Iron Tower is back with another post with information about their latest RPG project. You can read it here on Steam. While development is still up in the air, thanks to the financial difficulties after releasing Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role Playing Game—things are looking better. The chance of seeing the game actually being made has gone up from 50/50 to 70/30 in their favor. This is good, of course, but it’s not without issues, with the biggest being from a question made by user Frenzin on RPG Codex regarding animations:
The question: “Any chance you guys can implement armor battle damage and gory death animations featuring dismemberment? They make combat feel grounded, and worked amazingly well in Battle Brothers (and the original Fallouts). Plus, they fit the setting and overall vibe you’re going with in this game”.
The answer: “No animations, period. Too costly and take too long. So if we go with animations, we’ll drain the budget much faster and will have 6 creatures tops. Without animations, we can easily have 30.
Armor battle damage—it’s doable but still expensive and time-consuming. It’s either high quality texture work (but I doubt it would suffice) or different armor model variations (plus unique textures). So do we spend time and money to create 3 variations of each armor (new, damaged, badly damaged) or go for more armor sets? Yes, it worked amazingly well in BB (2D has a clearly advantage here), but BB also had a truckload of different armor (well over 60 iirc)”.
Oh boy, I understand the added workload being a pain in the behind if you are already strained for resources, but zero animations—in a fully 3D game? I don’t know if this will be viable. Battle Brothers had a minimum of animations, but even here it added so much to making the battlefield feel lively. And we are talking about a 2D game here, where the boardgame aesthetics is ingrained into the visual style. Heralds of the Third Apocalypse will not have that advantage, going by the looks of the newly released screenshots. It has a certain fidelity, where one would expect having animations—maybe not the fanciest, but something to make the battlefield come alive. It’s going to be interesting to see how this evolves during the coming months.
I also managed to get a question answered, but that was over at Steam. I asked if we were going to have some kind of base to manage, like in X-com, and if missions are going to be randomly generated. I got this in response: “The overall design will be similar to Battle Brothers. No base to build and manage, your warband will be working for one of the three main cities, the main questlines (the main quest and anything related to the long dead sorcerer-kings) will be hand-crafted, contracts will be procedurally generated”.
Make sure to head over to the post on Steam, to check for more questions, and the thread over at RPG Codex, if you want more information! They are answering a lot of questions about their upcoming game.
– Thomas
Tom's Gaming Vault 