DramaticPopcorn
Guest
Ehhhhhhhhhhhh
If that is true, it would be awesome.Slitherine_Iain said:The entire combat model and all stats can be altered. You can change it to fire Gretchin out of your tanks if you want. Pretty much anything you can imagine.
Warhammer 40,000 has an enormous range of background materials - what made you select 'Sanctus Reach' as the setting for your game?
We were given permission by Games Workshop to choose any source from the Black Library. We spent a solid month researching the different materials. We documented the different armies, what enemies there were and what the general plots were. Generally we found most of the stories progressed in literal “Grim Dark” fashion before finally clinching a victory at the end (though sometimes not...), which we felt might not be the right feeling we wanted from our game. Then we found Sanctus Reach and it had pretty much everything we were looking for. Epic battles, legendary heroes and some brand new characters recently introduced to the Space Wolves and Orks. We simply could not pass up the opportunity to have the major leaders of the Space Wolves in our game - and the challenge of creating them!
What has been the driving idea behind the game design for this game?
It boils down to wanting to make a game that we would have loved to have as 14 year olds 'back in the day'. We wanted to replicate some of the “feelings” one might get from the tabletop experience., so we put a lot of effort into the unit roles and their weapons personalities while giving players a new way to experience 40k. The art style was inspired by Duncan Rhodes.. he’s our hero. (do you want to take a look at some Sanctus Reach Space Wolves models? Look no further!)
Sanctus Reach has been designed to appeal to both long standing fans and new players, what was the most challenging aspect of this from a game design point of view?
The most challenging thing was definitely just trying to find a balance between these two audiences. To a new player the 40k universe can seem a bit overwhelming. Games Workshop has been developing and changing the universe for longer than some of our team members have been alive. There’s so many different units with different roles that it can easily be confusing if we didn’t present the information correctly. The 40k veterans on the other hand know all the units like the back of their hand and have certain expectations. At one point our Gretchen were a bit overpowered and taking out half a squad of Grey Hunters in a round of firing, to a new player this wouldn’t mean anything but to a veteran this is pure heresy. This is why we chose to keep the unit roles familiar but produce the experience in a new way that both new and veteran players could learn and enjoy together.
There are a lot of very impressive unit models in Sanctus Reach - which one was the most challenging to get into the game - and which one is your favourite?
They were all uniquely challenging in their own way, but the most challenging units by far were the Imperial Knights and the Gorkanaut. Literal blood sweat and tears went into those guys. They have so many parts to model and they were so time consuming that there was no room for error. The Knights model on it’s own was pretty bare so the trims, vents, studs and decals were all added on in texture later by hand and baked before painting. All of the vehicles were done in this way, but I think the Gorkanaut has the most studs, it was quite painful but definitely worth the effort!
Sanctus Reach uses the new Archon engine - how did you find using it?
The Archon Engine is brilliant. For anyone starting out and wanting to make a strategy game we would highly recommend it. It’s easy to use and has great support. It’s been ideal really.
Do you play the tabletop game? What is your favourite army and unit?
Most of us have played the tabletop in the past and remain firmly attached to our original armies. Gordon and Mark prefer Eldar, me (Kim) and Alex are heretics and both enjoy Chaos.
How would this game differ from other 40k games in your opinion?
The vast majority of 40k games offer very unique experiences that are not turn based. I think there are a lot of people out there (ourselves included) that crave more turn based games which have a lot of content and depth. I feel like we’ve covered that.
Did you choose a turn-based system instead of real time to be closer to the tabletop experience?
Yes and no. We wanted to replicate a familiar feeling to the tabletop without duplicating the experience directly and we as a team just prefer turn based strategy games in general. We wanted to make an immersive game that you can really sit and contemplate what you’re going to do without the need for rushing or stressing, I think we all have enough of that in our lives!
Are there any previous games that influenced you in developing Sanctus Reach?
Chaos Gate and X-Com are probably the biggest influencers. Gordon and Mark played a lot of Chaos Gate back in the day.
