Expeditions: Viking Preview

The folks at RPGWatch have published a preview for Expeditions: Viking, based on the time they spent with the game at Gamescom. The presentation left the writer with a wealth of information to share, so I recommend you read the full piece for an overview of the game. A snippet:

Losing in a fight will never end the game. It effects certain types of outcomes, such as whether you win or lose in combat. However, you do sustain injuries, for which you will need healing, but you won’t die just like that. However, untreated injuries will fester and eventually lead to a character’s death. The game ends if the main character dies from his or her wounds.

One of the significant differences between Viking and Conquistador is that you don’t draft your crew at the start of the game. A major part of the first campaign is gathering the crew for your ship. As long as you don’t have a crew or a ship, your village is under constant attack since it is seen as weak. You can collect crew members from the starting village and from your travels through Denmark. The first two people that join you are your two best friends, which you have known for a long time. One of them is a spear-wielding shield maiden, and the other is a hunter with a bow. The advantage of a spear in the game is that you have a longer reach and you can pass one hex, so you hit someone at a two hex distance. You can even go over the head of standing before you, or over defensive formations. In addition, you don’t have any issues with attack of opportunity as that works only for adjacent hexes. You can’t dismiss any of your party members during the first campaign, as they are essential to the narrative.

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Some of the skills that you can use in combat can be quite powerful and will, because of that, be limited to a certain number of uses per combat. One example is quick-shot, which gives a bit of an aim penalty, but if you are close enough that doesn’t matter much. However, the big advantage is that it allows you to shoot twice, instead of just once. When you have selected the type of attack you want to perform, hovering over that opponent will show you how much damage you can expect to deal. You can use this to determine which skill to use for that character and whom to attack in this turn. For more details on combat be sure to check out the video at the end of this article.

Currently there is no friendly fire in the game. It’s being considered, but the devs also want to make sure that playing an archer feels as valuable and useful as any other character. For this they are working on several things. One of them is that when your arrow misses, the character gets a status effect, “harried”, which means the character is unnerved. After all, an arrow just flew by and missed the character by a few inches. The character’s brush with death gives them a bit of a debuff. So, even if you shoot and miss, something comes out of that action.

For a melee character, the game does not have a hit percentage. You hit every time, but the damage you do will vary. If your opponent carries a shield, they have a chance of blocking the attack. If they succeed in blocking the attack, the shield’s durability soaks up the damage. As mentioned, for range attacks you don’t always hit.