Thorvalla - Update #3, Party Building

Guido Henkel writes about party-building (and a new pledge tier) in Thorvalla Update #3:

The game then starts with this one character and very soon, our hero(ine) will meet an NPC who is willing to join the party. What happens next is putting the control back into your hands.

While the NPC willing to join you might be a centaur and you may not have an option to change that particular fact, you will now get back into a character generation screen that will allow you to make modifications to that centaur character. You will roll the attributes, but more importantly, you will be able to determine the class of the character as well, along with his traits. It’s not just a question whether he’ll be strong or weak. We are talking the entire gamut here. It means that the centaur who just joined you can be a Warrior for one player, but a Sorcerer for another player. The choice is entirely up to you, and it is my way of giving control back to the player, even though he is dealing with a recruitable character.

To me it combines the best of both worlds. The player is mostly free to shape the characters he is playing with and from a dramatic standpoint, we can use these NPCs to great effect in the storytelling. It is additional work, of course, to accommodate actions, reactions and behaviors for the different classes within the story, but ultimately I think it will pay huge dividends. It will increase replayability of the game dramatically and it will allow us to throw in some wicked plot twists in the story, directly surrounding and affecting these characters. It will even allow us to unlock entire new branches in the story, because to us, as designers, they are not an unknown quantity any longer. They are still planted NPCs, but with so much flexibility that we begin to blur the lines.

There's also a new concept art piece.