Expeditions: Conquistador, released in 2013, was a fairly unique strategy game that had you traveling the South-American jungle and managing a small group of people, hunting, fighting, and having adventures against a historical backdrop. It felt a bit like the
King’s Bounty games with a smaller scope and slightly shifted gameplay priorities, and I feel that it didn’t quite get the attention it deserved. Late next year, Danish developers, Logic Artists, will follow up with another game in the Expeditions series, this one obviously Viking-themed. You start out, having inherited the leadership of a small clan.
In the game’s first campaign, you gather your most trusted allies and work towards consolidating your power in your home region. The second campaign will have you and your merry band of plundering Northmen travel to Britain and begin raiding. All of this will follow a branching, but generally fixed story line. Considering that the narrative design of Expeditions: Conquistador was one of its standout features, I have high hopes for Viking.
It won’t be an easy feat, however. The problem with Viking lore and mythology is that most of the information available to us today was written by their enemies, while most records of Viking origin have been lost due to having been carved into wood or embroidered on fabric. Logic Artists still hope to convey a decent level of historical accuracy, but considering its origin, it cannot be spot on and will possibly be filigreed with a good deal of Nordic mythology from the Viking sagas.
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I really liked
Expeditions: Conquistador. It was by no means a perfect game, and a few gameplay flaws like the aforementioned camping spreadsheets and a rather unforgiving difficulty kept it from ever reaching the fame and fortune it deserved.
However, it seems that Logic Artists are well aware of these issues and intend to not make the same mistakes again with Expeditions: Viking. Furthermore, the attention to detail, from trying to incorporate Viking lore as well as possible to little things like the hand-woven look of the map screen, is already pretty impressive. Considering that I saw an early alpha build of the game and it won’t be out until late 2016, I have high hopes that
Expeditions: Viking will be a memorable, interesting, and awfully pretty strategy game, so keep an eye out for this one.
