Spearhead Games’ Project Witchstone Looks Interesting
If you’re not familiar with Spearhead Games’ work, do yourself a favour and check out their masterful action RPG Stories: The Path of Destinies; it’s available on GOG and Steam. An Unreal Engine-based game, it’s notable for the variability in its narrative; the story features numerous decision points — hard branches in the narrative tree — and each decision causes pronounced ripples throughout the rest of the game. This gives Stories a significant amount of replayability (and the combat is pretty good, too; fast-paced and mostly intuitive).
And their newly-announced game, currently called Project Witchsstone, sounds like it dials the narrative ripple effect up to eleven (as it were):
Living world:
The world you explore is alive, meaning that characters that inhabit this world go on with their daily lives and move around following a routine (from their workplace to their home, for example). They also own properties, have personalities, friends and enemies, likes and dislikes, appreciation towards you, allegiance to factions, perception of their surroundings, etc.
Sandbox:
Using actions common in RPGs (dialogue, combat, spells, abilities, stat checks, stealing, etc.) and less common ones (stealth, influence interface, etc.), you can interact, manipulate, and shape this world as you see fit. Our goal is to give you the freedom to live the adventure you want. No overarching pre-defined main story thread, you get to decide how you want to proceed.
Want to frame an NPC for theft or murder? Want to join a faction, become their leader, and destroy the other factions? Want to destroy the factions but scheme in a way that they never know you’re responsible? Want to become a treasure hunter instead? Maybe the best solution is to blow everything up?
All of this is possible in our sandbox.
How?
With our systemic approach to narrative, tailored events will occur based on your previous actions. All crimes will result in law enforcement running an investigation and attempting to arrest the suspect. Any violent act committed against a faction will result in retaliation. Taking over someone’s house will work fine until the previous owner’s relatives or friends come to visit.
These are some examples of the ripple effect you can cause in this world. And how you deal with the ripple effect will determine what happens after.
The living world aspects of the game certainly invoke the spectre of Ultima 6 and Ultima 7; fully-scheduled NPCs who carry on about their own lives were a key component of why Britannia felt so “lived in” in those games. Equally, their ambitions for the world go beyond just shopkeepers adhering to a daily routine; Spearhead’s plans for the sandbox aspects of Project Witchstone sound a bit like the Artificial Life engine that was built for Ultima Online (and subsequently scrapped, because it couldn’t keep up with hundreds of players causing havoc in the world).
At any rate, Project Witchstone will be coming to Kickstarter at some point this year. Keep an eye out for it! (And seriously: give Stories: The Path of Destinies a try, if to date you haven’t.)
(Hat tip: Infinitron Dragon)
Hm. Intriguing, but I’ve heard a lot of this before from overly ambitious devs, with way more resources, only to have it all scaled back to something unrecognizable, and largely traditional, later. Still, worth keeping an eye on. I’ll need to see something running before I’d kick in though. Too many Kickstarter tales of woe.
I’m willing to extend a bit more trust to this project based on what I know of the developers from their previous games. And then not previous games as in “we made some games years ago at different companies”; I’ve quite enjoyed the last two RPG titles this studio has put out.
This is it boys, this is definitely the spiritual sequel to Ultima 7 we’ve been waiting for get excited! /s
Should be an interesting project to keep an eye on. Hopefully it’s a story and game world you want to partake in.
Spearhead are good storytellers. Their ability to create branching, engaging narratives is well-enough established at this point.
Thus far, their games have had more linear worlds, so their ability to design a more open world remains unproven. Though I do have some confidence that they can pull it off.
Well this certainly looks a lot more promising the Shroud. I still won’t be Kickstarting it, once burned and all that, but will certainly be keeping an eye out for it once it is released. Thanks for sharing!