That was exactly what I felt when I saw it. Poor man's Chaos Gate.Some internal interview that showed up on SLitherine forum:
Are there any previous games that influenced you in developing Sanctus Reach?
Chaos Gate and X-Com are probably the biggest influencers. Gordon and Mark played a lot of Chaos Gate back in the day.
Actually, it looks a lot more like another Final Liberation:That was exactly what I felt when I saw it. Poor man's Chaos Gate.Some internal interview that showed up on SLitherine forum:
Are there any previous games that influenced you in developing Sanctus Reach?
Chaos Gate and X-Com are probably the biggest influencers. Gordon and Mark played a lot of Chaos Gate back in the day.
Wot I Think – Warhammer 40K: Sanctus Reach
The never-ending conflict between Warhammer 40K’s Orks and the greatest warriors of the Imperium of Man, the Space Marines, is an ouroboros that’s already trapped us all inside it. An infinite war, spawning an infinite number of smaller digital wars on our PCs, making sure we can never, ever escape.
Warhammer 40K: Sanctus Reach [official site] is the latest snapshot of the war, a turn-based strategy affair that, of course, pits Space Marine against Ork over a planet that nobody in their right mind would want to live on anyway. Here’s wot I think.
This is of course well-trodden ground, and only recently served as the premise of the similarly turn-based Warhammer 40K: Armageddon. However! This time the Space Marines are Space Wolves. Think Space Marines, but Vikings, and you’ve probably already got a vivid picture in your mind. Some of them ride wolves. They’re even more silly than their Roman fanboy equivalents, like the Ultramarines or the Blood Ravens, and using my questionable rating system, much better.
Alongside more recognisable units like Dreadnoughts and Rhinos are Space Wolf-specific ones like the eager neophytes, the Blood Claws, who charge into battle with bolters and chainswords; the aforementioned bikers, Swiftclaws, undoubtedly wearing shades underneath those helmets; and hammer-wielding Wolf Priests, capable of healing allies as well as smashing in Ork skulls. Sanctus Reach boasts an impressive roster of units on both sides, perhaps the largest selection in a 40K game, and rarely will you find one that doesn’t fit into the puzzle of creating an effective army.
Both campaigns see the Space Wolves don their bearskin cloaks, fill up their bikes and head to the titular system to protect its last world from the green tide. And with that sentence I’ve given you about as much detail as the game ever gave me. It’s unusually reserved for Warhammer, lacking characters, plot or any real hint of the universe it resides in. Even mission briefings hold back. At best they’re a paragraph long, vague, and have nothing to do with the actual battle.
Mostly linear and absent much of a plot, the two campaigns don’t really serve a clear purpose. The vast majority of missions are actually random skirmish fights, though without the myriad customisation options found in the proper skirmish mode. There are three for every main mission, recycling the same objective over and over again. Hopefully you like capturing victory points. The game limits both your roster and the amount you can spend on units depending on the size of the map, so the battles do always have a chance to play out differently, though not often enough to stop these skirmishes from turning into a chore.
The main missions let you field a larger army – sometimes chosen yourself, sometimes not – to face off against a much larger Ork horde. Reinforcements can appear too, turning these battles into gigantic brawls that play out across the entire map. Thankfully, these missions also come with proper objectives, like escorting Rhino transports or taking out high value targets. Annoyingly, however, Sanctus Reach just can’t let go of that obsession with victory points. Once you achieve your goals, the battle continues, with victory going to the side controlling the most points by the turn limit.
I got so tired of capturing those bloody points, and it started to feel like the game was taunting me. My fears were vindicated when I started getting two-part missions where the first objective and the second tasked me with capturing and holding the same points. I started laughing in the way that a person laughs when they are either about to do something terribly evil or are going quite mad. For me, it was the latter. I was far too tired to do anything terribly evil.
The main problem with Sanctus Reach’s over reliance on victory points is that it doesn’t come with any of the tension you normally get when desperately fighting over important locations or racing to get that final point. See, the Orks clearly aren’t playing the same game. They could be standing right next to a point and they’d still ignore it entirely. I recall one battle where I had to retreat from an area rich in points that I controlled, leaving an absolutely ginormous enemy horde to set up shop there. They didn’t bother capturing a single one. I essentially won the fight because Orks are lazy.
