Quick Look: Northgard

Job's done.

Reminds me a lot of Banished, which is nice.

Had my eye on this game for a while. I really dig the art style. This may have convinced me to buy yet another game...even if I don't have enough time to give what it deserves.

@Alex you should check out endless legend it's a very deep strategy game much like CIV with incredible art.

I love Endless Legend, but Endless Legend is 4 years old at this point, so the chances of GB covering it are approximately 0%. :b

EDIT: On topic, Northgard seems cool, but I'm feeling burn-out from the endless tide of medieval-low-fantasy Viking-ish/Northman themed games.

I would like to commend @alex for trying out more strategy games! This game looks interesting and i might get it because of your curiosity.

Also it made me think of Age of Mythology and that's always great.

I like that Alex is coming to grips with how dope strategy games are.

@steveurkel: Could never get into Endless Legend. I should try again. That game looks like something i should be way into...

I have a problem with bunching up buildings and making sure all the squares line up on the grid. Seeing Alex build them all willy nilly is baffling!

I'd forgotten about this one, love me some strategy games.

Is this a bit like 'Knights and Merchants'. That game was awesome

Buyer beware: This game looks better than it plays!

I felt like it was a whole lot of shuffling your villagers around trying to keep production optimised, only to be disrupted by endless thumb twirling during winter.

Following my own progression of getting into non-Civ strategy games, I eagerly await the day three years from now where @alex falls down a Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis rabbit hole.

Why do these vikings use a Christian calender? 800 AD? Also, the continent of Northgard, the mythological creatures, and these clans are clearly fictional. Does that mean Jesus exists in this fantasy setting? I have lore concerns.

@aas: the UI doesn't exist in their plane of existence. Or maybe it does? They look up and see all these floating numbers and panels.

@alexIs there any way to increase the font size on that UI? Seems awfully tiny even by my blind-ass standards.

@alex Have you tried Endless Legend? I fell off civ 5 after awhile but EL shook things up enough I found it really satisfying. Although Civ6 took up the idea of city tiles and maybe took them a little further than EL, EL also has regions similar to Northgard, a questing system, a more complex and impactful winter system.

@curiosus: I loved Civ 4 and 5, but, at this point, I think Amplitude Studios is eating Firaxis' lunch with their Endless games.

I so wanted to get into that game, but its just way too daunting for me to invest that much time into. That said i love hearing peoples stories from it.

Alex "the Jaz" Navarro

What bums me out the most about Civ is that the AI never really improved, they're always just nagging about open borders and never taking no for an answer but once you want something they'll decline everything.

I LOVE the art style! (and everything else about this game).

PC is fine, but I'd love to play it on PS4.

@aas: Maybe "800 AD" means "800 years After Dinosaurs". ;)

"You have to clear all the people units out of that space."

Nice euphemism, @alex!

Huh, I guess nobody remembers The Settlers.

Woodsmith

@vinny The game is actually very well put together for multiplayer. It seemed to be the primary goal during development, as the campaign was the last thing added to the game before release.

I played this game quite a bit last year and after jumping in because it looked like a fun Vikings Settlers game and I was surprised at solid the gameplay was. It's also successfully follows the good old "easy to learn, hard to master" mantra.

They could also check out Endless Space 2. That one's Space Civ and only one year old. XD

This is super cool. I really dig this new(?) kind of emergent sub-genre of RTS.

They Are Billions is another similar type thing.

I always felt the multiplayer focus of a lot of RTS is a super exclusionary and divisive element. You take a game like StarCraft 2 and it's pretty clear that it's a multiplayer game first that they put a lot of work into adapting a serviceable single player campaign out of. That's of course going to be a love it or hate it type of game.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Yo, I play fighting games. I get it. Sometimes people need to make games that "aren't for you". 100% agreed.

But then I think back to the RTS of old, before StarCraft and Broodwars really exploded, and it never really felt like THE sole focus was primarily around the multiplayer. I think Warcraft 2 was so beloved because it was a great single player game. The multiplayer was a cool bonus that turned out to be a huge deal and a genre redefining thing for a lot of people. Kind of like the MP in Doom being a neat thing that eventually led to Quake and the rise of the competitive shooter.

But similar to that genre it feels like the single player side of things got left behind. In recent years we've had a resurgence of really good single player campaign focused shooters but for the RTS genre... It always seems like an adaptation. An, occasionally elaborate and well meaning, effort to make you forget you're basically playing bot matches of the superior multiplayer game you bought, with cutscenes every now and then.

It seems to me like this, and games like it, is the people who grew up playing games like Warcraft but never got into the multiplayer aspect finally making games for that crowd.

Watching this feels like how I "remember" each campaign map went in Warcraft 1 & 2 as a kid. Build a cool base, expand, gather resources, explore, upgrade, etc. Fighting was cool and all but only a fraction of the greater experience. Here however, instead of each map nessicarily ending with "Go stomp the AI's base" there's this whole added layer borrowed from 4x style strategy games to seemingly replace the PvP centric mechanics with a bunch of systems and mechanics better suited for a single player RTS.

I'm very impressed. I stopped playing RTS years ago because the games went down a path that was very much not at all why I liked the genre (Dawn of War 2 is amazing though) but I'm super into this. I hope it does well and we keep seeing developers experiment in this format as well as more traditional RTS' like SC2.

Oh and btw if my They Are Billions comparison seems like a random aside; That entire game is basically the infamous "Kerrigan vs Zerg Rush" base defense scenario from the beginning of SC1 blown out into it's own game. Which is super cool. Turning a single map into a new genre worked for DotA after all :P

Look I get this game has MP and might even have been designed with it in mind... It just comes across more like an old school RTS scenario adapted for such things is all.

You can start having fun (Read: Murdering your family) with CK2 just by playing the tutorials, wait for a sale and give the base game a try! Probably my favorite game of the last 8ish years?

Stronghold-rogueish-like

Perhaps not really my style but there are definitely some good ideas there.

Got a Kingdom of Keflings feel

It kind of looks like small scale Stellaris.

you all like the sound of chopping wood?

My favorite game so far this year. The campaign is ok, the real fun of the game has been the multiplayer for me. I've never been good at competitive rts, but this is slow enough that I can manage.

@mikemcn@meierthered

Incidentally, core CK2 is free on Steam for the next couple of days.

I really enjoyed this one. Nice work, Beast crew. :-)

You guys missed the true value of this video! @Alex knows Five Iron Frenzy!

Great vid.

Vinny- tell me everything you know about Jarls.