Children of War: Blood and Snow Interview

N4G’s user Cat has published a two-part interview with Shadowforge’s Ryan Lamb on the studio’s open-world co-operative RPG Children of War: Blood and Snow, which is currently seeking funding via a Kickstarter campaign, but so far only managed to raise 1/5th of its funding goal. Here’s a snippet:

Cat: You got me with some keywords: discovery and exploration. Tell me more about this 20km x 20km of environment, what can we expect?

RL: We love story line and character development but we also love player freedom. We figured, why not combine the two into one experience? While our story line quests are definitely a guided experience, designed to tell a story, describe lore and give a cinematic experience, we didn’t want the whole game to be scripted. We certainly didn’t want the players to feel suffocated by our constraints and so we decided to allow players to wander from the main story line and create their own stories through their own unique experiences. As mentioned above, that 20 km x 20 km space is filled with caves, dungeons, wandering characters, relics and landmarks that all tell their own stories, disconnected from the main story. This will allow the player to have epic experiences that other players may or may not ever see! It sets the conditions for individualized adventure. We think that’s pretty awesome.

Cat: Talk a bit about single player vs co-op.

RL: The game is being designed to scale with party size so that a player who prefers to play solo can have just as good of an experience as the team-oriented players and also so that anyone can jump back into their game without having to worry about whether or not their friends can play. Rewards will be scaled too and this will factor fairly for both types of players because of how we handle statistics. Gear can be deconstructed and the points in that gear redistributed to other gear. This allows the player to keep any gear they like the look of while upgrading stats to keep up with level. It also means that even with slightly lesser rewards for solo players, that it takes them a bit longer but that they can obtain the same level of gear as team-based players. Fair for all! As far as questing together goes, we’re all about freedom and chaos and so as the dialogue system currently sits, whenever a choice has to be made in quest dialogue, the engine makes a virtual dice role to determine who gets to make the decision and everyone in the party has to live with that decision. This stems from our background playing tabletop RPGs like D&D and the amazing, frustrating, humorous and exciting experience of having to live with the decisions of your party members, whether you like them or not.

Cat: Blood and Snow is a class-less system with a flat ability tree, can you explain your vision?

RL: We want players to be able to access all abilities from the start of play. Progression trees make sense in some games and they can work well but with our overall philosophy of choice and experimentation we didn’t want to constrain the player to our pre-determined set of skills. We built the system instead so that a player can mix melee, ranged, buffing, healing or whatever types of abilities they want and then level and change those individual skills within their own trees. Skills are contextually leveled so the more you use them, the more power they gain. And you won’t be stuck at a certain level with the skills if you choose not to evolve them. The points that you put into your abilities determine the way they work rather than how much damage they do.