See the ice dwarf, Simon came back and said that he has an idea for what he wanted him to look like, gave us a picture of Diego Maradona.
The Making of Stronghold Legends
Hi everyone and welcome to another Firefly Studios video.
Today we are going to be talking about the trials and tribulations in the making of Stronghold Legends with Producer Paul and Lead Designer Simon Bradbury.
If you haven't dipped your toes into Stronghold Legends before just know that you can catapult werewolves in that game
so it might be worth checking the Steam Edition or the Stronghold Collection on Steam but for now let's get to the questions.
Why Fantasy?
So the most obvious burning first question, why Legends? Specifically why fantasy?
Well I mean actually one interesting fact was Paul got really excited about the fantasy element straight away but then I told him
it wasn't to do with Ann Summers or anything like that, he was less keen on it.
Seriously, I think we made so many games, Stronghold games like throwing rocks, chipping away at the wall, climbing with ladders,
we just thought surely there's got to be some different ways to attack the castle.
To some degree it was born out a desire to come up with some different ways to attack castles so having things like
walk up the walls, climb on the top, having units turn other units, flying units, burrowing units, a little bit of magic,
it was a way to play with castles and castle siege and I think that fantasy element allowed us and gave us that leeway to try some different ways to attack the castle.
Obviously it was a sort of more skirmish combat focussed game so you wanted it to be quite varied if you are going to play it many many many times in multiple games or skirmish.
I mean why fantasy, outside of the estates and the different ways to attack the castle, also I think it added a different setting
so obviously you've got knights of the round table and the Arthurian legends, you've got Vlad Dracula and all those kind of creepy castle side of things,
and then you've got the slightly more ice, the Germany Legends mixed with a little bit of Philip Pullman going on.
Basically we took all of the various other castle kind of fantasy things and put them together.
You even end up with all on one map in lots of cases, that's quite interesting visually.
You did and that kind of what we wanted to do, what would happen if you took Dracula versus Winter is coming versus the Arthurian law and put them together.
It is interesting because if you play the three different types, they've all got very different play styles, one is kind of noble which is the winter law,
the units are powerful and strong, some are sneaky which is obviously the Transylvanian crew whether that's catapulting werewolves over your walls
or creeping a tower and converting your archers to their side or then you've got the Arthurian law who played very differently,
that's like a squad of heroes so the play styles are very different so that's what the fantasy allowed us to experiment with some of the core Stronghold game plays.
Production Problems
Were there any issues in terms of design or development with introducing quite a different concepts like flying units,
the ability of smash it all down with a special power. Were there any issues in terms of balancing,
was it difficult to code because it was built on the Stronghold 2 engine so it's doing some different things with the same engine.
I think flying was easier. I guess so you don't have to worry about walls. Path finding is just one line.
Exactly, what a fantastic relief, no path finding required so path flying actually was easier, we did all the hard heavy lifting
with walls and building walls and screwing with the path finding so flying stuff was easy.
Yeah but the biggest problem with the flying stuff was that obviously we had the camera height, you need flying stuff to go over like towers and walls
but at the same time you need to make sure that your camera can get that in. It's not necessary a slightly technical challenge, especially back in 2006.
They are appearing much closer to the camera aren't they? yeah and the more we zoom out the more we have to rendering more stuff in the scene,
there is all these technical challenges that we had to make design decisions based on that.
We knew the flying stuff was going to be a bit different and not something that could ever happen in a normal Stronghold game so it was cool that we could add it into Stronghold Legends.
Yeah we don't have too many, we have the kamikaze bats and then you've got the witches who are a little bit like the fighters and you've got the dragons.
Yeah they were a pain. They were harder to do but they're great, they are like an ultimate bomber, you only get them after a lot of effort
and you've got to hatch your egg and then you get your dragon, you can't have more than one going at a time so when people,
in multiplayer dragons are fantastic, the timing of when to use your dragon is quite crucial.
Yeah but they are massive and they've got big wings. Yeah, Paul always talk about that, it's a production standpoint, where is your imagination Paul?
Dragons and towers and wings, yeah it's not easy.
Where's the sequel?
Would you ever consider returning to the fantasy setting?
Paul?
It was quite controversial at the time, still a lot of Stronghold fans they've... well it's strange because things have changed and maybe it's different but basically at the time.
Game of Throne is pretty hot right now, just saying.
I've heard! Game of Throne has kind of normalized fantasy. It was always out there but very much appealed to a certain group, games.
Games of Thrones brought it into the mainstream in a big way more than anything else probably has.
There is a story there because when I was showing Stronghold Legends, I did a press tour in the US and I was in San Francisco
I'm showing it to the editor of PC Gamer in 2005 maybe and I was showing it to him and he was playing it and he was going do you know what this reminds me of a book I'm starting to read
this Game of Thrones things and he'd started reading Game of Thrones, he was like about six months into Game of Thrones in 2005,
he was going 'you should read this' so I did, fantastic obviously thank you very much whoever you are, I've forgotten your name
but the trouble was that I've read all the first four books and now what do I do watch the show or do I sit and wait for him to write the final books, I don't know I'm stuck.
Anyway what were you talking about?
Giving this return of fantasies, popular culture,
Lord or the Rings is embed in the public culture at the moment
but with Game of Thrones specifically we've got this return of it with the Witcher, doing incredibly well and those kind of games.
