A few months after the release of cRPG Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, we had an opportunity to chat with Creative Director Alexander Mishulin about the development of the game: Mythic Paths, the ever-changing landscape of Alushinyrra, player choices, additional management elements like the Kingdom/Crusade and more. What is more important, the amount of epic or a heartfelt personal story? Give it a read to find out.
Now, with the approaching arrival of Through the Ashes, the second DLC out of the three announced, it’s time to look forward and learn everything there is to know about the new addition – and, perhaps, about the previous DLC Inevitable Excess as well. We had the pleasure of chatting with Creative Director Alexander Mishulin and Lead Narrative Designer Alexander Kamzolov and asking them some questions about what the game has in store for players.
Gamespace: Please introduce yourself.
Alexander Mishulin: Hello, my name is Alexander Mishulin and I am the Creative Director at Owlcat Games.
Gamespace: Can you tell us about your general approach to the development of the base game and the DLCs? Have you planned for the three DLCs and settled on what they will be about from the very beginning?
Alexander Mishulin: We designed the base game without any regards to the future DLCs, it is a complete experience as we envisioned it. All the DLCs are designed as separate small games, based on the original one. We are trying to experiment with the game tone, structure and try to provide an experience a little bit different from the original game.
Gamespace: Kingmaker and Wrath seem to share the same basic formula when it comes to the DLC. A story-focused expansion (Wildcards & Inevitable Excess respectively), a side-story featuring a different group of characters (Varnhold’s Lot & Through the Ashes) and an endless dungeon (Beneath the Stolen Lands & DLC#3). Is it something intended or coincidental?
Alexander Mishulin: Some of it is intended, some coincidental and some even just seems like the same formula but is not. We liked how DLCs for the Kingmaker were received and wanted to stick to the same idea – play around the original game, providing slightly different versions of it for different audiences.
The Wildcards was designed as an DLC that revolves around a new class and companion (we tend to separate such experiences from those that focus on the additions to the story). The Inevitable Excess DLC was initially playing with the idea that we want to provide player with more content to play on the highest possible level. In the base game you have just several encounters after your character acquires the last mythic level, and the idea was to let the player play more with those powers. It was envisioned as rather combat heavy with several quite difficult and unusual fights being highlights. Synopsis was changed a couple of times before we chose this particular story, as we developed the DLC it became a more prominent part of the whole experience, and became more balanced between story and combat.
For Through the Ashes we wanted to tell a story about a different group of characters but also we wanted to try to take a break from the heroics of the original game and make a little bit darker and less epic story with the elements of the survival mechanics. Kingmaker at the same time was playing with the idea of the protagonist not being a king or queen but being a counselor.
As for the 3rd DLC – we had a very warm welcome for the Endless Dungeon mode and a lot of players asking us for the new version of it. Of course it will have new twists and will expand on the stories told in the Wrath of the Righteous, but it is deliberately similar to the original one in the Kingmaker.
Gamespace: How has your pipeline for updating and supporting the game changed since Pathfinder: Kingmaker? Have you streamlined any processes, such as receiving and analyzing bug reports, player feedback, etc.?
Alexander Mishulin: Kingmaker was a great experience for us in almost every aspect, and we tried to use it as much as possible starting development of the new game. Certainly post launch support of the game is one of the very important topics. For example since the Kingmaker we significantly increased the speed of assembling the builds and fixes.
Regarding the bug reports and feedback, Pathfinder: Kingmaker didn’t have an integrated bug reporting tool on release. And our team had to collect the feedback via emails and forums. The data could often be incomplete, and we could spend a lot of time trying to reproduce the reported issues. After some time, we developed and integrated the bug report tool into the game, which made processing the reports much easier.
For Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, we upgraded the bug reporting tool even further. You can select the context (where exactly you encountered the bug – the map, a UI element, a particular character and so on) and the aspect (graphics, sound, mechanics, for example). This helps us to sort through and assign the bugs faster.
Additionally, we added the community fields into the tasks which the reporting tool creates. When Community Managers gather a lot of comments from our players about a particular bug, they fill in this information in the community fields. This allows us to see which issues bother our community the most, and we can fix them faster as a result.
Gamespace: Was there any feature/system/DLC you really wanted to introduce to Wrath but had to leave out as it would have realistically harmed other content of the game due to its production requirements?
Alexander Mishulin: The biggest feature that didn’t survive even pre-production was cooperative gameplay. We made two big MMO games (Allods Online and Skyforge) before Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous. Thus we know quite well how much effort is required to make cooperative gameplay with the level of quality it deserves, and it also puts constraints on some of the content.
Also at the early stages of the development we were thinking about more Mythic Paths than we currently have. In preliminary designs there were something like 14 of them (but I am not quite sure), after we made some drafts and synopsis for several of them we understood how much complexity each mythic brings both to the story and to the mechanics of the game so we started reducing their amounts. But we’ve made quite a lot of them nevertheless.
