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[Purkake4]

New interview, here's a snippet:

EM: I’m curious about your take on stats versus storytelling and how you see the two as connecting. You’ve mentioned that the game has 24 skills and 4 attributes, noting impacts on the playing experience. If a player starts down a specific path, does it become difficult to ‘change lanes’, and to what extent are players rewarded for consistently maintaining a particular ethic?

NTWTF: In terms of classic RPG dichotomies, there are no lanes to follow in No Truce, no paragon or renegade archetypes to choose between. Instead, the skills and their influence on the plot form a complex interwoven structure, revealing different aspects of the plot and the world as you play. Some of these might even be contradictory, resulting in straight up cognitive dissonance in your character. You can build a really schizophrenic type, whose skills start arguing against each other and vying for the player’s attention.

However, there are more concrete archetypes you can settle into if you wish. We have political leanings in the game – you can be a hard core nationalist, a communist, a “radically centrist” neoliberal we call moralist. O ye boring person of meager soul, raise high the moralist flag of signal blue!

While playing the game, you get these little snippets of choice where you can demonstrate your leanings, and, as the game goes on, you get associated Thought Cabinet projects to ruminate over your ideology and get the relevant skill bonuses. And if you really fly the flag, you can do a kind of a vision quest for your ideology to cement your beliefs. This might involve having a fevered conversation with the broken down statue of one of the old Philippian monarchs, sword in hand. Or it might not! Design in process.

(Insert more money for awesome political vision quests)

 

[Arulan]

EM: You’ve spoken in other interviews to the fact that details and personal connections bring worlds to life. NTWTF celebrates the unique, multi-millenia timelines of numerous civilizations; here on present-day Earth, many people remember the Roman Empire by way of togas and cool architecture, much as they remember the ’80s via Deloreans, Moon Boots, and He-Man. For the game universe, how large is this role of inherited memory, and what kinds of influence do you see its minutiae exercising?

NTWTF: These elements permeate society in No Truce With The The Furies. People wear belt buckles with ornate lung designs as a reference to Innocence Dolores Dei, a benevolent maternal zeitgeist-defining semi-religious figure who lived some centuries ago.
To take a step back, all of today is accumulated history, and, whatever Fukuyama might have you believe, history is never done. When we think about the world we’re creating, we don’t think in terms of snapshots of a perfectly composed world. Fictional worlds often suffer from stasis, where the demiurge designer fixes the perfect moment down with superglue. To counteract this, it helps to think on a grander scale, to see things in terms of historical processes building up and eroding away. People may live in houses built a hundred years ago, but life today is different from what it was like then. The old gets modified for contemporary use, though the origins remain plain to see. What we’re doing is applying dialectical materialism to world design.
Movements and tendencies that will shape the future are also already at play in their nascent forms, and in No Truce With The Furies, just as in our world, if you pay enough attention, you can almost glimpse the future.
A nifty midway point that our world occupies is that we have the mass production of swords. They’re forged, pulled, hammered, bent and grinded by heavy industrial machinery. The handles are cast in bakelite resin. Final assembly is by the underpaid proletariat huddling around lengths of conveyor belts. And these swords are surrounded by familiar debates: some people feel they’re not of the same mettle as the old smith-forged swords with their arabesques on swooping hilts, the narwhal and giraffe designs, while others see the wonders of the modern world, the cost savings of industrial automation, bold aesthetic simplification and mechanical perfection – the democratization of the sword.
In our world, there are people pining for the old days of monarchs and cavalry maneuvers, and there are people who look forward to robots with magnetic limb sockets. There are people who know that you can split the atom.

This game continues to fascinate me.

 

[Purkake4]

This game continues to fascinate me.

Sounds like a magic realism evolution of Planescape's consensus reality (clap your hands if you believe) thing.

 

[Purkake4]

An interview with one of the artists featuring some nice concept art.

 

[glaurung]

I got invited to go over and play a development build of this game late last week. I'm not sure how much I am allowed to divulge, but the game definitely piqued my interest. The glorious art style and voice acting is just one facet of this. What really surprised me was the RPG side of things and how that impacted the game play.

