Genre mashups can be bold propositions. If they don’t gel properly, the game can feel an unfocused mess, but if they do, a title can bring the best of multiple different styles of game together. Fortunately, the studio Wombo Games seems to have found an ideal blend in Raiders of Blackveil, its debut title.
Game director Christopher Nelson spoke to The Best War Games about how Raiders of Blackveil brings RPG-style loot, extraction gameplay, and MOBA-styled heroes to a roguelike, managing to form an experience that the studio feels is deeply engaging and exciting.
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How Things Come Together in Raiders of Blackveil
On its surface, there are a lot of different genres and moving pieces in Raiders of Blackveil that might make it sound like the title is trying to do everything at once. However, Nelson explained that rather than running in four different directions, the game takes a thoughtful approach to what elements it borrows from the different styles of gameplay and how to piece them together.
It is a roguelike game at its core. So the entire framework is very much a roguelike. You have one life. You have to get as far as you can through as many biomes as possible until you die. And if you die, you do have to start over … You have your stash in your base, and all enemies drop items and loot and trinkets and resources, and they're all put into your inventory, even the currency that you spend on a raid is it takes up an item slot in your inventory, and you have to constantly evaluate, what am I choosing to keep on this run, and what am I choosing to extract back to the base.
That core gameplay loop, blending the looting of an RPG with the fundamental elements of roguelikes, is joined by the way the player inhabits one of a number of MOBA-style champions with their own abilities and passives. At the moment, Raiders of Blackveil has four anthropomorphic champions to choose from: a rhinoceros-man serving as the tank, a bumblebee-woman druid, a chameleon-man assassin, and a cheetah-woman fire mage. Four more are planned, those being the monk, warlock, guardian and priest.
It was the intent of Nelson and developers at Wombo to combine animals with fantasy archetypes to produce their heroes. While the four initial champions form a well-balanced party in cooperative play, Raiders of Blackveil is also designed with the option to be approached singleplayer. Nelson said this was a challenge for the team, but it was important for them to include singleplayer functionality. In particular, designing the bumblebee healer able to stand on her own in solo play was a puzzle Nelson mentioned having to tackle.
Part of how Raiders of Blackveil manages that challenge is with its diverse skill system. For instance, the chameleon and cheetah have access to skills that are designed to increase their survivability in a singeplayer run. Nelson also made a point to highlight synergies among the game’s perks, which enhance the status effects unique to each class and increase what can trigger those effects. For instance, the cheetah can set the entire battlefield ablaze with the right combination of skills.
The Goal of Raiders of Blackveil’s Champions
Every champion needs a cause. In the case of Raiders of Blackveil, that cause is the anthropomorphic heroes fighting an industrialized human corporation called Blackveil. The concept has similar broad strokes to Sonic the Hedgehog, in particular the Saturday morning cartoon based on the comic series published by Archie. But Raiders of Blackveil is very much telling its own story.
From the resistance’s base aboard the airship Liberator, players will interact with their fellow rebels and unlock perks in the service of taking down the forces of Blackveil. Missions see players launching daring operations to steal supplies and undermine Blackveil as the anthropomorphic heroes attempt to hobble the corporation.
One of the operation sites of Blackveil, and the first one that we will be showcasing here [at Steam Next Fest], will be the meat factory. So this is a place where Blackveil, they are creating fairly low quality food for the entire world of Wildguard. So it's, of course, industrialized, so it's super mass production, which lowers the quality of everything, and they're not doing it in a moral or ethical way either, I should say. It's a dark place. It's nasty, it's very dirty, but it's very–how do you say–‘focused on production?’ So there's a lot of conveyor belts. There's a lot of big machines. Yeah, and you'll be fighting against employees of the Blackveil corporation, and be fighting against their robots.
Those interested in Raiders of Blackveil will be able to see more of the struggle to free Wildguard from the control of the Blackveil corporation at Steam Next Fest in June as the airship Liberator soars toward Early Access.