Interviews// War for the Overworld

SPOnG: What is the structure of the campaign mode? How is progress communicated to the player?

SR: The intention is to have a linear progression, with a couple of little mini branches along the way. It's meant to be quite goal-driven as it's meant to direct the player through all these new features as they discover them. They need to come out the other end having a good understanding of how to use these features. They can then go into skirmish multiplayer and sandbox mode; all of these things we are playing with.


SPOnG: There is the perception that it is a multiplayer focused game, is that fair?

SR: Within our team there are people from different walks of life in terms of how they like to play War for the Overworld. I always like to play the single-player campaign, whereas members of the team are really into the multiplayer. So the intention here is to try and balance this out; we don't want one mode of play to override the other.

LM: We almost get a 50/50 split in the community about this. Whenever I demo it I get people saying 'oh, everybody expects this game to be single-player experience' when there's others who say multiplayer is king. It's going to be tough to balance, but I believe we can do it.


SPOnG: So in War for the Overworld the most powerful foe would be, like, 10 paladins?

SR: In the single-player campaign we do have big bosses down the road. There will be some named heroes, so it's not just going to be different units and different sizes. We don't want to give too much away, but it's the same thing but with a different flavour.

LM: What we want to have in the single-player campaign is to offer something new to the player and a new challenge to overcome. In the campaign level, you mentioned boss monsters. We have a knight who is a lord of the land above the dungeon and he is a very strong hero and is going to be very tough to take down. So that is one boss, there are other bosses such as rival underlords that the player has to kill.


SPOnG:Just to be clear, the player does not control anything directly, they are mere ordering units to go to do things or to move to places in the dungeon.

SR: There is this spell called possession, which gives you basically direct access to units while looking through their eyes. That's typically not a spell you'd use to turn the tide, so yes typically you are directing units. You do have to be mindful of creatures' emotions as they won't do as they're told if they are not happy or scared for some reason.


SPOnG: The art style is very unique, it's very gothic and that sort of thing - you appear to have been working on this aspect of War for the Overworld for quite some time judging by the latest build.

LM: I'd say we have an incredibly talented team of artists and I think it's [the art] always been excellent and the community has helped with their feedback, and that has determined how we have progressed forwards. War for the Overworld is dark and it is grungy but every single rune, for example, has a very unique appearance and that's what we want, we want everything to appear unique and special to give it that extra flavour and the appearance will make War for the Overworld look great. We've not gone for anything too cartoony, but we do have humour elements thrown in, in the design at certain points.

SR: Just going back to the art style, we've really been tightening up the bolts on that right up to the end to give it a more cohesive look and I think we're almost there. Yes there are a few bits and pieces to do, but I think we're pretty much there.


SPOnG: War for the Overworld is out on all three computing platforms, i.e. PC, Mac and Linux. Are there any plans for controller support?

SR: We have tried it with the Steam controller via the prototype and we do think it's something we could add into War for the Overworld.

LM: We have had it running on Windows Surface Pro tablet and it does almost work. So if we needed to tweak it in certain ways we could get it onto tablets. I don't think we have any plans for that though.

I can say the full release of War for the Overworld in February 2015 will not be the end. We have a lot of ideas on how to progress War for the Overworld in the future. It all depends on how successful it is, but we're very eager to do more.

SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time!