Welcome great nobles,
Thank you for your activity, comments and suggestions. We are pleased with your interest in the game. Such a response motivates us to work more intensively on it.
Today we will reveal some information about the setting. Mainly about the Black Death. This is the most important story event in Noble's Life: Kingdom Reborn, apart from the Hundred Years War.
But first, we will try to explain another topic that may raise doubts, after those discussed in Dev Diary #0.
How do we approach historical realities?
First of all, we want to emphasize that the most important thing for us is gameplay, even if it requires some adjustments to the setting.
Therefore, the player takes on the role of a fictional noble (everyone can design their own coat of arms like us in the trailer :D). We want you to be able to create your character and to actually find your ruling style, and this requires a game that gives you a variety of choices.
Our goal is realism, that will support interesting gameplay. We want to achieve this by presenting an unique solution to the things such as UI (maps, lists, miniatures and meetings with characters instead of tables, switches and non-immersive screens), time flow (possibly realistic, but with speed up options), recruiting troops (we wrote a little about it in Dev Diary #0 - Vision) and many others.
First of all, we are inspired by medieval sources and create events, missions and challenges for the player based on them. Also in the case of Great Mortality.
Black Death
Although it wasn't the first European plague epidemic (there had been, for example, Athenian or Justinian plague) it clearly deserves to be called the most devastating one. Some even write about the death of 60% of the European population at that time, including almost half the population of France.
The Great Plague was also one of the most important reasons for the temporary suspension of fighting during the Hundred Years' War. Hence, it has obviously become one of the most important things in our game design.
Player will have at their disposal numerous historical methods of fighting the plague. Only that most of them just didn't work. Nevertheless, using them may be necessary. Taking many of these actions will have an impact on the satisfaction and religiosity of the subjects. So sometimes a nicely wrapped placebo may be the only way to avoid riots.
House with a plague cross. Buildings of the Black Death victims were marked like this.
On the other hand, these few working methods, such as quarantine and social distance (modeled, for example, on the solutions from medieval Ragusa), may sometimes require drastic forms of control. So is raising sanitary standards and even recruiting doctors. The latter will be able to at least eliminate some of the symptoms of the disease. This, in turn, will increase the chances of survival of the greater part of the population.
In addition, the Black Death is also about rapid social changes, heretical movements, uprisings, social and economic changes. We want to include this in the game and make the collapse of the player's estate a real threat.
Initial concept arts of Flagellants. And rats for attention :D
Flagellants are a good example. The practice of self-flagellation itself has been known for a long time. However, the Black Death period can be considered the apogee of the popularity of this practice in the Middle Ages. In the game, the flagellants are a form of heresy. They can appear on the player's lands in places of high religiousness and/or affected by an epidemic.
Fanatics can be helpful and player can use them, e.g. as highly motivated recruits or to send them against their rivals. However, they can just as easily cause problems, from a conflict with the Church, through defeatism, to the desire to radically cleanse the player's lands of sinners (inspired by events, e.g. the 13th-century Italian Perugia).
We hope that this Dev Diary explained our approach to historical realities a bit. Next week, we'll introduce you to the key part of the game, which is the economy.
P.S. Some may wonder why, since we are writing about the Black Death, we don't mention the plague doctors? Well, the medics specializing in fighting the epidemic did exist. There is even evidence that they earned many times more money than ordinary medics. We will probably mention them in future dev diaries.
The situation is different with the costume with a bird's beak mask promoted by pop culture. We didn't come across any evidence that it existed in this form in the 14th-15th centuries. Therefore, for the sake of realism, we’ve decided to not present it this way. Of course, if anyone thinks that we should do it differently or has some interesting sources on this topic, feel free to comment :D
Best regards,
Gentle Griffons