Disco Elysium OUT NOW (previously: No Truce With The Furies)

[Gaspard]

Ah, so you are inspired to have NTWTF become as popular as CoD? That sounds more like pure fantasy than "fantastic realism".

But the game sounds up my alley, so I wish you the best of luck.

Hey, aim high! Cheers and thanks!

A question for the wider circle:
What are your thoughts (and fears) when it comes to our proposed approach to combat encounters? Do you think you´d enjoy that, just be curious or ask for a refund the first chance you get?

Here are some of my personal musings on the subject:

When I think of it, some of the more recent titles like Obsidian´s Pillars of Eternity in the expansion White March Part II already experimented more freely with it in their short text adventures. In the vanilla game those consisted mostly of "fast travel" encounters where you could jump over obstacles and throw ropes (if had them in your inventory). In White March the text adventures were more varied and also tied in with combat.

Those who have checked out the new Torment beta builds have seen that there they´ve dissolved the PoE-type text adventure aspect into the regular combat encounter - the Crisis system. There you move around the map, like you would in a turned based combat encounter, but among other things you can persuade or taunt your enemies. A different type of character could instead interact with specific scenery objects (in a dialogue screen, again) to influence the outcome of the encounter.

Now imagine this reversed - where the traditional combat encounter is similarly dissolved into or merged with what can be done in a dialogue encounter. I am sure it´ll become clearer when you see it in action.​

 

[Black Angel]

Although I'm looking forward to it, I'm actually haven't seen any gameplay footage of PoE and I didn't pay attention to the ones for T:TON , since I want to see it for myself. From what I can get in your description,

1. PoE: White March -> Texts are used to deal with random encounter and to, basically, avoid combat in somewhat a manner of subterfuge
2. T:TON -> The Crisis System allows conversation (not just taunt) during combat, thus allow some problem solving option other than just outright killing your opponent

No Truce With The Furies make combat encounter happens as one traverse a dialogue tree/choosing an option? (Sorry if I misunderstood, English ain't my mother-tongue and I'm also kind of stressed today)

 

[Irwin John Finster]

Everytime I see this thread I still read it as "No Truce with the Furries" so I think the developers are going to have to go ahead and change the entire focus of the game to that.

 

[Gaspard]

No Truce With The Furies make combat encounter happens as one traverse a dialogue tree/choosing an option?

That'll be a part of it, sure, although there's more to how combat is handled in No Truce than simply picking dialogue options. For the impatient there are hints in the press release bullet points as well as the screenshots. Aside from that we'll get into it in greater detail at a later date.

Everytime I see this thread I still read it as "No Truce with the Furries"

It is not a bug, that is a feature. Among progressive developers working on ambitious cRPGs right now it is a very popular PR strategy.

 

[Black Angel]

That'll be a part of it, sure, although there's more to how combat is handled in No Truce than simply picking dialogue options. For the impatient there are hints in the press release bullet points as well as the screenshots. Aside from that we'll get into it in greater detail at a later date.

Ah, so that's how it is. I did take a look at one of the screenshot here, where we can choose to 'aim to miss'. In that case, sounds fun! My fear would only be if it felt underwhelming, in terms of it doesn't felt much impact on choices and consequences aspect. Since you guys aimed at having the characters being a total failure, and in turns have the audiences relate to them, it wouldn't be good if it felt underwhelming/barely felt.

Also, I really liked you guys, even the Codex are beginning to like Marat Sar who's just starting to post there. Marat Sar catches attention with such a personality, despite being newly registered. Such bold statement he posted there, I liked it. Hope the initial adoration don't dull your spirit and passion, though. Please deliver!

 

[Gaspard]

Thanks, Black Angel

Meanwhile I wrote up a short post about what goes into our backgrounds. I’ll do that by elaborating on one of the screenshots from our recent press release (Read it here), namely the moody one with the bad-ass car and the rain and the big building.

I worked on that – the Perikarnassian church. It is one of the landmarks in the game and even before I began our AD Aleksander had made this early mood concept (that’s the image above).

The environment started changing during production. First, the area is newly sketched out (like here) and a rough 3D block-in of the landscape and buildings etc gets done in Blender. At this point I look at lots of references, sketch some and discuss my ideas with the writers and the AD. Eventually I end up with this:

Based on this sketch I do some variations before going into more detail and minute variations, below, along with the original idea and the rough block-in for comparison.