Gamespace: The recently released DLC #1: Inevitable Excess received frosty reception from the community. Any thoughts on that? Any lessons the team learned from the situation?
Alexander Mishulin: Yes, we learned a couple of lessons from that situation. First of all, there was a bit of missed expectations – some players disliked the idea that… (spoilers for some players) protagonist is the Excess, not a real commander (as well as the companions). And they felt that twist was underwhelming for them. Another part of the story is that a lot of players did not know most of the NPCs they met in the DLC – those are from the stories for different mythic paths, and didn’t feel any attachment to them and their requests.
And last but not least, a couple of dungeons featured new means of traversal with mass teleportation that was not quite clearly marked as well as some puzzles (most of them not mandatory) without clear rules on what to do and how, and those are not appreciated by a lot of players. We are going to work with puzzles more carefully and we are going to provide a little bit more information about our future DLCs as well.
Gamespace: I loved the bit about the multiverse of madness with the anomalies from various Mythic Paths and, of course, the Excesses. How did you come up with the idea of an Excess being the protag of the DLC instead of the Commander and their party?
Alexander Kamzolov, Lead Narrative Designer: The release of DLCs is a good time for bold moves and “what if” ideas. This could be a new mechanic (like we did with Kanerah/Kalikke swapping each other in Kingmaker 1st DLC), a new narrative approach (Kingmaker 2nd DLC Varnhold’s Lot, where you play as a companion to the story’s main character), or a new story approach (the main character is in fact a copy of a main character in Inevitable Excess).
Wrath of the Righteous story is massive, the variety of mythic paths allows for many playthroughs. An 8-hour long DLC couldn’t possibly continue the story of each and every mythic path and we wanted to tell the players a consistent story that each player would live through regardless of the mythic path they’ve chosen in the main game. We found ourselves in need of a creative approach. So we unshackled our imagination and thought about a “clone” world on the verge of breaking where the representatives of different mythic paths coexist as anomalies.
The next DLC Through the Ashes will also feature a new approach to the game – the simple citizen surviving in the burning Kenabres without any access to the mythic powers rather than the usual epic battles against powerful opponents.
Gamespace: With Varnhold’s Lot, Kingmaker players could see the outcomes of the DLC and even interact with the General in certain cases. What about DLC#2? Will it have any effect on the Wrath’s main campaign? Can we run into DLC characters or maybe see the results of their actions? Any new classes, archetypes, spells, feats, etc.? Do you have anything unexpected and exciting prepared for players in Through the Ashes, like the secret ending of Inevitable Excess? Should we keep our eyes peeled?
Alexander Mishulin: We are trying to provide ties to the original campaign in most of our DLCs, and Through the Ashes is no different, there will be some connection, but no major effect. There are no new classes, feats or archetypes in the new DLC – thematically it is telling the story of the common people stuck in the midst of the city besieged by demons, so new heroic powers do not fit well into this.
But there are some mechanical differences – for example there is no experience gained just for defeating the enemies, it is given for accomplishing something (like reaching a certain passage, or getting valuable loot, thus allowing player to skip the fights they can. They are trying to survive, not free the whole city from demonic threat.
Gamespace: How long do you suppose the new DLC will be, on average? And what tentative level cap are we talking about?
Alexander Mishulin: It is about 5-7 hours long and you will usually have level 4-5 at the end.
Gamespace: It seems like you have some good stuff prepared for players in the near future. Do you have anything to share about your plans for Wrath of the Righteous and the studio itself?
Alexander Mishulin: We already announced, that the second DLC is coming on April 21st. The third DLC that will feature endless dungeon mode is going to be released somewhen in July. What is even more important, we don’t want to stop with these content and we are going to make several more adventures in the world of Pathfinder and those will be included in Season Pass #2 that is coming later in 2022, including the first DLC that is to be launched this Fall.
Enhanced Edition also is going to be available for everyone this Fall, it will have new features and quality of life improvements. We will reveal the full list of features later but we can share that it will include photo mode as well as additional high-level content related to several mythic paths.
As for the studio itself Owlcat Games was originally established as an international company and we had employees all around the world. After the pandemic started and the team switched to remote work the process of relocation started almost on its own. Right now we are actively helping our employees to move to different places like Cyprus, where our HQ is located, a new office in Armenia and other European countries where they can focus on work and creativity. We already have successful experience of decentralized and remote work for the last two years and we believe that the team will continue to create great games further.
Note: Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Enhanced Edition has been confirmed free for existing players, like Pathfinder: Kingmaker Enhanced Edition before it.
Catherine Daro
Season Pass #2 sounds like a must-have ?