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Full Age of Wonders 4 update
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What changed
- Events
- Gameplay
- Maps
- Balance
- UI and audio
Age of Wonders 4 changes
Hello everyone! My name is Tom, and I am the game director for Age of Wonders 4. Unfortunately Bas is on a secret mission in the depths of the Astral Sea, and I have been drafted to take his place to write this Dev Diary. I’m here to talk about the Shrouded Isles, a major feature in the Secrets of the Archmages story pack releasing on June 16th.
When we first conceived Secrets of the Archmages, the "secrets" were intended to be whatever the Godir in our story realms had been up to between the events of Age of Wonders 3 and 4. However, we quickly realized that players would also want new secrets to discover and use. We developed the idea of various Godir hiding their most powerful magics within pocket dimensions, concealed from the eyes of the Archons. In these Shrouded Isles, players can explore unique environments, learn about the Godir who created them, and eventually claim these powerful spells for themselves.
Shrouded Isle Design
The initial design included a sample Shrouded Isle to serve as a baseline. While this specific design never made it into the final game, it functioned as a template to establish the gameplay flow and design direction.
I began with the island's layout, which was designed to exist on a separate layer - much like the Umbral Layer from Eldritch Realms. This ensured it remained completely hidden until a player physically entered it.
Steam post image The magical portal, which serves as the entry point.
Sinister statues lining the path.
Magical symbols hewn into the earth.
A great Altar surrounded by a magical forcefield, acting as the player’s destination.
Elements 1 and 4 are present in every Isle, forming the start and end points of the exploration. The altar was eventually renamed the Arcanum and transformed into a sinister tower, with our concept artists drawing inspiration from crystalline shapes and Escher-esque geometry. Below, you can see the natural evolution of my initial "it's just some boxes" concept into something a bit more sophisticated:
I decided that the Arcanum would function best as a sort Ancient Wonder, so it would start with the player getting an event that would set the scene:
| As you approach the shimmering force field, you see a hazy form laid out on the altar before you, a beak, a flipper, a crown. A voice sounds in your head:“She was my greatest creation, and my greatest regret. Such beauty, such poise, such power. A power I thought that I could control, but I never imagined the terrible price I would have to pay. Turn back Stranger, while you still have your sanity. Turn back, while you still have a chance for the happiness that I have forever lost…”Chittering forms rise from the darkness before you, glowing red eyes and fangs. What will you do? To arms, the power shall be ours! Enter battle [Order Affinity Test] Summon the powers of Light to Drive back the Darkness! Success - Enemy units are blinded in the coming battleFailure - Your units are blinded in the coming battle Retreat! |
Suitably awed by my masterful prose, the player would then enter a battle on a custom map, against a powerful foe with a special combat effect. In this case:
| The Chittering Horde Every turn, 2 dire penguins appear next to their dark mistress, prepared to sacrifice all for their regent. |
After a long and epic battle, they emerge victorious and claim their reward!
| With a mighty crash, the terrible beast falls, with a sound like a thousand arctic birds wailing their grief, she melts into the ground and you feel a terrible arcane power channel into you. Such power like you’ve never felt before - forbidden, alluring, terrible, and ready to serve.You gain:600 knowledgeNow you shall serve me, dark mistressSecret Spell - Summon Arctic QueenBanish this monstrosity forever500 mana200 imperium |
Secret Spells
In the end, the secret spells themselves are the ultimate prize, which led to something of a challenge since the game already contains quite a few spells already, so what would make these so special? We decided that the best approach would be to have spells that, for various reasons, we wouldn’t actually want to add to the game properly. Perhaps the spell was too silly, for example, giving effects that undermined the game’s lore or atmosphere. Perhaps the spell broke some of the game’s mechanics by being too powerful or breaking the game’s balance in some way.
Perhaps we really did make a giant penguin monstrosity.
We played with various ideas for letting the player keep these Secret Spells in some way, so they could be used in future sessions, and eventually settled upon allowing a player to keep one of their unlocked spells as an Ascension Trait if they won the map. That ascended lord could then take their powerful new spell and use it to wreak havoc in other sessions!
This did unfortunately mean we needed to add a requirement to the spells that a certain level of Wizard’s Tower (or Vampire Lord’s Castle) be built to unlock casting the spells. Hilarious as it would be to summon a tier 5 monster on turn 9, we felt it would be a good idea to at least try and slow it down a bit!
