Greetings, Survivors!
Over the last few weeks, we showed you how our game's main concept, a Creature Apocalypse, went from "plagued corpses rising as zombies" to "insect-human hybrids".
This week, I'd like to talk about how we went about tackling another major pillar of our narrative: the Middle Ages.
Making a choice: “Wanting to make an uncommon zombie concept.”
While the original version of Zombicide that our game is based on is essentially a typical modern zombie setting, the version we were more attracted to was the medieval themed Zombicide: Black Plague.
We've always enjoyed Medieval content like Game of Thrones and Mount & Blade, but beyond that, we knew we wanted to create a fresh take on the idea of Zombies.
The zombie genre is very popular and there are already a lot of games out there, so we thought we needed something to set us apart, and so thought that a medieval setting would give our game a unique angle.
To represent this in-game, we asked ourselves:
- What’s the appeal of a "Medieval" setting and what do we need to represent it effectively?
- What would really happen if a zombie apocalypse happened in the Middle Ages instead of modern times?
- Which of these elements would work well within the game we’re creating?
Initial Focus: Efforts to Recreate the Middle Ages in Real History
Our initial approach to "Medieval" was to try to achieve a level of authenticity that would bring to life the feel of a specific European country around the 14th century, albeit fictionalized, as in Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Mount & Blade.
The idea of a "Zombie Apocalypse" is fascinating to us because the existing social order breaks down and disintegrates under the weight of zombies, and we felt that the appeal of the apocalypse could be conveyed more strongly if it felt like a real historical setting rather than a fantasy world like D&D.
However, as with everything we've shared so far, there were a number of issues that surfaced when we dove in.
One of the things we didn't realize was that the art style we chose, Pixel-Art, is more about capturing the imagination than realism.
The gleaming metal texture of full plate armor on a knight bracing his jousting lance atop a galloping horse... is a typical emotive image when thinking of the "realistically rendered Middle Ages," but it's hard to capture that feeling without a 3D game with realistic depictions.
Furthermore, the top-down perspective we chose for tactical play, while great for situational awareness and gameplay, didn't lend itself to a "realistic feel" - we didn't have the ability to rotate the camera angle or zoom in like the XCOM series, and it would have been prohibitively expensive to make resources completely different in combat than out of combat.
After spending days debating why we needed to represent a mill in order to create a "realistic medieval village" and why it was hard to convey in our current art style, and finding sources and debating whether wine could or could not have been bottled in the Middle Ages, we began to have fundamental doubts about whether this direction was the right one for the core fun of the game.
Unless the game's entire raison d'être is to recreate a realistic medieval world, we thought it better to pivot away from this direction in favor of something that plays more to our strengths.
One plus side to this early focus on realism is that it helped us shape the mood of our content, even though you would have been hard pressed to find potatoes in 14th Century Europe!
Second focus: Building a low-fantasy worldview centered around Religion
In a previous post, we mentioned that the narrative shifted from a “pilgrim's journey to the Holy Land” to a “knight's journey to retrieve a holy relic.”
Whereas “Journey to the Holy Land” focused on "realistic, authentic medieval representation," the revised narrative shifted the focus to what "medieval charms we could capitalize on," and the main focus of that was Religion.
There are a lot of things that symbolize the Middle Ages, such as feudalism, hierarchy, and cold warfare, but I think the idea of "a time when religion ruled" is also a big part of it, and we thought it was much easier to capture that aspect with pixel art than iron and armor, with the statues of saints and other religious symbols used in our Reddit post.
Therefore, we wanted to unify the elements of the entire game around the concept of religion, and through this, reveal the theme of a medieval apocalypse.
- The goal of the game is to recover all seven "holy relics," which are religious symbols.
- The protagonist is a knight who has sworn an oath to the church to protect the relics
- Protagonist's starting companions are religious figures such as monks and nuns
- Human enemy NPCs other than monsters, such as "heretics" and "inquisitors” are present
- Represent the conflict between religious doctrine and real-world situations (since there was a choice system back then)
- Organize the game's starting location, and the main setting for the search for the relic, as a "church/cathedral/monastery", etc.
- Other events, referring to "the changes and trials of religious medieval people's faith in the face of an apocalyptic situation" and their attitudes toward the Black Death at the time.
We wanted to give the overall narrative a sense of unity in this way, and I think that if we were able to implement it “accurately”, we would have been able to present a medieval apocalyptic world with its own flavor.
However, as I mentioned in the previous post, the cost of implementing the choice system shifted the overall focus of the game from tactics to storytelling, and we had to completely rethink our narrative plans for the medieval world instead of the monsters.
Third Focus: A fictional medieval world centered around “Cold Warfare”
Since the “religion” element is ultimately a mental element related to people's “beliefs”, we found it difficult to make it work in a game that is more strategy/tactical than narrative-driven.
In fact, I don't think it's an “impossible” goal, as something like Blasphemous borrows heavily from these elements while still delivering a heavily action-oriented experience... but at this point, we'd already changed the narrative so many times that we were afraid to set an “uncertain” goal again.
So, even if religion wasn't necessarily at the center of the narrative, we’d still keep some elements that would be natural in a medieval setting, but the overall thematic focus would be less on "medieval" and more on the threat of the "creature" itself and the individual characters like Willam/Edwin/Duirmuid trying to overcome it (primarily through the use of cold weapons).
As we went about making the Early Access version, the "Medieval" elements were woven into the weapons and tools used in combat, the setting, and the narrative of the characters as a kind of decoration.
Each of these decisions were made for a reason, but in hindsight, the current interpretation and representation of the keyword "Medieval" leaves something to be desired from a developer perspective.
At this point, my main regret is that we've been obsessing over "external" elements like "medieval" as a keyword or "religion" as a keyword, rather than thinking about how to make the game more fun and engaging through this.
With these lessons learned, our new direction for narrative building is to aim for a consistent sense of fun across both gameplay and narrative, and we'll be sharing some of that in posts over the next week or so.
Thank you for your attention to this long tale of the past, and we'll be back next week in the form of a Dev Note where we’ll look at something more directly related to current Dev direction!
See you then!
REMORE