Free choice of party members
It's up to the player to decide whether he just wants to stick with our recommended group or if he'd rather try to adjust all the characters more to his liking. There are some restrictions to the group-creation system, but these will not lead to a lack of reasonable and interesting character combinations. You may choose between six classes and seven races.
Unique racial traits and class skills
Every race has its specific trait that distinguishes the chosen one from the others, making each race unique. Naturally, the same may be said about the classes. Classes are defined by a set of skills at their disposal. Each class offers several general skills that are common to more classes and a few class-specific ones to keep things fresh.
Character class progression
Each character class in DoA may reach a higher class level after fulfilling its advancement quest. These must be first discovered and will be more demanding than most of other side quests. There are two different advancement paths for every class. Both enable you to specialize your character in a specific manner. For example, a warrior class may become a high damage dealing berserker or a more defense-oriented knight.
Realm exploration
Exploration will take place from a first person view. Player will discover and interact with all the active game objects (traps, secret passages, containers, NPCs, etc.) solely in this GUI. If the game detects a hostile presence in the vicinity of the group, it will automatically switch to an isometric view and a bird´s eye perspective. Our game has a built-in feature, which sets the battleground at the actual location of your group at the beginning of each combat. There’s no limit to the amount of prefab maps for each game area - our game throws you into combat at the exact same spot you were at just before the combat commenced. Therefore, the choice of a suitable battlefield is very important and adds an interesting strategy element to DoA.
Attributes skills and perk system
We decided to go with the classic "holy-five" attributes: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence and charisma. The charisma attribute plays an equally important role among all the other attributes.
On top of that, you can choose from a total of 36 skills that grow in strength together with your character and also gain additional new effects, further expanding their possible usefulness.
Leveling-up works in DoA in four different ways. Automatic raise of secondary attributes (calculated from the primary attribute values), investment of skill points into new or already known skills, improvement of primary attributes, and, eventually choosing of new perks.
Camping management
You may give various assignments to your party members during the camping in the open via a complex (but easy to use) time management schedule. Your characters may, for example, meditate, hunt, cook, repair and tinker, collect plants and mushrooms, brew potions, stand guard, etc. (oh, and sleeping might sometimes be quite a good idea). If you're not interested in this kind of stuff, you may simply avoid this detailed management by setting a lower difficulty level or using the automatic camping function.
Travelling system
Travelling between Aledorn's locations will make the most of the mini-map of the known world. Prepare yourself for numerous random encounters during your travels, ranging from ambushes to meeting travelling merchants to running into quest NPCs… and finding hidden locations! We wanted to avoid filling the game with "empty open-world filler" areas between the important locations as an excuse to increase the games “size.” This way you’ll be able to quickly travel between locations.
NPCs dialogs
What kind of an RPG would DoA be without hundreds of NPCs to interact with?
Many of them will gladly talk with your party members. You can expect widely branching conversations and your options will vary according to the skills and attributes of your adventurers. Successful skill checks will provide you with various benefiting effects as well. In some cases, you might even gain otherwise inaccessible advantages or discover secret side-quest assignments.
At the same time, we don't want to overwhelm our players with tons of never-ending senseless blabbering. Secondary NPCs will respond mostly with a single or two cycled sentences. Some NPCs will gladly play one of our mini-games with your group, and gaining money isn't necessarily the only motivation to do so...
Multiple ways to complete quests
Some in-game quests will have more than one solution, and their outcome will be also reflected in the game. For example, your party will become outlaws within one specific quest and your actions in this situation will determine one whole side-quest line in the future. It´s not possible to implement similar consequences in all our quests, but we´re trying hard to make as many of them as possible, because they definitely make the game feel like a living fantasy world.
Switching from exploration to battle mode
There are two ways to enter a battle encounter. You may initiate the battle yourself (which is not always an option!) or when you get too close to the enemy. We have implemented a "danger meter" to the exploration GUI to show the risk of a combat encounter. Said metter fills with every approaching enemy and the encounter starts when it is full. It´s a sort of warning mechanic that allows you to run away from enemies if you don´t feel like fighting them at a specific moment.
