War of the Vikings hands-on
While the tireless workers of Gamescom were still preparing the Koeln-messe for this year’s event, Francesco and I attended a behind closed doors (BCD) presentation of War of the Vikings, the recently announced new entry in the “War of” series published by Paradox Interactive.
If you have played War Of The Roses, you will probably feel right at home with the mechanics featured in War of the Vikings, since the game is a direct evolution of its predecessor. A big difference, of course, is brought by the new setting: this time, instead of Lancaster vs Yorke, we get to choose between Vikings and Saxons, during the invasion of Britain. More importantly though, this means that technology is way less advanced than it was in the previous game: no crossbows, no horses (there might have been a few knights among Saxons, but it just wasn’t common at that time), and the result is a more visceral, melee focused action, which is perhaps exactly what Fatshark wanted.
The map available in this early build was a small arena (the full game will support up to 16 players in smaller maps and 64 in the larger ones, though) and unfortunately, we were limited to fight 1vs1 against each other in a high-ping situation, which is perhaps the worst possible condition to assess the quality of a CQC game. However, we were able to test some new features introduced by the developers: dodge and special attacks. Dodge, performed by pressing the ‘Alt‘ button combined with directional arrows, allows players to avoid enemy attack - or rather, to try.
In fact, dodging doesn’t yield any kind of invulnerability and as such, choosing the right moment to dodge is of paramount importance - especially since Executive Producer Gordon Van Dyke actually explained that if a player is hit while dodging, the damage received could actually be increased because of the momentum involved in the move; it’s definitely a nice touch and it shows that the development team isn’t just blindly copying features from other games, instead trying to give their own spin after careful analysis.
The other main addition is that of special attacks - each class has a different one, and it’s always executed with the F button by default. Right now it looks like a successful special attack almost always means instant death for the attacked player; however, performing a special attack isn’t simple at all and if you aren’t perfect you’ll miss the target and become exposed to counter attack. There are three different classes that can be summarized as: one handed+shield, two-handed and the ranged class. The approach of each class is uniquely different from the others and our feedback so far is positive, although we tested them in an extremely early build. In the full game it will be also possible to select a few different perks, but they were all locked for the time being.
After the brief hands-on session we managed to ask Van Dyke a few questions. He explained that while the team size is quite small, they want to continue supporting War of the Roses (which recently had a spike in player population) with bug fixes and tweaks; War of the Vikings will have many additions post-launch, just like War of the Roses did. We also inquired about the release of modding tools, and he answered that they are considering it, but the tools need to be mature enough before they can be handed over to players; nonetheless, they are open to the idea.
Of course, the topic of the year is the upcoming release of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, however presently Fatshark is focused on getting the game out for PC. As we reported earlier, a future launch on PS4 is much more likely. Lastly I asked if they ever considered to give players the option to play in first person view, and the answer was that they have been looking at it and are still researching the possibility, but it needs to be done perfectly or else it could screw up the entire gameplay feeling.
Overall, War of the Vikings seems an improvement over the already good War of the Roses game; we’ll have more as the game approaches its launch frame (Paradox is targeting Q1 2014), anyway for those who can’t wait I’ll add that owners of War of the Roses already have access to War of the Vikings alpha on Steam.