Even when they do remember that there’s an objective beyond wanton slaughter, they have such an unbreakable single-mindedness that they can sometimes forget all other concerns. It does seem like the sort of trait you’d expect an Ork to have, but it doesn’t make them a particularly effective opponent.
The first time I witnessed the green tide making a concerted effort to win a battle strategically, we were duking it out over the ruins of a sprawling industrial complex. I’d made some pretty terrible mistakes and was down to one commander unit and two badly injured Blood Claws, the Space Wolves’ basic infantry. Two turns were left, and I honestly wasn’t sure if my chaps would see the end. I put them in cover, took a deep breath and pressed End Turn. The Orks didn’t fire. Instead, they turned around and marched on the closest victory point. There was absolutely no logic to this ‘strategy’. They weren’t close enough to get to the point in time, and even if they had been, I controlled five out of five, so one wouldn’t have made a single difference. Literally the only option they had for stealing a win, they willfully ignored.
It’s a wonder that the Orks conquered the whole Sanctus Reach system before the Space Wolves arrived, because it seems like they couldn’t conquer a playground. Time and time again I watched as they ignored cover, picked fights they could never win and gleefully charged at me head on, not a care in the world. Instead of tactical prowess, the Orks have numbers and unrelenting aggression. And you know what? In the absence of competent AI, it’s a strategy that sometimes works and, more importantly, creates exciting battles.
Sanctus Reach’s main missions are overflowing with angry green xenos. To the point of absurdity. Whole maps painted in green, like every Ork ever born has decided to murder this one group of Space Wolves. From start to finish, they offer one brutal fight after another as you chip away at this seemingly endless supply of savage aliens. It’s exhausting, sure, but it’s also the source of some intense journeys across battle-scarred maps, constantly trying to stay in formation and protect the most powerful units as suicidal monsters surround you. And with each unit being able to move a fair distance and take two actions per turn, there’s decent momentum and the ability to quickly make battle-changing assaults.
What really makes Sanctus Reach’s bloody brawls satisfying, though, is the joy of watching Terminators standing up to a tank that dwarfs them, or rows of shouting Blood Claws charging at Orks, chainswords hungry, or the sheer pleasure of seeing Whirlwinds turning everything into a red mist with one volley. The game’s full off dramatic standoffs and ridiculous violence, and while I might not recall a single thing about the barely present story, battles gave me plenty of memorable moments. It’s pretty good propaganda for the Imperium, making Space Marines seem utterly unstoppable, even when facing a whole world full of enemies.
And yet I could have stopped playing by the end of the first campaign and never looked back. There was little to be invested in, and a person can only kill so many Orks and capture so many victory points before they begin to question their life choices. I try to avoid that sort of introspection when I can. Sanctus Reach’s unit and faction design and flexible mechanics deserve a much better campaign and fewer constantly recycled objectives.
Warhammer 40K: Sanctus Reach is out now on Windows via Steam for £23/$30/€28.
Like a sentient species that has newly acquired interstellar travel, the various guises of the Warhammer universe have undergone a scattering in the last few years. Morphing from the rigorously-curated Games Workshop property that only the now-fallen giant THQ was allowed to touch, Warhammer is now a (still rigorously-curated) plethora of titles spanning pretty much every genre short of football management. Oh, wait, no, there's actually one of those as well. Warhammer 40,000: Sanctus Reach is yet another of these titles, arriving with existential inevitability just as the furor around CA's Warhammer Fantasy Total War title has calmed a little.
And it's back to the grim darkness of the far future where there is only war. Once again, developer Slitherine return to this sunny setting to bring more Space Marine-on-ork violence, as they did in their previous outing, Armageddon. This time around though, things are on a slightly more intimate scale, with units representing squads or one larger unit such as a tank. Therefore the 'epic scale' mass warfare feel of Armageddon is replaced with something much more intimate.
