First Legend of Grimrock 2 screenshot is outdoors and pretty :: rpg codex

Last week, Almost Human's development blog had a post about two potential designs for Legend of Grimrock 2 that had been scrapped. It caused some disappointment on the Codex, as you will see:

Grimrogue

Everybody loves a good roguelike, right? Antti and I are big fans of roguelike games here at the office, so it was only natural that this idea, the amalgamation of a roguelike game with Grimrock, has popped up every now and then in our discussions. After all, the tile-based nature of Grimrock seems to be a perfect match with roguelike game design.

With this design levels would be procedurally generated, with some custom made levels here and there. Turn-based combat would probably work better than pure realtime. We even made a quick prototype entitled Grimrogue with turn-based combat and a minimap in one corner of the screen.

One problem we quickly realized was that the player would be focused on the minimap when exploring the randomly generated dungeon and all the gorgeous 3D graphics would be almost like a gimmick. We also had our doubts about turn-based combat. Turn based combat works really well from a topdown perspective where you can see all the units and can think about the best tactics. In first person view where you can only see in one direction, turn-based combat takes away tactical movement and reduces combat to a locked in place affair.

In the end, we felt that with this design we would lose lots of the appeal of Grimrock, the puzzles and the chaotic nature of realtime combat, so the design was scrapped. It would certainly be possible to make this sort of game but it wouldn’t have been Grimrock.

Travel around the Northern Realms in 30 days

Another concept which we tried to make work really hard was travelling in many locations around the Northern Realms, the world of Grimrock. We were initially really excited about this idea, and we made a prototype of the world map, with towns, villages and adventuring locations. There would have been a storyline that ties the main locations together much like the main quest in many RPGs.

In the prototype, the party could travel between the map nodes and choose where to go next. Towns and other encounters were menu based “resource management nodes” and adventuring locations were dungeons with puzzles and monsters. We were so happy about this design that we were about to write a lengthy blog post about it, when doubts began to haunt our heads.

[...] The problem with this design is the lack of focus. We believe that the charm of Grimrock is compactness, tight focus and emphasis on fun core gameplay. In Grimrock 1, the environment, the dungeon itself has personality and the quest was personal to the characters. Having multiple locations with different atmospheres and multiple linked goals would take some of that charm away.

A game of this sort could surely be made, but, again, it would not be a Grimrock game.

It was assumed that since Legend of Grimrock 2 would not be an open world game, it would therefore be set entirely within a dungeon like its predecessor. The latest blog post, however, has revealed that assumption to be unfounded. Check out that screenshot:

Pretty! Now, if they can do something about that combat mambo, maybe we'll have a worthwhile real-time competitor to Might & Magic X.

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