As you can see by the green tick – at first we went with that one. We had to press on and before I could give it to Mikk for modeling I drew up a slightly more detailed image. In this phase I tried out some colors that would fit the mood of the place. Meanwhile I got to work on the church interior. As this is something you won’t be seeing today I’ll fast forward a bit

When you compare the model to the concept you’ll see that it has gone through some changes again. The isometric perspective can be a harsh mistress. From some angles you lose detail and other angles butcher the silhouette. In Blender I went back in and made both smaller and larger modifications to the model. There, now we could basically put it in the game! It just needs materials.

Here’s the render of the church where I’ve applied base textures and tweaked the model some more – note the angle of the roof, the tower didn’t really work visually before and I attached a balcony/boardwalk to its side among other details. Now the render’s composites (the various maps our custom shaders use) went back to Rostov, who gave it a paintover.

Et Voila! Ain’t a thing. Thanks for tuning in.

 

[Hassknecht]

I really like the look of the church in the third to last picture. It has this kinda crisp detailed look to it, a bit like Commandos.
The final version has bit more of a drawn/pastell look to it, looks awesome. Although I do prefer the kinda more detailed look of the earlier version
That carriage-thingy is really cool, really digging the general style.

 

[Gaspard]

I really like the look of the church in the third to last picture. It has this kinda crisp detailed look to it, a bit like Commandos.
The final version has bit more of a drawn/pastell look to it, looks awesome. Although I do prefer the kinda more detailed look of the earlier version
That carriage-thingy is really cool, really digging the general style.

Thanks! Well - when you see the big picture I hope you'll see it works well together

Our technical genius (Kuubaas on the TIGsource board) wrote up a post about the Vitruvius Map that helps us with characters' clothes management:

New Tech Day: Occluding Clothes

Hi there! Here's a quick writeup of how we occlude wearables, mainly for coming back to when future me is puzzled over his past decisions.

No Truce's fantastical realism does not lend itself to clearly distinguishable character classes that look so much alike you could get away with just a texture swap. What we have is more or less everyday clothes on more or less (mostly less) everyday people. That calls for underwear, shirts, pants, boots, coats, hats, gloves, etc. In other words, a truckload of assets to be combined in a truckload of ways. That, in turn, means a lot of mesh clipping if you're not careful. The problem with careful is that it’s time consuming and not fun at all.


Naive approach

The initial plan was chopping the character base mesh into pieces and hiding the meshes not visible under current apparel. That would include chopping up shirts which could be partly covered by a coat or a jacket. And trousers which could be partly covered by various lengths of boots. Or the other way around. Referential joke: Hey, that’s even more chopping than Hugh Jackman.


“Buttoned up, under cloak, sleeves rolled, high waist pants, disco pants. WHERE DO WE CHOP?”

This is apparently where technical artists should put their foot down and ask character artists to start standardizing their clothes. But I’m a people pleaser and wouldn't dare tell kinnas how to art, so I prefer sorting things out before opting for the "technological limitations" excuse.


A less naive approach [sub](Did he just call industry’s standard methods naive? Read on to find out.)[/sub]

Since we're in the privileged position of not pushing many polygons, we don't really need the polygon reduction from aforementioned method and could actually just get away by making the underlying geometry invisible.

And once we’re just setting transparencies, we don't even need to do it by polygon. A low-resolution map will suffice.

However, we still have a few problems to tackle:

- each article of clothing does not know what it occludes or what occludes it.
- each article of clothing is an arbitrary soup of polygons that does not know or care where on the body it sits.

For the time being the former will be handled by a simple script which places assets into an array (hat/coat/shoes/etc)and they will occlude each other in a static order.

The latter is a more interesting task however. To avoid any time-consuming proximity baking, we will need to describe the body mesh and the wearable assets in a single topological space.

We will define an additional UV map to each asset to describe just that.


Enter the Vitruvian Map


Da Vinci would be proud.

Instead of overwhelming our 3D modelling pipeline with tens of edge loops to consider, we simply add the task of mapping your object to the Vitruvian Man above...


Jacket mapped to the vitruvian man.


...and making a little b/w map to describe where the object occludes. (could be automated I guess)

Jacket’s occlusion map to be applied to underlying layers of clothing.


In engine, we loop over the array of clothes, grab the vitruvian map as we go from outer to inner layers, multiply it to the previous ones and apply it to each layer. So a shirt will receive the jacket’s vitruvian map and body will receive the shirt’s vitruvian map multiplied by the jacket’s vitruvian map and will thus be occluded by both. Use the multiplied maps to dictate alpha cutoff and you're done.

