Hey folks!
It’s been a while since we’ve shown how the world progresses as you go through the game. Once you finish the snowy mountainous zone of Marca Hispanica, you’ll land (not literally because you weren’t flying) in the sandy region of Al-Andalus. Unlike some other zones, Al-Andalus doesn’t have an overarching story outside of just getting to the end. This is explained upon entering the zone, as Al-Andalus is almost overrun with the Corruption. (The map visuals aren't final yet, we're still working on making it prettier!)
The atmosphere in Al-Andalus is bleak, filled with encounters that convey struggle against the forces of Corruption and attempts to survive the onslaught. Most of the nodes in the zone will be corrupted, and the rare uncorrupted node will be a welcome respite with no inherent danger. The progression from Albion to Al-Andalus should be clear: Albion has the occasional corrupted node which almost guarantees a fight against the abominations, while Al-Andalus has the occasional uncorrupted node, guaranteeing no fights.
That doesn’t mean all corrupted nodes have fights, it’s just that the roles and their implications on having to fight are reversed. Al-Andalus doesn't feature human enemies, as all humans are focused on fighting the Corruption.
We also played a bit with some encounter constructs in this zone. There’s one short stretch of the journey where you can go to an island city. It’s a set of several handmade encounters that only appear there, with two of them being over water. These will have custom encounters with internal variations so every visit feels different across sessions.
The way Mat has setup the combat progression is also interesting. Each zone adds a new mechanic (so to speak). At the end of zone 1, you fight the first large unit. During zone 2, you see large units during standard combat encounters, and at the end, you’re introduced to waves of units that appear during combat. During zone 3, wave spawning is used in most combat encounters, and at the end of the zone, we introduce a mechanic you’ll need to defeat the boss in the last zone.
I’m not going to talk about this mechanic, as I want to keep at least some unknowns for all the people who read these blog posts. If you’ve been reading them all so far, you’d have seen a lot of things the game has to offer, along with their evolution during the last year of development. I’d like to keep at least some things untold via blog posts, doesn’t make sense to spoil it all, eh? :)
Thanks for reading! If you’ve got any questions or want to comment on anything really, join our Discord server and ask/suggest/complain/praise/hang out. The whole team is there.
MarkoP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/600610/The_Hand_of_Merlin/