And you know with gaming, when you really boil it down, it comes to quality of life. How much fun are you having? A little lack of polish can be forgiven if the game is so much fun you barely notice the technical shortcomings. Sanctus Reach? It's most of the way there. But if you had a storm bolter to my head and I was forced to be completely honest, I'd have to admit that for the price point there are a few too many areas that are rough. Overlooked features and bad UI can take away from some of the fun.
So you're leading your intrepid Space Wolves in an assault on orkish positions. You've taken the time to position your Whirlwind armoured artillery on raised ground overlooking the battlefield, and your airships are spotting for you, allowing you to rain devastation down on the enemy. Sensing a sea change in the flow of battle, you seize the initiative and storm the enemy lines with Rhino Infantry Fighting Vehicles packed with squads of brave Space Marines. Reaching a suitable front you unload your troops... and then get bogged down in shuffling through the embarked units in order to find the ones you want to unload. Basically, this is done by disembarking everyone and then re-embarking the ones you didn't want to disembark in the first place. If you're getting fed up with me saying 'embark' and 'disembark' over and over, imagine how it feels when you're actually trying to do it in the heat of combat.
But this little annoyance doesnt put you off and you are back at it, working out how your handful of Space Marine units can possibly withstand the continuous spew of the greenskin plague. You bring your powerful dreadnaught to the flank to protect your vulnerable side. It shreds and rips their units apart. It really feels powerful, but then you know these orks are many. But you know in your gut, there are too many of them even for the brave immortal that resides within the mighty machine. But then you see your 2 bike units have still got their turn left, and they are fast enough to reach the area this turn. You speed them over to lend support, but make sure they do not get too close, yet, lest they get pulled from their metal steeds.
Meanwhile across the other side of your line you see the daft orks are piling up their wrecked machines, which is forming a barricade that you can use against their masses. You channel the enemy between their own wreckage and a hill, forcing them into a shooting gallery, where your Space Marine infantry and Multi Melta units sit waiting. Your hero with his power glove engages them in melee, blocking their primary route forcing all their units to sit and wait to get past him. They are orks though, and they shoot into their own front lines to get an occasional hit against the hero. But you know this can last a while and it will buy you all the time you need. But then your heart sinks. From the fog of war you see the huge metal monstrosity lurching forward towards this bottleneck. Gargant!
This is the sort of thing that can happen and you get a real sense of unit purpose. Put the right unit against the correct enemy and the formula works. You turn the tide like the elite Space Marines should.
The campaign modes are, frankly, unfinished. There are blank screens where mission background text should be, and trying to navigate the menus for the campaign (including a bemusing troop levelling system) can often be more of a challenge than the battles themselves. This is by no means a deal-breaker, you understand. Once again, it feels like its just a matter of a couple more man-hours needed in the dev studio. As it stands at the moment, Sanctus Reach teeters on an unsteady precipice between Alpha build, Early Access and full release, without tidily falling into any one camp. No doubt many of these concerns can be fixed after release (and hopefully will be), but we're once again back at the question that defines this era in PC gaming: should we be buying unfinished games?
So you're probably worrying. But don't panic too much! The love that the studio feels for the setting is apparent in every design decision. Tactical options abound, and while I moaned about it a moment ago, the ability to move troops around in Rhinos is a great tactical perk in game, despite its poor user experience implementation. While the enemy AI is less than stellar, it simulates orkish tactics well. They'll swarm your positions, and cause you all manner of problems as they engage with your recon units, pinning them down in melee combat until you can spare the reinforcements needed to free them up and limp them back to your lines. Unit variety is decent, ranging from small four-man trooper squads (occasionally led by special commanders with your usual Warhammer 40K loadouts) to Titans and Gargants. Units can move and fight, or fight and move, with niche-use fight-move-fight orders (with dramatically-reduced movement range after the attack) allowing for set-piece drive-by attacks and fighting withdrawals that favour units designed for that, like fast bike units.