The jacket's vitruvian applied to body alpha. Cascading nature of this method not illustrated.


Completely unrelated

Sometimes we keep buggy code to use for a potential dream sequence.​

 

[omphaloskepsis]

The games looks very promising and the art is fantastic. I'm surprised it looks so good with such a (presumably) small crew.

I'm looking forward to it's release.

 

[Chud]

So wait...it's NOT that? I am disappoint...

It certainly gives a whole new context to that picture of a body hanging from a tree. "No Truce with Furries," indeed.

 

[Brivoo]

What is it with isometric games and having hanging corpses from trees? It seems like an oddly frequent thing.

Either way coloured me excited. I've always wanted a proper game where combat wasn't a focus or a mechanic and it seems my prayers have been answered.

It'll definitely be on my watch list and if the writing turns out to be as good as it promises to be, It'll be absolutely perfect.

 

[valcik]

A question for the wider circle:
What are your thoughts (and fears) when it comes to our proposed approach to combat encounters? Do you think you´d enjoy that, just be curious or ask for a refund the first chance you get?​

I'm fine with text-based combat system depending solely on your stats and rolls, that's how it worked in good old PnP sessions anyway.

 

[Gaspard]

Our AD Rostov writes more about our art pipeline:

I always enjoy learning how other artists work and seeing how images come together. In that spirit I have taken to a habit of saving periodic work in progress shots of my own pieces as I spend time on them. Here’s a rundown on a piece of concept art relating to a more run down part of Martinaise.



There’s a general back and forth over many quick and ugly thumbnails where we get a basic idea of what’s what with the writers. This is where most of the level design gets worked out. We talk through what the main plot points dictate for the area, we figure out pathways how the player should move through the location and make sure there’s elevation changes so the bare geometry of the area looks good and casts interesting shadows. The player is free to pan the camera around as they please but each location is designed with a certain composition in mind. There’s a an abstract shape to each area that subconsciously feeds into the atmosphere and how the player perceives a location. There’s an asymmetric balance to the region where the center of mass lies on the field amidst the huddle of houses with a protrusion leaping out. In artist-speak there’s “tension” in that.



I block the level with basic 3d shapes and we test it in engine to see how good the distances and sense of scale feel. From here it’s pretty useful to just screencap the block-in from the viewport, run a find edges filter on it in Photoshop and use that as the underlay on which to start drawing. The light grey lines up there are just that.



This is the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” step. Finishing up on the linework. When thinking about what exactly to draw and what reference material to gather I want to avoid generic finishing village photos lest it becomes another place you’ve already been. Instead I look for photos of old dachas. Point is that poor people live here, not ye old timey fisherman cosplayers.



Once the drawing is sufficiently far along I start blocking in the shapes with flat fill colors. As I go along I go back and draw some more bits and pieces here and there since I’m impatient like that. But the idea is to start getting some sense of what the scene might actually look like. For convenience I keep every shape on its own layer so I can search around for colours by just dragging the hue slider around on each individual shape and layer.



Another bonus to keeping stuff on seperate layers is I can lock the opacity for each of them which allows me to take a wild textured brush to the canvas without fear of ruining the edges. It’s a good technique in general for more illustrative pieces where the point is to convey practical information rather than to show off the brush stroke of a painting.



The shadows here come from the 3d block in I made earlier. I multiply it over the image and clean up where needed and add bits and pieces to the shadow layer where I’ve drawn new stuff not present in the block in. There’s a bit more to do but it’s mostly just detailwork and cleanup, it’s pretty much done by now.

And here’s the final piece:

 

[Chromevod]

On a whim I did a Google search, to see where else the game's being promoted. In doing so I found a poetry catalogue with the same title, which I thought was a bit amusing.

Seriously though, I think I'm actually getting a little bit hyped for this. So kudos there.

 

[Gaspard]

Oh no! This thread is almost on the second page now! Let's fix that.

Seriously though, I think I'm actually getting a little bit hyped for this. So kudos there.

Thanks!

I give you this weeks news post by one of our writers Andreas W. He writes about the tools we use, their inherent issues and what it's like in general to write for games. Grab a Gamma Gulp and enjoy:

DEV BLOG:

Writing has never been this hard. Of course this isn’t the sort of talk you’d like to hear. A creation should come into being with natural elegance, should it not? Strain means dull work and the smell of sweat, lack of ideas probably, etc.