I think it's different, Game of Thrones has normalized it but at the same time now everything is
going to be compared to "are you just ripping off Game of Thrones?", anything you do will be compared.
So we've missed the opportunity to make Legends 2.
I think what we could say at this juncture Nick maybe is that Stronghold Next is not a fantasy game.
There you go
Who knows we might in the future but we haven't gotten any plans at the moment I don't think.
Best Bits
With references to the units that changed the gameplay quite considerably, what are your personal favourite if you have to pick one?
Go Paul and I'll pick a different
So whatever I say you'll pick something different.
You can't say dragons.
It's difficult, there is so many units. Do you like the creepers?
Is that what you are going for?
They are different.
Oh he is going to do the thing where he goes through all of them
I was going to say the bats because they are the cheapest thing in the world.
You know what you could do worse than the bats because they are great, they are obviously not mine but you said it.
No, creepers are the most interesting because they can climb walls, they turn the opponent's enemies to yours so that's a bit different, you don't see that in many other games
It's quite cool because if you saw one coming there was a panic element and they are quite powerful so it was a nice risk reward strategy.
Yeah, and you are kind of used to in RTS games having your entire base taking over when you're defeated but there aren't that many examples of
units that capture individual units or groups of units and can slowly take up your base almost like a zombie plague.
Yeah it is what it is, it's like a zombie plague. I think both those units that Paul has chosen are excellent units
to use in the game from a gameplay perspective, my unit is going to be one that's slightly more harder to use and slightly less useful in certain ways but the werewolf catapult..
I like it because it's so funny and if you are clever with it you can chain werewolf catapults together so that
you can effectively have these logistics chains where werewolves get catapulted from catapult A to B and then they land and automatically to B to C.
You can set up an endless supply of reinforcement of werewolves. A it's funny and B it's actually quite useful, it just takes a little bit more lateral thinking to get going.
The ice dwarf, Simon came back and said that he has an idea for what he wanted him to look like, gave us a picture of Diego Maradona.
That had come from a very long train journey with someone from Take 2 who is a PR guy and we were sitting there, we had a few beers and we went Diego Maradona.
It all just clicked
Sometimes you just need moment of genius.
That was not
Priority: Skirmish
One final question that has just come up a lot, quite a few people have said that the sort of combat
and the RTS aspect of Legends is one of the best features in the game. Why do you think that is, do you know?
No but I think a little bit as Paul just said, because it's a bit like the way Crusader 1 was based on Stronghold 1
and then we got to get it to be even more polished and Stronghold 1 is a pretty polished game,
Stronghold 2 was very ambitious and it probably wasn't quite as polished when it first came out as it should have been
but with Legends we got a chance to actually make it run well on most machines, so not only did it run well
but also we put some of those polish elements in there I think a lot of those went down to things like unit control.
I remember looking through the units because like some units in Stronghold 2 would do like crazy huge lunging moves
which aren't working in RTS because they are going to go straight through their opponent so we stripped stuff away
that we knew weren't working in Stronghold 2 and we redid certain things to make the combat feel better.
They're so involved, the games have so many subsystems too, it's an RTS but it's also a builder as its strategy estate system into it
it's got multiplayer, single play, freebuild, there is so much stuff we have to do that it's tricky to do all of those things right
and we don't always get everything right so with Legends, we've got that time to polish and polish and polish.
It's got a really nice formation system in there so you could put your troops in formation and you could set the direction formation.
Things like that, organizing your troops feel a lot better in Legends as well, I think that was the other thing,
people felt that they had more control over their armies in Legends.
And I guess people appreciate that when they are doing that in addition to base building, simulation, economy,
all the constituents parts that make a Stronghold game.
We tried to make sure that battles were more spaced out as in units who had more space around them
which is always treating in the RTS because you need space. Just the refinements, lots of refinements from 2.
Yeah we focussed a lot more on skirmish didn't we and so the skirmish play plays so much better in Legends I think,
multiplayer as well, there's some of the funniest games I've had because you can exploit things a little bit more in Legends?
because there are so many different troops on top of the normal troops, you can find little one on ones that are a bit unbalanced perhaps but I think that is good
if you don't want to play with them, people in multiplayer can have rules that you don't play with them
but when you are experimenting with them, there is a joy going on, oh this guy is using those and I just know
if I use this and this he is toast and experimenting and finding that stuff out is brilliant.
Multiplayer had loads more options in it, remember there's deathmatch, king of the hill, the economic war, capture the flag is in Legends
and we've also got loads of options you can tweak in multiplayer, we even have the voting system where other players could communicate
via sort of a traffic light system as to whether they liked what you'd chosen, it's just loads of refinements and it's nice.
It was more focus on skirmish and multiplayer, we kind of needed to do that a little bit because of the variation in the unit types
meant that there's nothing, you can't do rock-paper-scissors when you've got about 30 things.
More like witch, vampire, werewolf, ice dwarf, Diego Maradona ...
unfortunately that's all we've got time for today as Paul and Simon need to get back upstairs
to work on Stronghold Next and MetaMorph but please suggest any future ideas for making of videos
and as always like, share and subscribe and return next week at 3 p.m. for another video from Firefly Studios on YouTube.
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