Listen to Austin read this article with additional commentary! It has a big focus on character creation, class variety, and combat feel, and its secret sauce has always been its pawns , recruitable NPC party members who are borrowed from other players, learn things about the game world while you adventure with them, and then return with that knowledge the next time their player boots the game up.
Caves are gateways to the unknown, places to be explored and mapped and eventually understood. I mean that fundamental scratching of the itch of curiosity. Game development collective The Arcane Kids once wrote that the purpose of gameplay was to hide secrets. And you know, yes, treasure also.
They delimit all those wordsβall that worldβto make something comprehensible, meaningful, and digestible. Yes, the aforementioned caves will show up there after you find them, along with other landmarks, like the riftstones where you can summon new pawns or camp locations, where you can recover HP or change your skills.
Reclusive sorcerers will ask you to find them some key books. Good-hearted knights will ask you to investigate secret communiques and mysterious masquerades. Mercenaries will ask that you point a new recruit in their direction. And then you just gottaβ¦ figure it out. You have toolsβall the tools I mentioned above, along with quest text in the menu that often serves as a sort of narrative clue that will put you in the right direction. You might even find yourself, on a whim, going to talk to an NPC from a different quest line to see if maybe they have something to add to this new questβand you know what, sometimes they do.
Like Record of Lodoss War or Dungeon Meshi , it is unabashedly clear in its inspirations, but never feels like a dull or lazy copy. As the world comes into focus, it feels almost like filling out a Picross puzzle and beginning to recognize a shape. Aha, the valorized knight with a dark secret! It is wholly comfortable in the common tropes of the genre. I mean, shit, this is a game whose elves have a deep cultural relationship with archery, and where one of the most important decisions you can make as an archer is whether to spend your precious few explosive arrows on the current fight.