The "skills" system of this game is definitely unique (at least I cannot name another game that had something like this). I didn't get to play around with the character creator, but I think that doing that for a first playthrough might be a very bad idea.

I think they're going to have hands-on demos at a few bigger gaming events coming up later this year.

 

[Purkake4]

I got invited to go over and play a development build of this game late last week. I'm not sure how much I am allowed to divulge, but the game definitely piqued my interest. The glorious art style and voice acting is just one facet of this. What really surprised me was the RPG side of things and how that impacted the game play.

The "skills" system of this game is definitely unique (at least I cannot name another game that had something like this). I didn't get to play around with the character creator, but I think that doing that for a first playthrough might be a very bad idea.

I think they're going to have hands-on demos at a few bigger gaming events coming up later this year.

Sounds good. How much reactivity was there in a random dialogue? Are there degrees of success or just success/fail? Does failing just lead down different paths instead of just shutting that path off?

 

[vacantseas]

So the title of the game is a nod to the movie The Warriors, yes?

 

[Purkake4]

So the title of the game is a nod to the movie The Warriors, yes?

I think it's related to one of the developers' (Robert Kurvitz) unreleased novel, but it's a bit ambiguous.

 

[adversarial]

I got invited to go over and play a development build of this game late last week. I'm not sure how much I am allowed to divulge, but the game definitely piqued my interest. The glorious art style and voice acting is just one facet of this. What really surprised me was the RPG side of things and how that impacted the game play.

The "skills" system of this game is definitely unique (at least I cannot name another game that had something like this). I didn't get to play around with the character creator, but I think that doing that for a first playthrough might be a very bad idea.

I think they're going to have hands-on demos at a few bigger gaming events coming up later this year.

Curious as to why that might be?

 

[Purkake4]

Curious as to why that might be?

Spoilers maybe? I honestly thought it would be more like Planescape: Torment where you start as a blankish slate and build your character as you play.

 

[glaurung]

Sounds good. How much reactivity was there in a random dialogue? Are there degrees of success or just success/fail? Does failing just lead down different paths instead of just shutting that path off?

There was a lot of choice in dialog answers and overall interactivity options. As far as I could understand, failing a skill check removed that option from the list for good. In the early dialog trees, there were a few cases where the skill check was obligatory, in other cases you could elect to invoke it. Sounds cryptic, but you'll understand it quickly when playing.

Curious as to why that might be?

I was offered the chance to play around with the character creation, but I opted not to do it. Why? There are 24 skills governing your character, divided into four sections. Building a character from scratch or allocating some surplus points across the board would be very hard when you don't know what the skills do. There is another facet to how the skills "come into play" and I am not going to spoil that. I don't know whether this might change before release or whether this is stuff I'm not supposed to talk about. I wasn't really given clear instructions as to what to talk about and what not to mention.

There was another perk-like RPG system in the demo, which enabled boosting certain stats, sometimes with debuffs attached. Not sure if I am supposed to talk about that either.

The one thing I can say though: there is a chance to catastrophically fail an early check and die. Literally before you leave the first room you're in.

 

[aravuus]

Ugh, this has so much potential, goddamn. I could never get into Age of Decadence, but maybe this'll become my reactive/replayable indie RPG darling.

Did it look like they give you a liberal amount of skill points to divide between the 24 skills? Hopefully not.

 

[glaurung]

Did it look like they give you a liberal amount of skill points to divide between the 24 skills? Hopefully not.

The RPG system for getting extra skill points wasn't quite done in the build I played. The default pre-made character had strong stats in certain skill sections and weaker in others. Like I said, I did not see the character creation because there would not have been a lot of time to understand it.

 

[Purkake4]

Sounds really interesting. I'm ready for the next wave CRPGs, it's about time.

I wish they continued the blog posts about skills and attributes, the mental ones were very interesting.

 

[Steiner]

Sending in questions to the dev tomorrow for a larger Humble Bundle publishing interview. Are there any questions concerning NTWTF you guys would love to see answered while you have the chance?

 

[More_Badass]

Sending in questions to the dev tomorrow for a larger Humble Bundle publishing interview. Are there any questions concerning NTWTF you guys would love to see answered while you have the chance?

