Druidstone - Releasing May 15th

Silver

Spaceman
Staff Member
Joined
February 13, 2014
Messages
9,312
Location
New Zealand
Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest will release May 15th.

Are you excited about Druidstone? Are you in the market for a beautifully hand-crafted game made by a small team of dedicated professionals, with the kind of turn-based gameplay that is custom-designed to tell your brain to ramp up that dopamine production? Are you a savvy customer who knows a good deal when they see it and wants to save a cool 10% on the purchase price?

Good! Then you should be pleased to know that the release of Druidstone is upon us! More specifically, Druidstone will be released in just three weeks, on May 15th and we are launching pre-orders today! That's right, if you pre-order now you will get both a Steam key and a DRM-free standalone version with a 10% discount. You will also receive a special pre-order bonus, a free copy of a digital book, featuring concept art, behind-the-scenes information and other material from the making of Druidstone. The book will be delivered to you two weeks after the game's release on May 31st and will be sold separately at $4.99.

To celebrate the milestone we have also released a new trailer. As we are a tiny team of just four full time developers, we don't have the luxury of having a marketing team or even just one person dedicated to PR. In fact, all of us are busy polishing the game. That's why we're asking for your help. Please consider telling about Druidstone to your friends, families and on the web. We would appreciate it very much!



Key Features:
- A tactical turn-based and tile-based battle system where every action and every turn counts
- Upgrade the abilities of your heroes
- your upgrade choices have a dramatic impact on the characters' capabilities!
- Obtain upgrade gems by completing missions and discovering hidden treasures
- Challenging, hand-crafted missions with playtimes ranging from 15 minutes to 45 minutes
- Solve devious non-combat puzzle levels to gain extra upgrade resources
- Find lost shipments to gain access to the best gear in Steelface's Emporium of Curios
- A gripping, fantastic story of love, death and responsibility centered around the main characters of Aava, Leonhard and Oiko
- A unique fantasy setting that combines the best elements from western RPGs, JRPGs and tactical boardgames in unexpected ways
- Play custom missions created by others, or make your own campaigns with the Druidstone Level Editor (available as a post-release update)
More information.
 
Joined
Feb 13, 2014
Messages
9,312
Location
New Zealand
Sooner than I expected.
 
Joined
Oct 13, 2007
Messages
7,313
Wow - that was a surprise. From the video it might suck. Anyone with a better video?

??? What is wrong with the video? I quite like it and got me excited actually - only thing that worries me is amount of puzzles (pressure plate etc), I don't like puzzles :(
 
It does look puzzly ... which makes me less thrilled about it. Will wait and see.
 
Joined
Oct 6, 2018
Messages
1,114
Looking great! I'm pretty sure they nailed their mechanics right. My only worry is narrative as lack of proper storyteller is the main problem in such small teams.
 
Joined
Jul 23, 2014
Messages
117
I wish the Devs all the best for this game, but the apparent focus on puzzles (along with the fixed protagonist reported previously) doesn't interest me particularly. I think I'll pass.
 
Joined
Apr 13, 2012
Messages
1,901
Location
UK
A tactical, turn-based RPG from the makers of Legend of Grimrock games.
The story. That's what makers of LoG needed improved. They didn't which is kinda a disappointment.

Ah well, Grimrock was fun so I'm gonna buy this one of course, but when will I find time to play it is another… story. :)
 
Joined
Apr 12, 2009
Messages
23,459
I still may get this but when I found out you couldn't roll the main character, I was greatly disappointed.
 
Joined
Aug 28, 2010
Messages
2,838
Location
Wolf Light Woods
Why are people so frosty about puzzles? They are a staples of old cRPGs. Turn-based combat isn't that far away from puzzle solving too.

I'm actually wondering how purpleblob made it through BG2 a bazillon of times now, the game has a lots of puzzles (no they aren't pressure plates, but there is a lots of things hidden behind using the proper thing at the proper place and a few riddles to solves).

I personally love puzzles and wish more RPGs had like at least one of them.

Looking great! I'm pretty sure they nailed their mechanics right. My only worry is narrative as lack of proper storyteller is the main problem in such small teams.

They hired a writer back in February, Mikko Rautalahti, who worked at Remedy Entertainment (on Alan Wake and Quantum Break). He's been spending the last 2-3 months going over the story/dialogues in the game.
 
Joined
Oct 13, 2007
Messages
7,313
I'm actually wondering how purpleblob made it through BG2 a bazillon of times now, the game has a lots of puzzles (no they aren't pressure plates, but there is a lots of things hidden behind using the proper thing at the proper place and a few riddles to solves).

Because I don't mind logical riddle type of puzzles, not the pressure plate types. And if you look at proportion wise, there really wasn't that much puzzles in BG2. I also disliked puzzles in Kingmaker.

And thanks for making it sound like I lied about my 50+ replays of BG2. You know, most of members who indicated they dislike puzzles also are fan of BG2 and possibly did many replays too.
 
Puzzles aren't an automatic no-go (I thoroughly enjoyed Grimrock) but they're not generally what I'm after in a game. I'm more put off by the fixed story based party. I like creating my own characters generally. The two things together make it unappealing. Nice graphics though, and the Devs have a good track record, so I expect it will be a quality product for those that play it.
 
Joined
Apr 13, 2012
Messages
1,901
Location
UK
Too puzzly for me.

