Bellwright is a massive open-world survival game that fuses the city management of Rimworld with the combat of Mount & Blade. The game recently received an enormous expansion to the base game, the Maiden Voyage DLC, that transforms what is already an infinite gameplay experience into a whole new way of playing, with branching faction questlines and new repeatable content. I chatted with the team at Donkey Crew via email about how they went about bringing the Halmare Isles to life.
This new area plays more like an exploration or raid map compared to the original Karvenia map. “Halmare Isles, which is a new map and additional content for Bellwright, is not a small one because you can actually replay it,” the team tells me. The goal in mind with Halmare has always been to create a space where players can get away from the town management and the task of providing for your citizens, with a new area to “enjoy story beats and interesting new loot rewards.”
Bellwright’s Maiden Voyage Update Sets Sail For Halmare Isles
A diverse and engaging survival game gets a splashy new debut.
Unreal Engine 5.6 Means The Game Has Received A Performance Boost
One of the concerns I’ve had with Bellwright in the past has been performance. Nothing too egregious, but the sheer scale of the game can sometimes cause problems when you have very large towns full of citizens. I was curious to know if the new map would cause issues for players with existing saves full of moving pieces, but the team reassured me that they’ve made changes with the purpose of improving performance. “Our main map, Karvenia, is quite heavy for players, even though we updated to the newer version of Unreal Engine 5.6, which gave us a performance boost.”
The new map is totally separate from the original map, which has allowed the dev team to provide players with fun new tools to expand on Bellwright. “But making the maps separate is also a nice opportunity for us, to provide new tools to players, such as modders, who can now create their own maps that other players can use and explore. So it’s not just great for performance, but it’s also great for future development of our game.”
More Lore, More Ways To Experience Bellwright
More content means more lore. The lore of Bellwright goes above and beyond many survival games, particularly ones of this scale. The story follows you, the main character, who is a simple peasant falsely accused of murdering a prince. You lead a rebellion in Karvenia, overthrowing the crown, and eventually building up such a reputation that you essentially run the region. Any new content in Halmare Isles had to “fit the main game loop and progression”, and it was a task for the narrative team.
“They start by looking at each location’s lore, deciding which characters are needed, and making sure everything feels natural in the world. From there, they outline the story, define key characters, and shape the lore to match the mood of each region. It’s an ongoing process of brainstorming, collecting ideas, and doing research. For example, the Halmare Isles are inspired by Mediterranean myths and cultures. The goal was to capture a very different feeling from Karvenia, with new types of quests, dialogue, and story structure,” the team explains.
The Halmare Isles presents three different ways to play the endgame: there are two separate factions you can align yourself with (the Halmayans or Cassians), or decide to be “the main evil guy in the castle”. The team says it “basically wanted to have this option for players who really want to see how the story will develop if they are not following the exact storylines we prepared for them.”
New Content… And More In The Future
As well as new narrative content and loot, the update also brings the much-requested crossbow to the game. It wasn’t a straightforward task to introduce, however. “We wanted to make sure that crossbows stood out as their own unique thing, but we had to be careful not to make bow hunting worse in some way, due to how critical it is for early game progression. So we spent quite a lot of time iterating and experimenting to get to the final result.” This makes sense. You wouldn’t take a crossbow out deer hunting, but you would use it to siege a castle.
Lastly, as a player of Bellwright, I had to ask the team about horses. This has been a highly requested feature, and the team are well aware of everyone’s feelings about it. “So horses are actually a hot topic, on Discord, on our Slack, because we always wanted to have them. We still want to have them.” But they aren’t a simple thing to introduce, because the team also has to think about NPCs. Unlike RPG games, “like The Witcher or some other game where you just have a horse as a companion who appears out of nowhere,” the horses in Bellwright need to be functional, and used by NPCs to aid immersion.
So while the Halmare Isles update doesn’t include horses, they might be on the way at some point. “I can’t say when we will have them, but we definitely want to have some.”
The Maiden Voyage expansion for Bellwright is currently available.
Bellwright
- Released
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April 23, 2024
- ESRB
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m
- Developer(s)
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Donkey Crew
- Publisher(s)
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Snail Games USA, Donkey Crew
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
