Hi!
If you’ve played the demo on one of the several opportunities last year, you might have noticed that when you start the game it immediately loads up to the main menu. This means that you’d start the game without much context into what was going on, and what your main goal is.
We intended to solve this issue with the intro cutscene, a small image stream with voiceover narration to explain who you are, what’s happening, and why you’re doing what you’re doing. We didn’t have the time to make the cutscene for any of the demos before, although we did get close to having it around November. Ultimately, it was pushed back when we decided there weren’t going to be any demos, so we focused on the more immediate features. Shiv has done his side of most of those things, so he went back to making the cinematic.
Our writers have written the text that would be narrated over the cinematic, and Shiv has already drawn most of the images we are putting into it, so the only thing that remains is to make the actual cinematic. The Serious Engine has capabilities to make cinematics, so we’re leveraging those to have everything be in-engine, and also because the engine doesn’t handle video playback with consistent framerates.
The intro cinematic will play the first time you start the game and would be viewable through the options menu or something, we’re not yet 100% sure on that because we were missing the actual cinematic in order to implement playing it back on demand. One possibility we might consider is also just playing it every time you start the game and having it be skippable after the first time it’s played. I’m not sure what the best way is, so if you have any opinions on that, tell us!
The general context the cinematic sets up is that there are many worlds (dimensions) that are all threatened by the all-consuming Cataclysm. Merlin has hope it can be stopped tho, and to that end, in each of those dimensions, he has created Arthur and the Grail, which would have the ability to heal the wounds in reality. However, Morgana lost faith in him and trapped him for many years. After a long while, he awoke weakened and saw that Arthur had failed and was replaced with lesser men. Being so weak, he cannot exert much control over the mortal realm except some dream-state suggestions to the heroes, telling them to get the Grail, go to Jerusalem and save the world.
This is the gist of it, the full text is somewhat longer and has more flavor to it, and you’ll be able to hear it during the cinematic when you start the game. Because we didn’t have the cinematic in the previous demos, we tried to replicate the context in the very first encounter you see in Albion when you reach Camelot. We don’t yet know if we’ll cut that encounter down a bit for the full game since it won’t be absolutely necessary to explain everything over again every time you start a new game, but no plans for that yet.
Thanks for reading! You can find us on our Discord server if you wanna chat with us!
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/