Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms Updates and AMA Highlights
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Gamera Interactive brings us a couple of fresh developer updates for their narrative-driven action-RPG Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms. First, here’s a lore update that focuses on the Dragons of Bane and Flame. Then, there’s a more technical update that tells us about the game’s approach to real-time VFX.
And finally, there’s also this Steam announcement with some highlights from a recent Discord AMA. Here’s a couple of sample questions to get you started:
Will there be medieval-inspired castles with their own interiors in each kingdom?
Each kingdom has been basically built like this: there is a capital city (of course) where you can meet the ruler of your kingdom (who is actually the one summoning you to help fight Alaloth). Then we have a major city and five other minor cities to visit. Then you have three different points of interest and tons of fighting areas you have to claim in order to find pieces of the Artifact. You need the Artifact to enter the endgame and face Alaloth himself. So we have medieval stuff (especially in Edherest, the Human Kingdom), indoor and outdoor areas to explore, and many different locations you can visit.
How many roleplay systems are implemented aside from combat?
You can do a lot of things. We’re happy with our hardcore crafting system which is very well-connected to the world’s lore & logic. For example, you can't find elven stuff in a dwarven shop. The only exception is visiting a specific store at a specific moment of the game calendar because an elven merchant is traveling through that area at that specific time. We have a reputation system and a responsive world that changes along the way (the passing of time is a key factor).
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What games influenced the concept?
[Alberto:] Moonstone is one of the main references. It is an Amiga game from 1990 that literally blew my mind at that time. But we basically are RPG people and I think we can say that there is a little bit of everything we love in Alaloth. The idea behind the concept BTW, was pretty simple: bring the 3D fighting mechanics of modern action games to an iso view, inspired by BG & co.
Were you drawing from any well-known inspirations? And if so, how do you plan on making your product unique to set it apart from them?
We are trying to stay in-between old school classics (for the visuals, the iso view, the pre-rendered stuff) and modern masterpieces (3D mechanics brought to an iso game). That's how we plan to make a unique product. In terms of inspiration, we are not reinventing the wheel: this is high-fantasy with all the good things high-fantasy lovers (as we are) love.
When did the development of the game start?
We announced the game back in 2017, but at that time we just had a working prototype and we were still actively in pre-production. Pre-production ended mid-2018 and we can say we officially started full development at the beginning of 2019.
