Thea 2: The Shattering Q&A Session #2

The team over at MuHa Games has followed up their recent Thea 2: The Shattering-themed Q&A session with a brand new one. This time around, the questions cover the upcoming game’s non-human characters, god traits, character portraits, research tree, and the ability to create multiple settlements. Have a look:

Welcome back! We are pretty surprised that the first Q&A got so much attention. You have asked a lot of questions (some of them even got answered in some form in the latest patch), so let’s pick the next 5!

Q6: In Thea: the Awakening, building with certain materials would give a minor chance of attracting certain types of characters to your village each turn. For example, building with steel provided a minor chance of having an orc join your village each turn. Are there any plans to implement this feature in Thea 2?

At the moment we are not considering implementing the system from T1. We are however looking into various other ways to recruit non-humans, like faction towns where high loyalty allows you to acquire certain people, or god traits that may give you non-human children.

Q7: Are you satisfied with the god traits system and what’s available?

We think the possibility to customise your start and add certain perks is interesting. Unlike the system in Thea 1, it is quite flexible and doesn’t impose perks on you, so you can have a really difficult start if you fancy. We will certainly look into adding more traits to the list and perhaps make some changes to the existing ones to keep balance in check. We want the traits system to offer a nice selection of different starting conditions that would support a number of playstyles.

Q8: Can we have matching character portraits for kids/adults/elders?

As much as we’d like to, this is not really possible due to cost and time constraints. Currently we have 101 human portraits with a matching 3d model for most of them. You would effectively be asking to triple the amount of portraits we’ve got. Though variety is nice, we think our efforts would be better spent in other areas of the game, such as improving gameplay mechanics. Additionally, when proper mod support gets added around the end of the Early Access period, players will be able to make and share their own portrait sets.

Q9: When does proper research get added?

Research tasks will allow you to gain Research Points (RPs) from studying creatures and locations. The idea is that winning challenges with different creatures have a chance to “drop” (albeit not in the form of an item, to not clutter the inventory) some information about the creature you fought. Upon completing each creature entry, your people will be able to perform a research task and get RPs. Islands will have “study spots” where a camped group will be able to do a research task as well. We would like to tie the above with a lore book, where completing each entry would uncover a page telling you more about your discovery. Possibly the feature will also bring researchable bonuses for character classes.

As you can see, the feature is not a small and easy one and some aspects may need to be revised after they get added. It may even be that we will split the implementation into a couple stages. Seeing that we have not yet started implementation, it’s difficult to give a good estimate, especially that we still have a couple other things in the works, plus constant bug fixes.

Q10: Would you potentially allow building multiple villages, or perhaps some type of gathering outpost?

Yes, allowing players to build more than one village is very much our goal and at the moment at least one additional Cosmic Seed (which is required to build it) can be obtained through quests. We do, however, want to avoid having a village every few hexes, Thea is not a Civilization game after all. So the Cosmic Seed will never drop randomly from enemies, rather it will be very rarely awarded in events. A gathering outpost is not really needed since camping groups fulfil exactly this role.