I'm most curious about the game's "combat"/confrontations, how open-ended they are, how much your skills and prior actions can influence the scenarios, how weapons are used, etc.

 

[CrunchyFrog]

Sending in questions to the dev tomorrow for a larger Humble Bundle publishing interview. Are there any questions concerning NTWTF you guys would love to see answered while you have the chance?

They've mentioned that the released game will be on the smaller side. Is this deliberate or due to lack of manpower/resources? Plans for dlc? Sequels?

 

[Steiner]

I'm most curious about the game's "combat"/confrontations, how open-ended they are, how much your skills and prior actions can influence the scenarios, how weapons are used, etc.

Hmm yeah that is a good question considering the fact that swords are such a large part of the world.

So far it sounds to me like your skills impact the way your conversations branch out, and obviously combat is tied to conversation in this game. How much is passive, and how much is active, and do you "equip" the protag for confrontation? Is this your general line of thought? How else would you speak into this question?

 

[More_Badass]

I would phrase my question like this

In your frequently asked question blog post last year, you mentioned that, rather than traditional combat, Furies has violent confrontations handled through the dialogue system. Given the game's focus on player freedom and choice, how do your character's skills, items, earlier actions, and mentality influence these confrontations? Furthermore, how branching and flexible are the encounters, in terms of options during these situations and their consequences on the characters and story afterwards?

 

[Purkake4]

I would phrase my question like this

In your frequently asked question blog post last year, you mentioned that, rather than traditional combat, Furies has violent confrontations handled through the dialogue system. Given the game's focus on player freedom and choice, how do your character's skills, items, earlier actions, and mentality influence these confrontations? Furthermore, how branching and flexible are the encounters, in terms of options during these situations and their consequences on the characters and story afterwards?

I'd like to know more on this as well.

 

[Messofanego]

Sorry for being lame, but is there a release date? Each time this thread gets bumped, that's all I'm wondering lol.

 

[SugarDave]

How I am I only now hearing about this game? Sounds right up my alley.

 

[TheBryanJZX90]

Gotta love the first page where OP steadfastly refuses to engage with the many many posts misreading the title.

 

[Purkake4]

Sorry for being lame, but is there a release date? Each time this thread gets bumped, that's all I'm wondering lol.

Still just 2017 as far as I know.

 

[CottonWolf]

Still just 2017 as far as I know.

I thought it had got pushed till early 2018? But maybe I'm imagining that.

 

[Purkake4]

I thought it had got pushed till early 2018? But maybe I'm imagining that.

You may be right, I'm pretty sure it used to be 2017 on the Steam page, now it's TBA.

 

[Labadal]

You may be right, I'm pretty sure it used to be 2017 on the Steam page, now it's TBA.

There isn't an announced release date as far as I know.

 

[Purkake4]

There isn't an announced release date as far as I know.

I guess they were aiming for end of 2017 at some point, but now it's up in the air.

 

[Purkake4]

They'll be at Gamescom in case anyone is going

 

[More_Badass]

Anyone get a chance to check this out at Gamescom?

 

[Purkake4]

Nope, there is new art though

 

[Purkake4]

A rare video interview complete with a grab bag of accents.

 

[staen]

Game title changed to "Disco Elysium" New trailer:



Not feeling the new title.

 

[Denton]

The new title is a bit more catchy and does away with the furry association, so it is probably a good idea. Someone change the thread title?

 

[drotahorror]

The new title is a bit more catchy and does away with the furry association, so it is probably a good idea. Someone change the thread title?

I get why someone might think it has to do with 'furries' but it clearly is 'fury' but plural, perhaps not in the same context as fury but something else.

Anyways, I dig the new name change.

 

[LucidFeuer]

Looks great, and hopefully you'll be able to push resolution (don't know if it's image compression but doesn't look sharp) and refine the interfaces (such a game merits better on one of the most importantly but overlooked aspect of game design which is UI/design)

 

[Kadayi]

Really digging the aesthetic painterly style. Not keen on the new name, however....some one needed to google goggles that before going to press.

 

[Drac84]

Not a huge fan of the new name, but they had to do something, because even as someone following the developmemt I misread 'furries' every single time I saw the old title.

 

[Nikodemos]

The skill icons continue to impress me on how awesome they look.