want a reasonably consistent difficulty, you can simply pick a difficulty level and count on every part of the game mostly matching what you picked. However, if you are for example a turn-based tactics afficionado who wants a steep challenge in combat, but not a big fan of resource management and logistics, you can turn down the Resources and Battles difficulty to reduce the drain on your denarii and manpower while leaving the rest of the settings on higher difficulties. You can even customise what type of difficulty the game offers: say you don’t want combat to be too lethal because it punishes your mistakes too harshly, but you do want the AI to make very few mistakes and generally make the best possible decisions during combat, you can lower the enemy damage slider while raising the AI difficulty slider. Expeditions: Rome is a large and very feature-rich game, and we acknowledge that not every player is equally interested in every aspect of the game. If you just want to breeze through combat but still have difficult choices to make about how and where to spend your resources? More power to you. Undoubtedly the two settings that most significantly change the play experience, and which are therefore presented separately from the general difficulty level, are Combat Death and Iron Man. By default, when one of your people is incapacitated during combat, they will just suffer a long-term wound that must be treated while you travel, but after the fight they will get back on their feet again. Only if you are unable to treat their injuries for lack of medicine or skilled healers, that character may die permanently. However, if you enable Combat Death when you begin the game, characters who go down during a fight will begin to bleed out. You can stabilize them with bandages or certain skills, or even bring them back to their feet if you have a sufficiently high-level medicus on your team, but if you don’t get to them in time, they will perish outright. If a regular praetorian dies, you can replace them, but the death of a companion will result in a game over. Though this is not the default setting, we’ve found that it adds a very exciting element of pressure to combat and tends to result in a lot of nail-biting last-minute-rescues and tough tactical choices, and we strongly recommend that you enable this setting if you are familiar with turn-based combat. Iron Man works a bit differently in Expeditions: Rome than you may be used to from other games. Our Iron Man setting is not about turning Rome into a roguelike – your savegame will not be deleted if you die while this option is on. Instead, it is a way for you to force yourself to live with the consequences of your choices. When Iron Man is enabled, you will be restricted to one single save slot, and that slot is automatically overwritten any time an autosave is made. Thus, you are strictly limited in how far you can turn back time while you play. Usually, once you see the outcome of your decision, your savegame has long since been updated, and you will not be able to go back and undo that choice. This lends a certain weight to your roleplaying choices, and we believe you will find that you are more satisfied with your decisions when you know they cannot be undone. We hope you have enjoyed this little peek into some of our overall design principles when it comes to shaping the different options players have for how to play our games. If you’d like a more concrete demonstration of how these principles can play out in practice, please join us on Wednesday November 3rd, at 1:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. This week we have a special treat for you, as Senior Producer Brad Logston will play through one of the first quests in Expeditions: Rome while Creative Director Jonas Wæver and Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer watch and laugh (and provide incisive commentary). Until then, Valete! View full article

