Age of Wonders 4
Age of Wonders 4 let’s you conquer a fantasy realm with a race of your own design. Enter a magical realm in which to face fierce opponents and manipulate the realm to your advatage. Face off against up to seven other players or follow the campaign missions to battle against AI. Using a blend of 4X strategy and turn-based tactical combat the game puts a unique twist on the genre that encourages experimentation. For the first time in the series, the narrative unfolds through dynamic story events triggered by player-world interactions. Much like Stellaris or Crusader Kings players can influence the course of these events, catering to their individual playstyle or immediate objectives. As a continuation of the Age of Wonders franchise, you face the challenge of dealing with the returned Wizard Kings. What are these god-like beings scheming?
Genre: Strategy RPG
Year: 2023
Players: 1-8
Team size: 30+
My part: Narrative Design
Goal: Concept and implement story events and quests, and write lore.
Company
Triumph Studios creates fantasy games about conquering the world. With more than 25 years of experience the studio brought forth two remarkable series: Age of Wonders and Overlord. Paradox Interactive acquired the company in 2017, and it has since integrated well with their existing team of strategy game developers. Triumph Studios boasts a diverse team of over 30 employees representing various nationalities, with some members contributing remotely from their homes while the majority works from the office building situated in Delft, Netherlands.
Working at Triumph Studios taught me a great deal about healthy community relations. Through various channels the team stays in close contact to their fans and reacts to every feedback given. With a powerful modding tool at their disposal, the studios community is very active and constantly working on improving the Age of Wonders series.
Design process
When working on a sequel all narrative needs to be based on the existing lore. Next to learning the lore, I also needed to understand the tone and feeling of the older games. A very important part of what makes Age of Wonders unique is the feeling of personally ruling an entire empire. Whatever story I created, it needed to reflect upon being part in a saga as a powerful spell-weaving ruler.
My main task at Triumph Studios was to create story events which would convey short stories that in combination would give narrative to the players actions and fill the world with life. To design an event I distilled four important elements:
1. Epicness
2. Situational relevancy
3. Interesting decision
4. Playstyles
Playstyles refers to the difference in player decisions. With the highly customizable system, Age of Wonders 4 has in place, players could play their ruler in a million different ways. How do you write a story that both peace-loving and war-mongering players enjoy? That works for nature-loving druids and industrialists alike? My first approach made the stories to bland, too general. The stories needed to feel more personal and take player choices in account. Looking at examples from literature I then went with an approach that would leave parts of the story to the players imagination. “A group of loyal worshippers” could be a church, a cult, fans or just patriots.
The biggest challenge in creating these events was the strict word limit that made creating these feel like writing a poem. Every sentence had to be carefully constructed to balance information and flavour while offering interpretation opportunities for the players based on their playstyle.
I was excited to work with Triumph Studios house-own engine, since it has an interesting way of scripting that allows for little errors, unlike anything I have seen before. It was also interesting to learn how their localization tools and in-text hyperlinks work.
A significant challenge I encountered was devising names for the name generators, encompassing names for individuals, cities, titles, and racial descriptions. For every faction, I drafted a profile detailing characteristics and potential speech patterns, noting aspects like commonly used letters and whether the tonality leaned towards melodious or harsh consonants. I drew inspiration from the real world and delved into onomastics to understand name formations and the inherent traits associated with specific names. Armed with this knowledge, I established naming conventions for each faction, such as prevalent suffixes. Using these guidelines, I was able to generate numerous names swiftly.