Or not. Once I co-wrote a play with a friend (Jaak Tomberg http://smallblueabsence.blogspot.com.ee/). Everything was nearly finished, but three scenes remained to be written. With a clause that it’s me that wants to write them (we generally took turns at writing and switched between techniques, at times either of us wrote every other sentence). My friend was becoming impatient. The deadline was approaching. The clock was ticking.


It wasn’t an old school inspiration thing, it was rather like a chess puzzle you construct in your head with no clear shape, inexpressable as a graphic presentation. The field of text is laid out in your head and lone sentences are situated on it as protruding points of tension. But these are not worded sentences and they don’t express any fully formed thoughts. Everything falls into place at the moment you are finally ready to lay it all out, get it out of your head.


In the end, the time was right. Rather a question of decisiveness than finding a way: „I’m going to do it now.“ Later, when it was ready, I sat on the ground with my back against the wall, as if I had just ran 10 kilometers at my top speed or wrestled for an hour against a strong opponent. The fatigue was aggressive, sudden and physical.


This sort of thing is almost completely absent in game writing. The concentration part is there. The graphical chess scheme of structure and developments is there. The sentences still appear from the darkness. But rest, there is none. Rest always comes when the thing is ready, or, when running, if you can stop. There’s no such moment in game writing. It isn’t ready for months. All relief is temporary. For a moment it feels like something fell into place, that the eternally branching end of the dialogue has somehow logically found its way back into the main hub. But then you realize that the ends of all the other branchings haven’t made it there yet. And they will not go willingly.


So you have to force them. Every moment, all the time, there’s forcing of a logical structure. Like some kind of damn landing of Normandy. Taking it with force.


The main difference from all other writing (and I’ve written much of whatever else, starting with D&D campaigns and ending with opera libretti and scientific articles) is that you have a thousand endings. It doesn’t surprise neither you nor Deleuze, but it takes you to a place our lead designer Robert Kurvitz has described frankly: „While writing a book you always have lots of good ideas which you won’t write because they won’t fit. When writing a game you’re suddenly in a situation where you’re obligated to write down all your good ideas, and you’ll learn with unpleasant clarity if they were good ideas to begin with.“


While engaged in just that, we’ve encountered a little problem with Articy: Final Draft, the program that usually helps us tackle those thousands of branching endings. Sometimes it doesn’t. It seems possible that the size and complexity of our dialogues has reached the limit of Articy’s traction. It’s developers probably didn’t expect interactive literature to sprawl explosively like a borderless field of text (as it exists in the writer’s mind in its proto-being). And now we’re in a situation where we sometimes have to wait for the letters to appear on the screen with excruciating slowness. Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 is almost capable of rendering reality in real time, but Articy has some disagreements with it. We generally hope for Articy’s very flexible team to offer us their helping hand at some moment (and we are well aware it won’t be easy).


Another option is to rework our plans and start working on a dialogue editor instead of the game. You the public wouldn’t like this and you have every right to presume that we will not. However, it certainly couldn’t happen before the thousand ends of No Truce With the Furies have converged into a single concrete mother-node and made accessible to you.​

A field of text.​

 

[Gaspard]

In this week´s blog post Martin Luiga explains some of the resoning behind choosing a modern setting for our game, instead of, say, a steampunk or medieval setting. Before I get to that I´ll give a quick rundown of stuff that´s gone down since last week´s news post.

For example, you might enjoy reading the interview Fortress Occident´s lead designer and writer Robert Kurvitz gave Orange Bison. Stephen Harris asked the questions and Robert ran his mouth graciously enough. You can read the whole thing on the Orange Bison website (LINK).

Robert thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us! Firstly, the name; as far as I’m aware “No Truce with the Furies” is from a poem (and the title of a collection) by RS Thomas, you’ve said it’s a working title but is there any significance to it?

Indeed. And it’s not only the working title; it’s the launch title too. I remember when Chris Avellone was working on DLC for “Fallout: New Vegas”. He said somewhere that he enjoys giving them titles like “Old World Blues” and “Lonesome Road” – something you could never do with a major AAA title. Those all have to be called “Frontpoint”, apparently.

Well, “No Truce With The Furies” is not a huge AAA game so we have the same opportunity. We get to be authorial. The title makes sense for the story. You wake up as this psychologically embattled person, at the end of a long war against yourself and the world. While tortured, I like how “No Truce With The Furies” also implies a certain fighting spirit. If the battle is ceaseless, it’s not yet lost.

