KB: Warriors of the North - Preview @ Worthplaying

Worthplaying takes a short look at Kings Bounty: Warriors of the North.

This time around, you play as Olaf, a new hero who is a Viking. This new race brings with it a new area as well as a new school of magic known as Rune magic. The story has Olaf defending the world of Endoria against a relentless attack by the undead armies. Players will get to experience the frozen tundra of the Northern Lands as well as return to the heart of the kingdom, the land of Darion.
Fans of the series will recognize Darion as the location of The Legend. Returning to a familiar location was intentional, as a generation has passed in the timeline of the games. The developers wanted to give players the chance to see how things have changed over the years, but it's not just superficial. The demo team from 1C wouldn't go into a whole lot of detail; however, they did promise that the new story line ties in closely with the characters from the previous games.
The island mechanic from Armored Princess is returning, along with new ships for players to use. One new ship type mentioned during our demo is the longboat. Land travel is done by horse, but if your horse earns enough XP, it can sprout wings and turn into a Pegasus. Using the Pegasus gives you the ability to fly.

More information.

These Vikings are very popular lately. Not that I mind though. Specially when we talk about Kings Bounty!
The new adventures looks promising.

Very cool, although why are they jumping on the Viking/Norse bandwagon? Is it the success of Skyrim and 1C shallow marketeers?

The viking theme was announced awhile back, before Skyrim was even out.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Very cool, although why are they jumping on the Viking/Norse bandwagon? Is it the success of Skyrim and 1C shallow marketeers?

But Skyrim was announced a VERY long time ago…

It is amazing how durable the Norse mythology and culture has withstood time. I am a huge fan of everything Norse myself (well old Norse I should say). Some of my masters research is on Norse Mythology and archetypes. Even outside of games you find many references to vikings and the norse myths and legends.

So of course I tend to be interested in anything that throws this theme into a game

True but you were saying that they were trying to capitilize on Skyrim's success. KB:Warriors of the North was announced before anyone knew how succesful Skyrim would be.

KB has also always had nordic warriors in long ships with a strong viking theme. Armored Princess even had references to Norse gods.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
But Skyrim was announced a VERY long time ago…

Uh, did anyone NOT think that Skyrim would be a success? I think 1C saw it coming, and jumped hoping for a free ride. Or someone did. It's a little too unlikely that all of a sudden there's a series of Norse themed games coming out, when there haven't been any in years (at least, that I know of).

That would be some pretty amazing foresight if they started to develop a norse game because they predicted that a game which wouldn't be out for another year or two would start a norse trend!

While I think it's unlikely that the new KB game was influenced in any way by Skyrim, your probably right that we will be seeing other norse games that are.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Uh, did anyone NOT think that Skyrim would be a success? I think 1C saw it coming, and jumped hoping for a free ride. Or someone did. It's a little too unlikely that all of a sudden there's a series of Norse themed games coming out, when there haven't been any in years (at least, that I know of).

Not really amazing at all. All of the recent Elder Scrolls have been big successes for Bethesda, not to mention Fallout 3. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to predict Skyrim would be successful. Hell, I am not a rocket sceintist, and pre-ordered Skyrim, when I never pre-order (well except also for DE:HR).

You'd have to live in a cave to not see the success of Skyrim coming…

This is starting to sound a lot better than when they first announced it, and it'll probably be a week 1 purchase for me. I really enjoyed the first two games, although I liked The Legend a lot more than Armored Princess.

So by that logic it's just as likely that Armored Princess heavily featured Vikings because they knew that Skyrim was coming in 3-4 years and they wanted to lay the ground work for them to jump on the band wagon.

Or it could be just that a game which always had lots of vikings decided to release a sequel with lots of vikings.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Not really amazing at all. All of the recent Elder Scrolls have been big successes for Bethesda, not to mention Fallout 3. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to predict Skyrim would be successful. Hell, I am not a rocket sceintist, and pre-ordered Skyrim, when I never pre-order (well except also for DE:HR).

You'd have to live in a cave to not see the success of Skyrim coming…

This sort of parallelism of motifs found in works written/developed concurrently happens all the time in pretty much every medium of entertainment. Its not nescesarilly consciously jumping on any sort of bandwagon - its just that this is how things work.

Motifs and themes become popular in the cultural consciousness and examples of them pop up around the same time. This makes sense really when you consider that many people will ultimately end up reading similar popular books, watching similar television shows, and watching similar movies. This - and the relatively few degrees of separation amongst people in the same professional fields - means that those shared experiences are also shared at around the same time. It's no wonder then that we often see ideas with similar inspiration develop into parallel works around the same time - often as not in ways which might not be advantageous for properties competing over similar identities (Armageddon and Deep Impact for example.)

It's usually only toward he tail end of some topic's popularity that you start to see the more exploitative and cynical attempts to cash in with coat-tail games. Why? Because most of these kinds of properties have a long development cycle and when they started it wasn't necessarily clear that Germanic and Norse inspired themes would be in vogue when they started.

@fadedc That's poor reasoning. Not only was AP development started before Skyrim was announced, but it did not heavily feature Vikings.

Your memory is off. AP featured an entire island full of vikings, and viking ships, quest givers and troops were on many other islands.

As for development times, Skyrim was conceptualized in 2006. Armored Princess was announced in 2008.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
@fadedc That's poor reasoning. Not only was AP development started before Skyrim was announced, but it did not heavily feature Vikings.

I never really associated Bolo with vikings but i suppose it was in some fashion.

Originally Posted by fadedc
Your memory is off. AP featured an entire island full of vikings, and viking ships, quest givers and troops were on many other islands.

As for development times, Skyrim was conceptualized in 2006. Armored Princess was announced in 2008.

I never did either. fadedrc is grasping at straws.

Not only that, he's misrepresenting the truth. AP was released in 2009, 1 year before the first public announcement of Skyrim in 2010.

Originally Posted by JDR13
This is starting to sound a lot better than when they first announced it, and it'll probably be a week 1 purchase for me. I really enjoyed the first two games, although I liked The Legend a lot more than Armored Princess.

this is a big ditto for me

I've been concerned about this because its not a true sequel, basically a large mod not even done by the original devs. But his announcement makes it sound more promising for some reason.

The engine is getting kind of long in the tooth tho.

My thoughts, too. Hopefully there will be some engine upgrades and gameplay innovations (not simplifications). Needless to say, I am still jazzed by the announcement.

Are you guys sure this isn't a true sequel? The article actually states that it is.

After rebooting the King's Bounty series in 2008 with King's Bounty: The Legend, Katauri followed it up with King's Bounty: Armored Princess. While the second game got an expansion pack, it wasn't a true sequel. That honor goes to this year's release, King's Bounty: Warriors of the North, which promises to follow up on the story line that started four years ago.

The web page for WotN also shows that Katauri is indeed one of the developers.
http://www.1cpublishing.eu/game/king…north/overview