Expeditions: Conquistador - Interview @ Gamers.de

Gamers.de interviewed the developers of Expeditions: Conquistador, available in both the German and English language, in contrast to the game itself that will not be available in the German language.

Gamers: Are there games, which you consider as a source of inspiration for "Expeditions: Conquistator"? If yes, which games would that be? 

Logic Artists: In terms of the overall structure of the game, we’ve taken a lot of inspiration from King’s Bounty – that style of riding around a miniaturized world map in real-time and then loading up a smaller battlefield divided into a hex grid whenever there’s combat, which in turn was taken from the Heroes of Might & Magic series, that’s obviously something we’ve used.

The combat itself is more like a traditional turn-based RPG though, like you’d find in the two original Fallout games for example. We’ve also used certain elements from Dungeons & Dragons, such as the relationship between movement and actions or concepts like attacks of opportunity. Finally, we have the roster of troops that you select from when you go into battle, which can get permanent injuries if they’re knocked out, which is inspired either by the original Rainbow Six or the original X-COM, depending on how you look at it.

Gamers: Back in August 2012, I had the chance to play the first beta-version of your game and I already liked what I saw very much. But there have been many changes to the game since then. Which aspect of the game changed the most in your opinion?

Logic Artists: The world map is probably the aspect that’s changed the most – pretty much immediately after Gamescom, we removed the hex grid from the world map so you now just ride around freely. It makes the game look better because the hexes don’t get in the way, and it feels a lot less restrictive because you have more freedom in where to go and how to get there. It also allowed us to change the way you interact with objects a little – instead of going to a hex that contains an icon, you now just click on an object in the game world to activate it, just like in King’s Bounty, and that feels a lot better, more natural sort of.

The combat has changed in a lot of ways too, though. We’ve replaced all the animations since you played the game, we have more enemy types, every character type has different models now, with visual variation to show the quality of their armour and weapons, we’ve more items, you can decide what type of weapon each follower should use, our GUI has been improved, we have more types of victory condition in the battles, and so on and so forth. Plus, we have a whole second campaign set in Mexico, of course! We’ve done a LOT in those 6 months.