Dev Diary #4 - Camping and Your Village

Now that Update 1 has been out for a few weeks, it's time to look to the future. While the team is finalizing the content for Update 2, with a handful of people addressing a few things that have come up since Update 1 was released, the design team has already moved onto the Act 3 content for our full release, which is bigger than both Acts 1 and 2 combined.

One of the main things we're holding onto for the full release is the content and features related to your rulership of your own village. This part of the game is the reason Acts 1 and 2 are comparatively short: We wanted to get you through to the more open part of the game fairly quickly, so you can start to feel like you have real agency and can make bigger decisions that affect more than just yourself.

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If you choose to read on, please beware of some spoilers ahead .**

Every Expeditions game has featured some manner of "management" content. The "camping system" was a central part of the survival aesthetic of Conquistador. This system carried over to Viking, where it felt somewhat vestigial; the harsh survival mechanics that had been appropriate to a group of Spanish conquerors lost in the Aztec wilderness didn't really fit the story of a band of Norse raiders roaming the English countryside.

Thus, in Rome, we pivoted to treating the legion camp as a place you visit because you want to get good things, not a place you have to go to avoid bad things. This paradigm is very much still present in Samurai.

Camping in Expeditions: Samurai

Before you become the lord or lady of your own village, camping is where you go to replenish the charges of your tactical items such as smoke bombs or kunai, or to treat any injuries that might be reducing the effectiveness of your companions. It's also a place where you can just check in on your people and see if they have something new to share.

And they often do! We have oodles of dialogue with the companions this time around, for those who like to get to know their people. Like in Viking, camping is back to being a small group of people travelling together and pitching their tents, and we've put a lot of work into making sure you get to chat with your friends often and gradually get to know them better as they open up to you over time.

Unlike in Viking though, you don't have to go camp in the wilderness - in each act, you have a home base somewhere in Japan where you can do all the same things as you can do when you're camping. In Act 1, the House of Whispers is your home base in Nagasaki, and in Act 2, you get a new home base in the city of Osaka. From Act 3 onwards, your own village acts as your home base. This grounds you in the game world and gives you a fixed point where you can return between missions, so you don't feel like a vagrant.

Even better, it lets characters in the story know where you live so they can send you letters with threats or compliments (and you'd better believe our writers had a lot of fun authoring taunting letters from your enemies).

Inviting People to Your Village

Once you reach Act 3 and are made hatamoto, you can start inviting people to join you in your new fief. Most such "followers" also show up in your camp, so you can access their services at any time during your travels.

This way of upgrading your village and your camp is much more narrative than in previous instalments. You unlock upgrades not by grinding and spending resources, but by completing quests and inviting characters to come with you. Rather than accessing everything through a sprawling UI, you talk to the people who provide these services to you.

This is part of our general approach to side quests: We don’t want side quests to usually be random strangers flagging you down in the street to ask you for a favor or hire you for some task. Yes, we still do have a few of those, but the vast majority of side quests in Samurai comes from your own team or from the opportunities granted to you (and responsibilities foisted upon you) as hatamoto. It feels much better to be doing things for your close friends or working to expand your village (and unlock new gameplay systems) than it does to run errands for strangers.

Crafting

The crafting system is perhaps the most important of the services you unlock by inviting followers. An evolution of the system in Expeditions: Rome, the main change we made was to eliminate randomization of a weapon's abilities. Now, each weapon type has a certain set of variations that each come with a very specific set of abilities.

Crafting is how you exert control over your equipment. You can make your own weapons and armor to fill gaps in your loadout, customize affixes and special properties of unique items to suit your playstyle, or make enough yumi and katana to equip your whole team like real samurai. The only limit is what crafting components you've managed to scavenge out of items you've looted and dismantled.

Crafting isn't just for commissioning weapons and armor from the smith, though. Other followers unlock the ability to make new tactical items, or even to make your own treatment items for injuries.

We hope this preview has made you excited to gather a little group of subjects around you, improve and expand your village, and maybe dig into the crafting system to theory-craft some nice, cheesy synergies. In a few weeks, you can expect another dev diary that will delve into the upcoming Update 2, revealing more information about all the new content and the new features you can expect to find in that update.