Splitting the group
Some quests will require to temporarily split your party into smaller groups. You get to choose who goes into each smaller group, then taking sub-turns to control each separate sub-group. There are three possible scenarios during battles under this setting. If the inactive group stands close at hand, its members will automatically enter the fight at its start. If they stand a bit further and you decide to call them for help, the game will determine how many turns it will take for them to come to aid you. And if you went too far from the others, then you have to manage on your own and can't call them to your side.
Complex turn-based combat system
This is the alpha and omega of our game features. The combat system of DoA strives to get as close to reality as possible. It will allow you to interact with your surroundings within the limits of a real world’s logic. No, there won't be any barrels stuffed with explosives aboard ships. But you may still set things on fire by using oil, climb on/over many game objects or get cover behind to gain some bonus protection.
Another interesting aspect of DoA is its diverse A.I. for enemy combatants. Our A.I. doesn't only reflect the type of character to whom it is assigned, but it also continuously evaluates general development of current combat and appropriately changes its behavior.
Example: You get ambushed by a group of goblins under the command of a terrifying shaman. As long as he lives, their actions will be well organized (e.g. archers taking cover behind their shield bearers, targeting weaker and injured party members, etc.). Kill the shaman and the A.I. suddenly gets more random or, simply said, "more stupid."
At the same time, don't expect your warrior to live long (no matter how experienced he actually is) if he just blindly charges at the shaman and gets outnumbered by his followers. Each combat decision should be well premeditated since our game severely punishes every mistake. But don´t be too afraid - actual death of your DoA characters doesn´t usually come as long as there's still at least one party member standing on his feet.
Magic in DoA
DoA is a fantasy game so it isn’t a surprised to see there are also magic-wielding characters and alchemists present. DoA's magic system is definitely pretty classic. You know the spell, it costs you some mana to cast and, eventually (in case of a combat situation), also a few action points. Then you have to pass a skill check that compares your knowledge of the corresponding magic school and the spell's difficulty.
Unique to our game is the possibility to decide how much mana should be spent during your spell casting. This way you may increase the spell casting chance (or decrease it in order to conserve mana for later use) or increase their effectiveness. This system makes many basic spells still useful even at the higher character's levels. Five fire-darts are sometimes more than a single fireball.
Alchemy
The alchemy skill in DoA is separated into three branches - poisons, potions and explosives. Each one of these skills is independent from the others and must be improved separately. Furthermore, it´s vital to learn new recipes and to be able to identify alchemy resources - that´s when the so called "knowledge skills" are a must. These are sub-skills of alchemy and they also come in a group of three: botanics, anatomy and geology.
Knowledge skills allow you to find more powerful ingredients needed for advanced alchemy recipes. These ingredients may be found during your explorations, as a bonus from the above mentioned camping activities or even as you move from one location to another.
Difficulty settings
The last feature of our game is probably essential for many among you. We find most of the modern games are too mainstream-oriented. DoA's difficulty options are an answer to the hardcore community's plea for a real and reasonable challenge while at the same time allowing casual gamers to try out our game without encountering too many stressing situations in the process. Higher difficulty settings won´t necessarily mean tougher enemies (rather an increase of their numbers => more experience). They also enable more of the already mentioned optional features.
The easy difficulty setting uses less than a half of them and also decreases the quantity of encountered enemies. This is a friendly step towards the mainstream players who are not interested in detailed inventory management, countless combat-skill possibilities, adjustment of spell casting mana, etc.
The normal difficulty opens the key hardcore features and allows you to set (or all) of the game’s features, all while dealing with a reasonable amount of enemies.
The hard difficulty setting gives you no other choice than to stick with all the game's features and it should push your skills to the limit via numerous and more cunning (better A.I.) enemies. This is the setting at which the DoA is meant to be played (or at least how we would play it), and we hope that many gamers share our point of view.
I'm relieved.
