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In combat, Caeso is a Princeps (heavy infantryman). When you meet Caeso, he is well set in his ways, but eventually the consequences of his easy living will catch up to him, and his sense of duty and loyalty will be tested in equal measure.
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In Expeditions: Rome, Caeso represents the archetypical Roman centurion – a dutiful and disciplined veteran soldier who loves the Republic and will happily die to defend it.īut Caeso isn’t a stiff professional, he’s a bon vivant who likes wine, women, and for that matter men when the mood takes him. In Viking, we invented Asleifr as the stereotypical ruthless macho viking warrior. Let’s go over them now:Įvery Expeditions game is set in a particular culture at a particular time, and in our view that culture must be properly represented within the companion group. Then each companion is fleshed out with details that either support that archetype or counter it, until you have a well-rounded character. A good short-hand that we like to use to steer our creativity when designing characters is to assign a single title or nickname to each of them that hints at an archetype. This spread of combat roles was the seed upon which we built the player’s tight knit second family. Having decided that 5 is the number of companions the game will have, how do you decide who they should be? Well, a game – even a heavily story-based RPG – is first and foremost a mechanical thing, and since Expeditions: Rome offers 4 base character classes in combat, of course all classes must be represented among the companions. Once we had made this decision, we found ourselves investing more and more personality and agency in these four – after all, if we know these characters are always around, we can use them in dialogue and make them important parts of quests.īut let’s take a step back. We decided to promote our four starting characters to “companion” status, making them functionally immortal in that their deaths would result in a game over, and then we added a fifth character to the group to ensure that you could fill a whole 6-person team with companions only. Four of these praetorians did have a slightly special status as the starting party that we would use to tutorialize the four character classes, but once the tutorial was finished, they would be treated the same as any expendable praetorian.īut soon we ran into a problem: if we couldn’t count on the player to have at least 4 people on their team at any time, certain content in the game simply didn’t work. The player would be able to assemble their team from these praetorians, and as they were all able to die permanently or be kicked out of the group at any time, none would be integral to the plot. In fact, we originally envisioned something much more like Conquistador: a large pool of bare-bones praetorians who were mostly just a collection of names, portraits, and stats. We’d love to say that we wanted to place our companions front and center in Expeditions: Rome right from the start, but that would be untrue. RPG-style companion characters are perfectly suited for this, as they typically follow the protagonist everywhere, participating in every scene and every crisis. With a sufficiently compelling set of main characters, a story can really tug on the player’s heartstrings – and one of the keys to making a group of characters appealing is to give them enough screen time for the player to get to know them.
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Originally an attempt to emulate the dynamics of a tabletop RPG group, they have become one of the most beloved and distinct aspects of the genre, and we daresay its greatest storytelling asset. Companions are a staple of the roleplaying genre. We have a lot to get through today, so let’s get started. It’s companion week! Every day starting today, we’ll be releasing a new video about one of our five companion characters, introducing the role they play in the story as well as in combat, and hinting at the personal problems they’re saddled with, which you will hopefully help them deal with throughout your adventures together. Ave! Welcome to DevDiary 15, and boy do we have a doozy for you this week.