Ave! You have discovered our eighth DevDiary. Last time, we went over all the character progression systems in the game, including how the loot system works – but there was one part of that we didn’t have time to touch on: Crafting. In roleplaying games, there are typically three ways to acquire new equipment: you can loot it off dead enemies, from treasure chests etc., or you can purchase it from a shop with your hard-earned gold, or you can roll up your sleeves and craft it yourself. Each method serves a slightly different purpose: loot drops are rewards for combat or exploration but are typically completely random. Item shops offer you some choice from a randomised menu. Crafting gives you full control over what item you’ll get, but you’ll have to invest resources, time, and effort. We always thought there was too much overlap between these three methods – that the differences between them weren’t quite significant enough to justify their existence. When we were fleshing out the item system in Viking, we wanted to eliminate one of these ways to get items, so your items would only come from two systems. We had to keep loot of course – exploration is a core pillar of our series, and as a viking, why shouldn’t you be able to kill people and take their stuff? This left us with the choice between crafting and item shops, and crafting was clearly the more interesting system: it’s more different from loot drops than item shops are in that it gives the player much more agency with less randomness, and in terms of the fantasy, it felt more right for a viking to forge their own weaponry rather than purchase it from a travelling sword salesman. In Expeditions: Rome, we knew from the start that we wanted to keep crafting, mostly because it gives you – the player – more control over what equipment you’ll have access to. The next question was: how does crafting fit our new player fantasy? This was a question we had to ask with regards to every system in the game, since there is a big difference between being a viking chieftain leading a group of raiders, or a Roman legatus in command of a legion. When it came to crafting, we knew we didn’t want your character to make their own equipment. You’re not a smith, after all, but a patrician – a Roman noble, with access to the resources of the legion. Thus, when you wish to craft an item in Rome, you will visit the legion’s armoury, queue up the items you want, and assign one of your most trusted people to oversee the project. Each item takes a certain amount of in-game time to make, and once the smiths have had time to work their way through your order, you can just come back and collect the whole lot. You can’t just craft whatever you want to craft right from the start of the game, however. First you must learn the techniques involved, in the form of acquiring crafting schematics. Common schematics are found on slain enemies or in chests or crates throughout the game, while more rare schematics can only be acquired if you encounter particular worldmap events or search specific locations. Second, you must of course have the necessary resources. Salvage is dropped as loot or taken as tribute when you are victorious in battle, but you will get most of your salvage by dismantling equipment you don’t need. Since we have no item shops, dismantling is your only way to get rid of unwanted items. Each item type also requires a special material – for example you must have a sword blade to forge a sword, or an armour plate to forge a chest plate. These materials are also acquired by dismantling unwanted items of the corresponding type. One of our main goals has been that crafted items should be the best items in the game. Collecting loot from chests or fallen enemies is something that just sort of happens as you play the game, but crafting takes some time and thought, and so it needs to be worthwhile. As you learn the intricacies of how the item system works, you’ll be able to make full use of the crafting system – and that involves modifying your crafted items to better suit your purposes. Any item can be altered in one of two ways: you can upgrade it to a higher tier, increasing its stats as explained in our previous DevDiary, or you can customise its affixes. When you craft an item, you don’t control which affixes it rolls with. You might be hoping to make a bow that has a bonus to piercing damage, but instead you get increased critical hit chance. In such cases, you can pay some extra resources to swap that crit chance affix for a piercing damage bonus – assuming you have learned how to craft that affix onto your items, that is. But what about those unique items that you receive as quest rewards or find during your travels? Will you have to throw them away when the game’s power curve outgrows them? Not in Expeditions: Rome! Unique items can be dismantled to extract unique crafting materials, which can then be used to reforge the items at a higher tier so you can keep using it if you like how it looks. Dismantling a unique item also automatically teaches you the schematic for how to reforge it. Furthermore, if you don’t care so much for its appearance but you like its unique abilities, you can use its unique material to imbue another item that you craft with its special properties. Sometimes you might even find a unique item as a material that can be used to reforge the item in question. We hinted at this in our DevDiary about side quests – acquiring the schematics that teach you how to reforge such an item can be a small quest unto itself, and those quests are rarely listed in the quest journal. We’re not just throwing all of this at you right from the start of the game. To unlock crafting in the first place, you have to build an armoury in your outpost, and the level of your outpost determines the tier of items you can craft as well. The crafting doesn’t really unlock its full potential until almost half-way through the game, once you’re really familiar with the way combat works and you can be expected to understand what the different affixes might do. Once you unlock the ability to upgrade your favourite items to a higher tier, you really feel that you’ve reached an important threshold in your power progression curve. If you want to learn more about crafting or 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 October 20th, 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 once again host Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer to discuss how crafting fits into the intricate meta systems of Expeditions: Rome. Until then, Valete! View full article

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. 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! View full article

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. 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! View full article

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. 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 4th 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! View full article

