THQN Brad

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

Ave! Welcome to our second DevDiary for Expeditions: Rome. In our previous DevDiary (link here), we covered the vision for Rome and what the game is about overall. We also discussed this live in our first DevStream which you can watch a replay of here (link here). For DevDiary 2, we’re going to get a little more specific and take a deep dive into our core combat system. So gear up and let’s get started! Combat in Expeditions: Rome is predominantly expressed through turn-based tactical gameplay. While the legions fight the bigger battles for you on the world map, you and your elite team of praetorians will engage in tactical close-quarters fights on a hex-grid layout using a variety of skills and items. Let’s start with the basics: Turn-based combat starts when you encounter enemies, so you can explore the area in real-time after any fight, and often before a fight begins as well. Once a fight starts, the very first turn of combat is what we call the preparation phase, where you can strategize and position each of your combatants on the hexes that are available before initiating combat. Once you’ve chosen where your characters will start, it’s time to get into the fight. During combat, you can move each character, activate skills, and use any tactical items you have equipped. The amount of movement a character can make is based on how much armor they’re wearing, which grants them a certain number of movement points. If a character wants to move farther, they may have to sacrifice their ability to take certain actions. Most character actions are executed via skills that are made available by either their weapon or their class. Unlike our previous Expeditions games, we no longer have basic “white” attacks. Instead, every attack is executed through a skill, and each weapon has a collection of skills it can roll with. This means that you can acquire two different Gladiuses, for example, and the skills available can be completely different, providing a ton of variety. Additionally, class skills are unlocked through each character’s skill tree by spending skill points after leveling up. With each class having three distinctly different skill trees, there is a wide variety of active and passive skills to experiment with. We’ll talk more about all of the skills and classes in a different diary, but it’s important to understand the basics here to provide context for how core combat functions. Each character can equip a set of weapon and class skills based on what’s available to them, and these skills determine which actions they can use in combat. These actions, in turn, have many different synergy opportunities that bring out the tactical diversity of our combat system. For a more specific example: the Sagittarius class is a ranged-combat class, and there is a class skill in the sniper tree called “Ranging Shot,” where a Sagittarius can apply the status effect “spotted” to a small group of clustered enemies, eliminating the damage drop-off that takes place when executing ranged attacks at long distances. This is an early skill for archers and can be super useful when keeping your ranged combatants at a long distance without reducing their damage potential. This does, however, require the archer to setup their targets a turn early, as “Ranging Shot” does cost an action point. In other words, it takes two turns before the archer can start dealing that full damage. Where it gets really interesting is if you find a bow with the skill Overdrawn Shot, which guarantees a critical hit but reduces your range by 50% - if you’re using Overdrawn Shot to hit a “spotted” target, that penalty is negated. However, you might run into a melee pike weapon usable by the Triarius class that rolls with the weapon skill “Marking Strike,” which does a decent amount of piercing damage, but also applies the “spotted” status effect to a single target. This opens up new options – instead of having to use “Ranging Shot” as a debuff action before being able to apply the full damage of your long-distance archer, you could now move up a character with the “Marking Strike” skill equipped, do a one-two punch with “Marking Strike” to soften up the enemy first and apply the “spotted” status effect, and then use Overdrawn Shot with the archer at range, guaranteeing a critical hit at full strength, all in one turn! This is just one of countless ways different skills can be combined together to open up limitless tactical options. Another critical component of core combat is shields, which can only be used by the Princeps class. Shields are an off-hand weapon that provide an additional pool of health to the character using it. When a shielded character is attacked, damage is applied to the shield first, unless the skill used has a special modifier that ignores shields. Shielded characters also cannot take damage from archers until the shield is depleted, making them critical for the front line. When a turn begins, shields automatically recover some of their hitpoints, serving as an automatic source of regenerating defense. Shields also have skills that can be used, like buffs that can increase the total hitpoint pool of the shield for the rest of the fight, or even attacks that use the shield as a weapon to do damage and apply different status effects. We hope you can start getting the picture here, where options of moving up defensive or offensive built Princeps can change how other characters work together with those skills. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to core combat - there’s way too much to discuss in one DevDiary, and some of it we’re excited about you discovering on your own! We haven’t even touched on the two tactical item slots every character has, which allow them to expand their tactical options even further. The layout of our hand-crafted combat spaces also play a huge role in combat, including how characters can use cover to reduce their exposure to ranged attacks or exploit choke points to keep more vulnerable characters protected behind a tanky, shield-bearing Princeps. Don’t worry though, we’ll continue to share more of these details in future DevDiaries, and if you join us for our DevStreams, you may get some sneak previews at some of these features when we show off the game. Speaking of DevStreams, we hope you’ll join us for our second DevStream coming up on Wednesday June 2nd 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 Combat Designer Hans Emil Hoppe Rauer to chat about core combat in real-time. We’ll also be taking questions directly from this DevDiary and answering them on-stream, so get your questions in early and tune-in to hear the answers directly from the development team! We hope you’ve enjoyed this second DevDiary and hope you’ll join us in a few weeks when we’ll change gears and open up the book on our game’s story. Mark your calendars, that’ll be dropping on June 21st. Until then, Vale! View full article