Also, Robert and Alexander, the lead artist of No Truce chewed some fat on an Estonian podcast. It´s all in Estonian, though, so it is more than likely that most of the NMA audience won´t make heads or tails about the whole thing. Here it is for those that want to listen to our design leads´ sexy voices anyhow:



Last but not least, yesterday a cute lil´ article went up on Killscreen (LINK) by an author who actually had paid some attention to the lore of No Truce With The Furies. Go, Maddi Chilton!

Having gone through their share of uprisings, wars, and rebuildings, it’s no wonder such foundational commentary is coming out of Estonia. It couldn’t be more different from Fallout’s nuclear Americana.

Critique is great BUT PRAISE IS BETTER!

Okay, enough gushing. Here´s the blog post typed up by No Truce With the Furies´writer Martin Luiga:

DEV BLOG:
THE BENEFITS OF A MODERN FANTASY WORLD

The world of No Truce! (we do have a proper name for it, but we’re shy) is not what you’d call “a generic genre world”. It is not pseudo-medieval stasis, as Forgotten Realms was, nor is it Fallout’s campy barbarism with guns. It is also not a Harry Potter/Batman/vampire fantasy world, which is basically “our world with a secret/special world within it”. Neither is it the tech-obsessed ‘punks’ of steam and cyber. It’s a modern fantasy world, a fantasy world in its modernity, which roughly corresponds to the middle part of our XXth century. Now that kind of thing opens up an array of new possibilities. It is a world with a promise of non-staticness, meaning, things appear undecided — they could go one way or the other. It is close enough to our own world for things to have meaning in it, it is a proper frame in which to explore themes relevant to our own society such as bigotry, power relations, politics, bureaucratic apparati, geopolitical relations, philosophy, ideology, religion et cetera. A pseudo-medieval world is not a proper frame for truly exploring themes of, for example, sexuality, for it lacks 1) a proper concept of sexuality, 2) an actual idea of societal progress and 3) a clear ideological dominant, which would be the place where values come from. All you can do in a static, societally unstructured world is give out-of-place shoutouts to present day communities for cheap popularity (“this is exactly my sexual orientation, how did they know?!”).

We find the ideological dominant missing because the western world is traditionally culturally critical of ideological dominants – critical of both state and religion. Anyhow, a classic fantasy world would feature two main ideologies – the “good” and the “evil”, of which the former is selfless and compassionate, but the other one is selfish and cruel. The attempts to overcome that have given us the Grittywelt – a world in which everyone is an asshole and pessimism rules the day. Unsurprisingly, Grittywelt is also static as hell and meaningful change is foreclosed from it. It is a “protection from false hopes”. As such, it is heavily unrealistic. Much more realistic would be people living in super gritty conditions, but not looking the part, that is, not really noticing the abnormal harshness of their conditions, because they don’t have much to compare them to, and being hopeful towards the next day, because surprise! This is how you do it. Survive, I mean. Being depressed is a luxury. In a way, I’d say we’re trying to create the obverse of the Grittywelt – a world in which everyone is empathizable, sort of a hero of their own story.

The modern era is also a fitting vessel for anachronisms – do we not have actual cyborg limbs and donkey-pulled carts operating in the same world at the modern era? Capitalism can also contain little feudalisms in a way, in which a single man or single family controls the entire economy of a town or a village and profits from it. And at the same time, it can also contain little socialist utopias, scientist villages, in which everything is provided by the State. Aside from being a basic feature of reality (anachronism is nothing more than time failing to fit the stereotype about it), it is also a lovable creative tool, allowing for a plethora of what-if-scenarios. Imagine a modern world, only without television; imagine a modern world in which there never was a global war, imagine a world in which fossil fuels are less available. Now, if you will, imagine one which has forgotten its antiquity, and one, in which there is not just water between the continents, but something worse as well — an anti-reality mass we call “pale” (also more on that later). Now imagine one, which has a legitimate and operative “religion of history” in place, which seeks for people it deems special enough to be the “vessel of progress”. (This is not an alternate history thing, by the way. An alternate history takes place in our world quite recognizably and has no more than one divergence point from history as it happened.)

One might ask, why would we not create an even more modern world, if we wanted to maximise our possibilities? Well one of the answers is that it would have destroyed the necessary element of escapism, another is that we cannot create a good alternate Information Era because we ourselves fail to understand the Information Era (More precicely, we have the information era in its infancy and it works via radio relays). We are too close to it and it is too new to understand it, it is “in progress”. The third reason would be that technology is not a fascinating subject for modern science fiction. It’s become a natural part of our reality. We don’t believe it’s going to save us anymore – it has failed to deliver for too long. I am of the belief that the themes of science fiction today are societal, political and psychological (one could maybe add aesthetical to it, for we also love the world for its beauty). All fantastic or sci-fi elements are means for best exploring those themes.