Ave! Today we have a special, fun treat for our 4th DevDiary. Up till now, we’ve been talking about game mechanics, story, and characters, but in each of these posts we’ve been showing off cool concept art and beautiful screenshots. For DevDiary 4, we’re going to be focusing on the Visual Style we’ve been building for Expeditions: Rome. Since the game is so big, we’ve decided to focus on the challenges we faced in recreating the environment of North Africa in ancient times specifically. We consider the Expeditions series of games to be a kind of historical fiction in game form - a fictional story and series of unusual dramatic events set within the framework of real-world history. This means that while the narrative and the events of the game can be entirely fictional, we always try to keep it grounded, and if not realistic per se, within the boundaries of historical plausibility. We try to never go too far, too over the top, or create elements that are truly fantastical. This was also the basis for the artistic vision of the game. The previous game in the series ‘Expeditions Viking’ represented a step up in visual quality for us, and when we started work on the project that would become Rome, improving the visuals of the game was on top of our list. The basic overall concept was the same; we wanted to create an exciting and appealing visual representation of the adventures and exploits of legendary generals and explorers, that will be perceived as authentic and immersive, but without being subjugated to absolute historical accuracy. Creating this kind of authentic historical setting in a top-down computer game, which is inherently unrealistic in nature, is a core challenge of working on Expeditions: Rome. Compromises had to be made, but we always aimed at making the visual design naturalistic and grounded - enhanced with a measure of stylization and idealization, but not fantastic exaggeration. Stylized pseudo-realism, if you will. One of the visual aspects that seem quite common in historical games is that they tend to overall not be very visually exciting, but instead rather drab, or even colourless. It is as if visual blandness equals realism, and this is something we wanted to avoid at all costs. We wanted our game world to appear as vibrant and appealing as any fantasy setting; something that will excite and immerse the player and make them want to explore our world. In Expeditions: Viking we were fairly strict about historical accuracy, but in Rome we have loosened up on that a little bit to make room for more of the fantastic and extraordinary. A huge challenge for us was tackling the visual design and presentation of the Northern African region in the game, a sizable part of which is barren desert. One of the risks we faced was that the environment could end up appearing boring and repetitive, and without much color variation or other elements to visually please and excite. This could potentially be very counterproductive to our goals of creating a vibrant world that the player would want to explore and become immersed in. The first stage in this process started with a lengthy period of research, to gain an overview of the North African landscape, it’s flora and fauna, and finding out just how varied and interesting deserts and their surrounding areas can really be. On top of that North Africa was a lot more fertile two thousand years ago, but since there are unfortunately no photos available from that time, we had to rely on written sources and artistic discretion instead. Once we had gathered enough material that we felt we had a good basic overview, we started translating it into simple concept sketches to explore the visual opportunities that the limitations and properties of the natural environment afforded us. We asked ourselves “how much can we push this visually and how interesting and magical can we make it look, while still depicting a believable real-world environment ?” After this initial stage, the next step was designing the specific environments and locations in the game. We realized early on that lighting would be a critical factor and that we could use it to infuse the desert environments with some much needed color, vibrancy and ambience. Levels can be explored at different times of day, and we wanted the lighting to be distinct and to almost transform each level; creating a different visual experience depending on the time of day the player visits it, despite everything else in the level staying the same. This can be directly traced back to the early explorations we did, but revised and refined to find a balance that would work for us. An example a game location is the Court of Heaven, which is an oasis settlement of the Nasamones - a mysterious tribal people, about whom very little is known. This afforded us a lot of freedom in the visual design of the faction and inspired by present day Bedouin and Berber peoples. We settled on a very colorful style which would not only provide an interesting visual contrast to the Romans, but also allow us to infuse their desert settlements with vibrant colors that provide yet another layer of contrast to the natural desert environment. Attempting to create the most exciting and cool visuals, while simultaneously keeping it grounded and authentic is a constant challenge, but it’s one we’ve put a significant amount of effort towards. At the end of the day it is up to the players to judge if we did a good job or not, and we hope that they will enjoy exploring the world that we have created. Love art and want to hear even more? Join us for our fourth DevStream on Wednesday, July 7th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic where Senior Producer will spend the entire stream chatting with Art Director August Hansen about the visuals of the game. We’ll be going into more detail on topics from this Diary, as well as showing off even more art, and possible some sneak preview behind-the-scenes footage captured directly from the art team. And don’t forget, any comments posted here on the DevDiary will always be top of the list for being answered live on stream. We hope you’ve enjoyed this DevDiary on our visual style. We have a super exciting Diary coming up on Music next, which we think you’re REALLY going to love, so get hyped! Until then, Valete! View full article

KnightofPhoenix, we grabbed your question and answered it live on-stream. Posting the time-code to help you find the answer in-case you didn't catch the stream last Wednesday (feel free to re-wind and watch the whole thing too!)