Despite the clear love of the setting that the designers have implemented, there is a decided lack of background fluff on where you are and what you're doing. This seems strange - Warhammer 40,000 started life as a straightforward sci-fi miniature wargame with a Tolkien-like attention to detail, and to focus on the game and brush over the fluff doesn't sit right at all. In fact, it feels very much like the storyline and background detail are still to be implemented. Yet another place where it maybe feels like Slitherine ran out of time.
There is still polish to be done by the devs before it's this is a refined experience, but a lot of the issues can be overlooked once you get an hour or two into the core game and you are working out how to hold a line against the waves of greenskin. Much of the central gameplay is there, and there are loads of great ideas and units to extend tactical range. I feel more patches are in bound, with a new one out today to accompany Sanctus Reache's release date.
With Sanctus Reach, Slitherine are just now starting to show what they are really capable of in the sci-fi strategy arena and I look forward to seeing how this Warhammer 40K partnership turns out over the coming years.
Ultimately, this is the thing - Sanctus Reach is a cool and fun turn-based 3D wargame that fans of Warhammer 40K will no doubt lap up. I had a lot of fun with it and I'm certainly going to be stepping back into our dark human future for more.
Land Raiders exploded to Bolter Fire in Final Liberation (you had like 2/6 chance of hitting the track, which had a very high chance of destroying the tank, even with a squad of bolter infantry), so the rear armour of the Rhino is a step in the right direction!For all their professed love of the franchise, they could stay at least somewhat faithful to it... instead of having land raiders with the same rear armour as rhinos and dreadnoughts that stink at melee and die to big shootas.
Also, they tried so hard to have nordic sounding names that it sometimes looks like someone let a cat on the keyboard... with names like Hlkk and Kljuf. :D
Still, I kind of like it, will soon finish the second campaign.
btw, here is the checklist for my mod:
What do you think I should consider adding?
Stats on level up sounds good, but I will have to see wheter it is possible (or whether stats are always read from the squads.csv file, in which case, I would have to add some extra abilities for that).btw, here is the checklist for my mod:
What do you think I should consider adding?
How about giving squads some small bonus to stats on level up? And possibly the ability to pick the levelup perk instead of randomly giving you something useless? :D
The level up, unit carry over and map generator would really make things a lot better (and the AI too, but it is a bit vague...).Future plans for Sanctus Reach
Sanctus Reach released less than two weeks ago and it has been extremely well received. We’re really glad we received such a marvelous reception and we’re grateful for all the support the fans are showing.
When we started development, we knew this would be an ambitious project. We worked very hard to reach our goals: to capture the true Warhammer 40,000 tabletop fans interest with a turn-based game that would catch their imagination. We humbly think that Sanctus Reach was a really good first step in that direction.
We have many plans to improve upon this foundation and though we can’t reveal many details yet (we will soon!), for now let’s focus on what is directly ahead of us.
What are we currently working on? Besides the obvious bug fixing and balancing, we’re focusing on a number of areas.
• Force Selection – our goal is to improve the usability of this screen to make it easier to navigate
• Unit Carry over – we’d like to give more control over what units the player can bring to battle
• Pre-Battle Flow – we want to improve the flow and reduce the number of screens the player has to go through to start a battle
• Map Generator – we want to improve the variety of victory conditions and force compositions in random maps to make them more interesting
• Level Up – we aim at giving the player more control over the skills their units receive when they level up
• Difficulty Levels – introducing different difficulty levels
• More Story – we will give a bit more background story to players as they play through the campaigns
• Unit Introductions – similar to above but introducing the player to the units somehow so we can explain their strengths and weaknesses for both player and enemy units
• Morale System – we’re looking forward to bringing improvements to this
• Melee system – as above
• AI Improvements – we will always improve the AI!
These are the current plans: they are sizeable changes and we don’t know when we’ll manage to implement all of them, but we’ll do our best.
The changes we are working on will specifically target those issues raised by you, the players. We are always listening to all kinds of feedback and always reading the forum, and your feedback, suggestions and criticism have been extremely useful! We have a lot on the table right now and we can promise well-rounded improvements to make Sanctus Reach better and better.
That isn’t all, of course. We have ambitious plans for the future and for new content.
Stay tuned for further news – we’ve only just begun.