I have filled my page. That’s all for the time being. Thank you for reading.

​

Martin Luiga


Writer
​

Enjoy your week, mutants!
-

 

[Gaspard]

Oh, snap. Turns out the interview is the new most popular genre in writing. Heres a gargantuan wall of text back-and-forth between Robert/Marat Sar and the good people at Gamasutra.

I'm so excited I'm just pasting the link everywhere I go.

Go check it out - there are plenty new tidbits to dig out from that:

LINK

I'll give you the youtube from the interview - the music is too stellar not to

 

[Atomic Postman]

This looks absolutely brilliant. Although I've been burned by overinflated hype and expectation before, I'm certainly going to be keeping my eye on this one.

Could I get a bit of a tidbit on the setting? I'm getting Dishonored crossed with Depression era Louisiana vibes going on.

 

[Gaspard]

This looks absolutely brilliant. Although I've been burned by overinflated hype and expectation before, I'm certainly going to be keeping my eye on this one.

Could I get a bit of a tidbit on the setting? I'm getting Dishonored crossed with Depression era Louisiana vibes going on.

Dishonored has been mentioned before. It is interesting that both games advertise themselves as "moving paintings". So the drive to design something unique is definitely there. (By that I mean that Dishonored is a good example of a setting with unique art direction).

There's an introduction written up in one of the early developer blog posts. Here, these are the bits you want with the stage for No Truce! - Martinaise - in the end. I underlined it where it begins:

So the game takes place in the “bad part of the bad part of town” of the city of Revachol. The district you police is called Jamrock (“in honour of the island nation of Jamaica” nonetheless – or so I’m told by the boys in worldbuilding). More specifically, the neighbourhood “No Truce” takes place in is a coastal fraction of Jamrock called Martinaise. The city has been built and rebuilt across a span of four hundred years and the architectural styles present reflect that. We’re pedantic with how history works, in regards to the layers of technology and culture piling on top of each other. There are also modern cultural aspects that shape what different neighbourhoods look like. Immigrants from different parts of the world etc.

The game’s worldbuilding at large has places like Boogie Street, a street come ghetto of Semenine immigrants, whose abstract wood architecture and innovative techno music is poised to ride an invasive wave of pop culture to a civ style cultural victory. (Yes, really). There is Villalobos, the part of town populated by Mesque immigrants whose youth are essentially latino gangbangers in mesh wifebeaters. The neighborhood itself is a byzanthian labyrinth of housing that’s claimed the streets underneath; where one is never quite sure if you’re indoors or outside. Imagine a dungeon-district! An RPG city district that doubles as an ongoing dungeon, phasing from hidden street to meth-lab to salsa party.

Blam, you stepped into the wrong room motherfucker – salsa party!

Martinaise however is a coastal area. Here our “atmospheric target render” (another expression from the boys in worldbuilding) is encapsulated in the sentence: “I’ll wake up in a new life, shift shape and shoe shine.

Damn it all to do now, down by the seaside…”

Imagine old pre-revolution military pride dilapidating aside modern misery, while “On The Waterfront” style harbour work goes on in the background. The coast is marked by old Havanaesque architecture now in disrepair, large swathes of which have been demolished to make room for the ever expanding Greater Metropolitan Port of Revachol, which under coalition governance has grown into the world’s largest industrial harbour. Martinaise is where the revolution was ultimately lost. It is on these coasts that coalition forces landed to quell the uprising and it has the mortar scars to prove it. War damage is still apparent on most houses and locals have used the sturdier bits of ruin to support new, decidedly less baroque buildings. The era of Philipppe III The Squanderer (heir of Philip II The Misuser and Catherine The Lavish) is over, even if his ludicrous mounted likeness in bronze somehow survived. You see, among many, many other things, Philippe III also got prodigalwith military regalia. It was “one repulsive laugh after the other” with Phillippe.

Then the Turn-Of-The-Century Revolution came and wiped it all away. Today the equestrian monument is mostly seen by dockworkers and truck drivers.
​

 

[vdweller84]

I misread "no truce with the furries" and though this is yet another one of those threads.

The game looks cool BTW