Ave! Welcome to our third DevDiary for Expeditions: Rome. In previous DevDiaries, we’ve laid out the broad strokes of our vision for the game, and we’ve delved into detail about the combat system and given you a hint of the myriad tactical opportunities introduced by our skill and item design. Today, we want to focus on what makes Expeditions: Rome a role-playing game: the story, the characters, and the way you interact with them. The story of Expeditions: Rome is built on three major pillars: its authentic historical setting, deep and compelling characters each with their own personality and agenda, and the choice and consequence that is crucial to the role-playing genre. While the historical setting has provided the foundation for our writing, we’ve introduced our own fictional characters to drive the plot forward, and we’ve put great effort into allowing the player to change the course of history in major ways. To us, history isn’t a set of events that must be experienced the way they actually happened, but rather a backdrop for a complex plot that may borrow countless elements from history but must not be limited by it. The historical backdrop of Expeditions: Rome is, as the name suggests, Ancient Rome – specifically the late Republic, somewhere around the middle of the first century BC. You will be cast in the role of the scion of a patrician family, who are forced to flee Rome when your father dies. Joining the Mithridatic Wars in Greece, led by the Consul of Rome, who happens to be a friend of your family, you quickly rise through the ranks thanks to your military talent and the favour of your powerful patron. As your victory draws near, you will be faced with a momentous choice: secure the evidence you need to take your rivals to trial before the Senate or strike a decisive blow in the war effort that will save the lives of many Roman legionarii. This is just the first of the major choices you will be faced with in the game, which will keep branching the plot and affecting scenes throughout the rest of our story. After the war, you return to Rome to regain control of your family and property. Rome is where you really get to see the effects of your war-time choices, and as the story skips forward in time, the long-term consequences become clear. You will soon find that you have made a powerful and dangerous enemy in a Senator by the name of Vitellius Lurco. This leads us naturally into our second story pillar: the fictional characters we have introduced to drive the plot forward. Vitellius Lurco – your primary antagonist in Rome – is not a real person, but represents an amalgam of many different real-world people who lived at the time. He is a ruthlessly ambitious and frighteningly intelligent man with great plans for the Republic… plans that you are standing in the way of. As our plot begins to diverge more and more from historical events, these changes are driven by his schemes, your own reactions to them, the influence of your friends on those reactions, and the choices you make along the way. A word on those friends. Expeditions: Rome is a party-based RPG, meaning you do not go into combat alone – you fight alongside a group of companions, each of whom has his or her own reason for following you. This is a motley crew, ranging from your old family servant and mentor Syneros, over the freed gladiator slave Bestia Tabat, to the Scythian amazon warrior Deianeira. Every companion has their own part to play in the main story, and they all have their own personal quest to deal with. Sometimes you even get to play as them! And, yes, as many of you have asked: you will have the opportunity to form a romantic relationship with most of them. In addition to these companions, which are critical story characters who stand by your side through thick and thin across the entire span of the story, you will need to recruit legionarii from your legion to fill out your praetorian guard. These praetorians are mainly used in randomised pacification missions where leadership must be delegated to one of your companions (as a legatus, you do not have time to handle every little thing yourself), but they are not just filler – as in previous Expeditions games, every character in your party has a set of personality traits that determines how they feel about your decisions. A Conciliatory character approves of peaceful overtures but responds poorly to aggressive actions. A Hedonistic follower wants you to make time for recreation and revelry and objects when you fail to make time for such needs. The Approval of each praetorian determines their morale in combat, meaning disapproving praetorians may disobey you or be more likely to panic when things go poorly. If you manage to anger a praetorian enough, they will eventually leave you – and the manner in which they leave will depend again on their personality traits. But don’t worry, your closest companions at least will never leave your side, no matter how gravely they disapprove of your actions. Approval is just one of the many ways – large and small – that your choices influence the direction of the story and even of the gameplay. As we set about realising our vision for this grand, sweeping story of Expeditions: Rome, opportunities kept presenting themselves to let you, the player, decide the fates of major characters or the outcomes of missions. To us, the most important thing is that these choices should feel organic rather than contrived, and that they should have major consequences and knock-on effects, both clearly sign-posted and unforeseen. Some choices may seem small and insignificant at first, but then come back to haunt you in surprising ways later. If this seems intimidating to you, rest assured that there is no wrong choice in Expeditions: Rome. There are no perfect endings, nor are there any entirely bad ones. For every character you make an enemy of, another will join your side. We encourage you to make decisions based on what kind of character you want to play, and then see how the story reacts to that and unfolds before you. We hope this has given you some insight into what kind of story we’ve created for you in Expeditions: Rome, and that you’re excited to see what kind of mark you can make on this fascinating corner of history we’ve carved out for you. In a later DevDiary, we’ll go into more detail about the characters you’ll fight besides in Expeditions: Rome, and if you’ll join us for our DevStreams, you’ll gain even more insight into the process of creating this expansive RPG and how we’ve brought our world and our characters to life. In fact, please join us for our third DevStream on Wednesday, June 23rd at 1:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel: http://twitch.tv/thqnordic, where our Senior Producer Brad Logston will be talking with Creative Director Jonas Wæver and Lead Narrative Designer Fasih Sayin about the incredible work of writing Expeditions: Rome. As always, we will take questions directly from this DevDiary to answer on-stream, so be sure to get your questions in early and catch the stream to hear the answers directly from the development team! We hope you’ve enjoyed this third DevDiary and that you’ll join us in a few weeks when we talk about the visuals and art of Rome. Until then, Valete! 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This is freak'n cool! I know August (art director) had a massive collection of reference images for various Roman weapons. Maybe I'll poke him to come over and post his favorite