I'm not a huge fan of puzzles, but I finished both Grimrock and Grimrock 2 and I felt the puzzles in those games were in a decent proportion for an rpg, nothing like Bard's Tale 4. I also, as a self professed sucky puzzle solver only got stuck a couple of times and consulted a guide to get past these. So I won't be playing this on release, but will wait to the streamers finish their puzzle solving videos before getting started. Otherwise it looks good, sort of like a western SRPG with some puzzles stuck in.
 
Joined
Jan 29, 2014
Messages
2,716
Location
Vienna, Austria
I abhor puzzles and uninstalled Grimrock fast, so I'm pretty sure I'll skip this. Might buy it once it's a couple bucks in the Winter sale. Tactical battles with a party are also not my thing. Glad it's being released though, because we have a ton of Watchers that like these types of games.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
8,821
Why are people so frosty about puzzles? They are a staples of old cRPGs. Turn-based combat isn't that far away from puzzle solving too.

I'm actually wondering how purpleblob made it through BG2 a bazillon of times now, the game has a lots of puzzles (no they aren't pressure plates, but there is a lots of things hidden behind using the proper thing at the proper place and a few riddles to solves).

I personally love puzzles and wish more RPGs had like at least one of them.

You are right, a good epic RPG should have some puzzles in them. You're wrong that puzzles as the core gameplay element is an RPG thing. In the 80s and early 90s cRPGs they were puzzle heavy because that was the element that mde people buy solutions, either through 0700 telephone numbers or through magazines etc. It was ye olde version of loot boxes.

You'll notice that as soon as this trend became illegal then that sytle of RPG design faded into the history books and the cRPG was free to be more of what it should be. Puzzles are a good way to add variety and a sense of adventure to a game and help break up the more repetative routines. They only really work if they are intrinsic to the setting though, such as exploring a crazy-mage tower or opening that ancient crypt door etc. A means to have a locked door that a rogue can't pick or a warrior bash down etc.

However, cRPGs rely greatly on pacing and if you hold up a fevered exploration game with lots and lots of sudden drops in pace then you'll just have your players suddenly stopping progress to spend hours upon hours trying to work out puzzles, most of which are stupid once you look up the solution on a walkthrough, such as missing a pixel, an object obscured by another object due to shitty camera views, no highlight all tab, or something that doesn't suit your personal skills, such as slidey puzzles or sudokus.

And that's the thing with regular puzzles, in this day and age, and since the advent of the mid nineties, they are all but a 1 minute google away, so the days of expecting people to spend more than 20 minutes or so on a puzzle are long gone unless someone is specifically playing the game solely for the self-masochism, such as dedicated adventure game players. If a cRPG starts being more puzzle than RPG and thus ends up becoming just a play-by-walkthrough exercise then the inclination will be to stop playing altogether and to just go find an actual cRPG instead.

People buy adventure games for puzzles, they buy cRPGs for a more active experience. A cRPG entirely without puzzles does feel like it's missing something, but a cRPG with too many puzzles, and too many obtuse puzzles particularly, feels too much like a 'something else'.

Combat is only a puzzle in the sense that it challenges you to prove what you've understood of the game's primary mechanic, that of character building. Can you not defeat that pack of Goblins? Oh, did you try that sleep spell you learned? Did you try sneaking up on them to give you pre-battle knowledge? Are you wearing the proper equipment for your class? Can your team members all utilise ranged weapons before running at them? etc etc.

A non-class related puzzle doesn't have much to do with the essence of an RPG, that of different character classes being able to deal with the situation dependent upon their class skills. If a door needs you to solve a sudoku puzzle in order to progress in the game, none of your characters can 'solve' it because they have high intelligence, the game still requires you as a player to 'solve' it. Even having class-based puzzle solving doesn't help much as if you don't have a character with the specific class, such as a run with no high intelligence team members, then the solution will just be walkthrough-solved.

As per usual, you seem to have a very skewed view of cRPGs as evidenced by you thinking that BG2 was awash with puzzles. BG2 had barely any puzzles by puzzler standards and the ones it did have were so spaced out in time and place that even if one had to resort to a wlathrough it would never feel like one was constantly playing the game via a walkthrough. A good example of a cRPG over-doing the puzzles in an otherwise fairly normal cRPG would be Divinty: Original Sin Enhanced Edition, where the end-game is so riddled with puzzles that it starts feeling like you're playing something else all of a sudden as it delivers tedious crappy puzzle after tedious crappy puzzle at the player before allowing them to just get on with finishing off the end-boss.

But you chose to highlight BG2 of all games, which suggests you're either genuinely awkward to converse with due to your complete lack of understanding of the topic, or you're just being deliberately contrarian for the pleasures of creating conversation where there wasn't any for a purpose known only to yourself. When everyone else is saying "ugh, primary bias is puzzles? Oh well" then there's usually a good reason for that, and one that shouldn't require a wall of text to say what everyone else knows instinctively ;)
 
Joined
Nov 1, 2014
Messages
4,762
As per usual, you seem to have a very skewed view of cRPGs as evidenced by you thinking that BG2 was awash with puzzles. BG2 had barely any puzzles by puzzler standards

Where did I claim BG2 or older RPGs were puzzlers?
Where did I say BG2 was awash with puzzles?

I never bothered saying it before, it's not the first time this happens, but you're reading comprehension is dreadful.

I brought up BG2 because purpleblob is a huge fan of it despite it having puzzles in it (even describing them) and I found it strange. The reaction in this thread over seeing one pressure plate puzzle in a 1 minutes trailer seems a bit extreme to me actually.

But then going by the rest of the thread, seems like many think that puzzles are switch and pressures plates and not just anything that requires solving.
 
Joined
Oct 13, 2007
Messages
7,313
Back
Top Bottom