Just a tad more immersive than the card game
One of the most anticipated titles announced at Gen Con was Obsidian Entertainment porting over Paizo‘s card-based RPG, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. Since the announcement, however, things have been dark on the Pathfinder front. In fact, we didn’t even have any official screenshots, just some pictures of the game on a monitor. Yesterday the darkness began to fade away when I spoke with Shane DeFreest and Nathan Davis of Obsidian Entertainment.
Right now the Obsidian team is still working on getting all the card interactions working the way they’re supposed to as well as working on the interface to ensure it works for a digital version of the game, and isn’t just a copy of the physical card game. Based on the screenshots, they definitely want the RPG elements at the forefront, and the card mechanics to simply help tell the story. They’re also tweaking the interface to make it easier for players to remember what’s in a certain deck or which phase of the turn it currently is.
Instead of decks of cards, locations are shown in a bit more thematic style
The cardboard version of PACG plays like an Adventure Path in the actual Pathfinder RPG. The story is told in an episodic fashion, with new content arriving every month or so. As such, the Rise of the Runelords adventure path that is being implemented by Obsidian consists of 6 adventures, each consisting of a new stack of cards. The game will ship with a tutorial adventure as well as the first part of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path called Burnt Offerings. I would assume that the other decks in the Rise of the Runelords adventure path would be released later as IAP, but Obsidian wasn’t ready to talk about what happens after the initial game is released.
Come, let me clutch thee.
Like any good RPG, a good portion of gameplay comes from working as a team. In PACG it’s no different. Players have powers and can play cards on other player’s turns to help them succeed at whatever challenges they face. From a digital point of view, this would appear to make multiplayer a nightmare. Consider that, after each phase on your turn you would need to wait for every other player to possibly do something to interrupt your turn. Because of this, the game will ship with single-player and pass-and-play multiplayer only. That said, the amount of interruptions that can happen each turn in PACG would make even pass-and-play a chore. Imagine having to pass the iPad around to all other players every time you need to make a decision. To combat this the team at Obsidian is looking at changing the way that interrupts are played to make pass-and-play, and possibly even asynchronous online multiplayer, something that works. For example, automatically applying powers and card effects from other players if there is no detriment to the other player or having each player indicate what they are willing to help with so there is no need to focus gameplay back on that player when someone else is taking their turn.
Lastly, we talked about release. They’re currently targeting Q1 of 2015 and are developing for both iPad and Android tablets.
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