War of the Vikings Interview with Gordon Van Dyke

Last week, we posted an excerpt of our interview with Gordon Van Dyke, Executive Producer at Paradox for War of the Vikings. Today we present you the full chat, with some questions and answers that should hopefully shed some light for the game’s balance and future. Stay tuned for our review of War of the Vikings, which officially launched yesterday on Steam.

• Will there be enhanced camera modes, such as a free view spectator mode? Users are reporting that the viewing accessibility is a bit limited at the moment to make videos of the game.

We’re looking into adding freecam to Observer Mode. This should happen sometime post release.

 

• Is there any chance for you to add a first person view into War of the Vikings? I remember asking during Gamescom 2012, and I was told it was being considered.

We tried this out, but it just didn’t work and broke all our physics and animations.

 

• Some players are reporting that special animations, while cool looking, are also a nuisance in that they freeze the character until the animation ends. Do you plan to change this or is it working as intended?

This is as designed; to make them powerful they also needed an appropriate penalty for missing otherwise the game turned into War of the Special Move. ;-)

 

• Speaking of variety, players would like to see some different attributes/stats between weapons, as right now there is none. Did you think about this already?

Our game is so dependent on skill as the deciding factor adding buffs to weapons proved to only give a bigger advantage to those that already had one in the form of skill.  The cosmetic only aspect also stayed more true to the time period of Viking Age where weapons were all pretty much the same and those more successful in battle had the more exotic or attractive weapons and gear.

 

• For a multiplayer game, it would be very useful to let players create their own maps with modding tools. Are you willing to release them at some point?

This is something we’re seriously looking into since the engine we use will start supporting this, but we can’t promise anything at this point other than we back the idea of adding user generated content into War of the Vikings.

 

• Many games have been choosing the free-to-play model lately, in order to increase the playerbase. Is there a chance for War of the Vikings to go F2P?

There are no plans to go Free2Play with War of the Vikings.

 

• Also, during Gamescom 2012 I asked you about potential ports on PS4 & Xbox One, and I was told they would be considered at a later point. Is there any news on this regard?

We’ve investigated this a lot more now that the game engine we’re built on supports the latest gen of console and it does look possible, but nothing has been committed to at this point.

 

• Is there anything you’d like to add about War of the Vikings and its future?

Paradox is behind War of the Vikings for the long term.  We intentionally built the game and set hardware minimums for a 5 year cycle of updating if demand was there.  We truly want this game to grow into the best Viking Age game that has ever been made!

 

• Thank you for your time!