Battle Brothers Interview

The upcoming Warriors of the North DLC for Overhype Studios’ strategy RPG Battle Brothers will be going live in roughly a day. And if prior to that you’d like to read about Overhype Studios’ origins, some early and unused ideas for Battle Brothers, a bunch of DLC-related details and more, you should check out this recent Turn Based Lovers interview with Overhype’s managing director Jan Taaks. A couple of sample questions:

When you started working on Battle Brothers, was that exactly how you imagined the final product?

The original concept for the game was vastly different from what we ended up with. The only thing that stayed very close to the original design is the tactical combat. I can give an example of some of the crazy ideas that were flying around back then: With X-com as the mental foundation of the game we started out with the idea of actually fighting aliens in medieval times but the people at that time think of the aliens as creatures from their folklore and fairytales. We dropped that idea at some point and went for a less wild approach to the enemies in the game.

Being too strict with the concepts and mechanics of a game can be a very bad thing in our mind. As a developer staying open to new ideas and being flexible during development is crucial. There are countless bigger and smaller additions and features in the game that we never planned to exist but we implemented them anyways in between our planned features and often on very short notice. A game project is a living, breathing thing that changes during its lifecycle and we try to appreciate that. On top of that, developers should not be afraid of iterations and of rolling back things they once thought of as great ideas. Some things just turn out to not be that great after all and you should not be scared to touch them again for the sake of a better game.

The origins, a new faction, the champions, new legendary locations, new events, new items and much more we will find in the new DLC Warriors of the North. We know that initially, it didn’t have to be so big, what prompted you to do more?

When planning a DLC we start out with a basic idea and then add things around it. We want DLCs to have a certain amount of content to make them actually worth buying and to give the players a good deal and a reason to get them. Some of the new things also just come up as we are working so we never start out with a full feature list but keep adding to it on the go. The Warriors of the North DLC will still be a little bit smaller than the Beasts & Exploration DLC and that is why it will sell at a slightly lower price.