Unlocking The Isles
Of course, the isles themselves wouldn’t be very secret if the player could just walk through the portal and grab them, so we needed to hide them and we needed a way for the players to unlock them. We decided on a fairly simplistic “Collect the keys” type of mechanism, where the player would search the world for magical Obelisks that they could activate with their heroes.
Steam post image These obelisks are also placed in other realms, as a new type of resource node. They grant 5 mana, and 5 research.
Once the player has found 3 of these obelisks, magical portals appear which give access to the isles!
As a final touch, we felt that the Godir would not have left the portals so easily discovered, so we added some magical guardians who you would need to overcome in order to enter the portal. There was some discussion about whether we should use Sphinxes, but I didn’t feel they fit with the rest of the DLCs theme, so we decided to Owl them up a bit. They could still ask Riddles though.
There are two guardians, with the other one, the moon guardian being more themed around shadow and cold.
The art team have also done a great job with the combat maps if you choose to fight your way through the event. This particular portal is lying in the astral barrens from Rise from Ruin, which adds a lot to the atmosphere:
Colonizing the Isles
In the end Age of Wonders 4 is a 4x game, and fun as it is going on spooky adventures to do battle against improbably sized birdlife, it’s important that this feature actually interacts with the economic, city building aspects of the game as well.
We didn’t want players to actually build cities in the shrouded isles - however we’d already added support for a city to settle provinces through an underground passage. In technical terms, an underground passage is the same as a shrouded isles portal, a teleporter from one map layer to another, so having the player able to annex provinces through the portal should be easy enough. All we would need to do was to ensure that the provinces would have enough economic value from nodes, and magic materials to make it worthwhile. The arcanum itself would also be an ancient wonder, so that would function as a major economic reward for annexing enough provinces in the isle!
This approach still had some clear issues however:
The portals could be scattered across the map, players might find it hard to place cities near them once they’re discovered.
It’s a bit boring, it doesn’t add any new gameplay or strategy to the game.
Happily the first problem suggested a solution to the second one - if the player finds it hard to bring a city to the portal, what if they could bring the portal to one of their cities? Perhaps then another player could invade their territory and steal that portal and move it to one of their cities. The portals would become a sort of strategic resource for players to fight over for economic benefits!
A game flow was designed, and we put it into the game!
The player finds a portal
The player uses a hero to Open the portal by fighting or talking their way past the guardians
At this point the player can go through the portal and explore the shrouded isle.
The player then has the option to Bind the Portal for imperium
Once bound a new button appears on the portal, allowing the player to teleport the portal itself into the domain of one of their cities
Other players could then try and bind and steal the portal for themselves
This would be hostile, so it would require war to do
We’d need the binding operation to take several turns, so the owner has time to respond
This meant the portal would need different states, which we could show with color shifts:
Breached Isles
During the review of all of this, the question rose for these Isles of how many we could make. Given the costs of making the spells and special battles and such, 12-15 seemed reasonable, but since we only wanted about 2-3 to appear per game session that would leave the new shrouded isles layer feeling very empty. The Umbral Abyss layer would often have 10-15 islands in it on a normal map!
Someone suggested that we add a set of isles that didn’t have unique narrative elements and spells that we could use to fill that space up, as well as giving more portals for the player to fight over. We came up with the idea of a bunch of isles that had already been discovered and explored by Godir in ages past. These Breached Isles would sit in the same layer, but with a few key differences:
They would be visible from the start of the game
Since they were already explored it made no sense for them to be hidden
The arcanum inside would be a special Ruined version, which had weaker defenders and gave fewer rewards
Initially the ruined arcanums were totally unguarded, but it felt wrong to have a valuable wonder that was so easy to simply grab without resistance.
The gates would be unguarded, so you didn’t need to fight your way inside
Later on we added the requirement that you would still need a hero to Open the gate anyways - this was to prevent a player’s scouts getting into the regions in the early game which made the regions feel cheap.
Since these breached isles were mostly just hand made regions, we could make many more of them, giving us a way to fill the layer and giving players more stuff to explore!
Conclusion
I hope you all enjoyed this dev diary. I thought it would be fun to do a diary that was more focused on the design process behind the feature rather than the end result!
Tune in again next week for a dev diary filled with art and pretty pictures! If you want to play in the Shrouded Isles for yourselves, then they will be part of the Secrets of the Archmages, released on June 16th!
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