Exploring Eternal Strands' Codex 📖✨

Hi everyone. Mike from the Eternal Strands team here with a little deep dive about how we’re handling lore in our game.

I’ve always been a big fan of games with rich backstories and a setting that extends beyond what’s strictly necessary for the game. It just makes the world feel more alive and gives the writing team interesting tidbits to drop into conversations. Better, I think it’s super cool to surface some of that lore to players through a system such as a “Codex” or “Glossary.”

We faced an interesting dilemma with Strands, though: as an action-adventure game, we’re aware most players will be here for the monster fighting and cool abilities, so we didn’t want to bog down the exploration of our open zones with big blocks of text. Another consideration for me when designing our codex system is that I wanted to bring some element of “investigation” and the sense of piecing together the mysteries of the Enclave, and big lore dumps just from clicking a plaque or what have you didn’t feel like the right path.

Thankfully, inspiration struck. Tonally, Eternal Strands is a game of what I’d call high adventure. Think a fantasy version of The Mummy, Tomb Raider, or Indiana Jones, and it was that latter touchstone that inspired the solution we went with. Rewatching The Last Crusade, I realized that something like Dr Henry Jones Sr.’s diary was exactly the vibe we were going for: fragments of information that make sense in the larger context.

So, how does that translate into gameplay? First, when exploring the world, Brynn can come across what we call “knowledge fragments.” We made them glow to make them easier to spot (extra easy at night), which is a convenient feature for players, but I think it’s fair to say it’s sort of a manifestation of Brynn’s keen eye and curiosity.

Clicking on one won’t give you a big block of text, but instead a little fragment of information. A clue, bit of data or evidence, that kind of thing.

These fragments are then collected in the codex screen and grouped together under headings. You can check them at any time, and of course, we pre-load the codex with full entries for subjects Brynn knows about at the start of game.

Once you have all the fragments for a subject, there’s enough information for the band’s Lorekeeper, Laen, to assemble a proper codex. Doing so grants the big, beefy compilation of information for you to read right then and there, or at your leisure when time allows.

I’m pretty happy with the result: it keeps the information you find out in the field small and bite-sized, while giving you a chance to read the big, detailed results of your lorekeeper’s research in the safety of your band’s camp.

The fragments also play a role in your ability to predict the extreme weather that can sometimes hit the various regions of the Enclave, as well as what massive creature might be in each zone, so they’re useful to collect even if lore isn’t your thing. Also, as a bit of a comfort feature, the game tracks how many of the fragments you’ve found in each zone, so you’ll know when your hunt for knowledge in that space has been completed. You won’t need all the fragments in a zone to get all the gameplay data, of course. Collecting them all is for the lore buffs and explorers.

So, there you have it. A fun little feature that I thought might be fun to talk about. We’ll look forward to your feedback on it when you get to play Eternal Strands this January!

• Mike Laidlaw, Creative Chief Officer - Yellow Brick Games