Towns certainly don’t seem to grow or wither based on the world around them, something that you might hope a non-procedural world could muster. There are warring human factions that you can flip between for profit or gain, but you can’t see them (or anybody else) moving on the world map and all fights and skirmishes are small-scale towns can be affected by monsters, missing villagers or boosted by caravans, but that doesn’t seem to affect the towns beyond cycled quests. I’m pretty confident that by the time it reaches 1.0 this won’t feel like an issue, and the way that the cities and towns interact with each other will feel a lot deeper, but at the moment it just eludes to that. The Iron Oath‘s world, for instance, isn’t procedurally generated (unlike its characters), which feels a bit odd. It’s six of one and half a dozen of another when it comes to the appeal of these clever design choices, they feel novel and new until things start repeating, at which point it’s almost worst than it not being there. Unlike many of those games, your characters can wind up permanently dead, and your mercenaries will comment on it - I’ve had one character permanently die after misjudging a mission, and everybody held a funeral. As characters in older RPGs would, they act like they have their own concerns and fears, and converse with other characters in your party. That said, the dialogue is very well written and Curious Panda Games have clearly made a deliberate effort to make your mercenaries get involved in conversations where they can, and to make them seem like deliberately written companions. The thing is, there’s no opportunity for grand betrayals in-game, and writing that plays on those relationships will only happen around scripted events - so it can feel a little light on story at times after such a grand introduction. Only you and a couple of company stalwarts remain and immediately form a new company to seek vengeance and rescue a kidnapped child. A cave dive culminating in a retirement party suddenly shifts into a massacre as your mercenary gang turn on itself for profit. Its tutorial, while a little linear, paints a slightly different world than the one you’ll be exploring. Part of that is due to the fact that it’s a squad-based, tactics game before all else, but most of it is because it’s only just started on quite a densely-packed year of Early Access development. They’re not though, they’re procedurally rolled, and as you level them up the characters that share classes might well start to feel incredibly samey, and the messages might start to feel less personal and more repetitive. The Iron Oath‘s demon-incursion-stricken world actually feels closer to a Baldur’s Gate or Dragon Age-lite setting, and a lot of effort has gone into trying to make each character feel unique as with tactics RPGs your party members are slipped into messages, and they have conversations mid-contract that almost make it seem like they’re deliberately crafted characters rather than a dice-roll of class, stats, face, colour-palette, name and abilities. The Iron Oath is a tactical, squad-based game at its heart, following in the steps of games like Wartales, XCOM and Battle Brothers, however much like many of those, there are some traits and features that are more commonly associated with RPGs littered throughout. However, if you think about it, the heroes of most party-based RPGs, including pen & paper RPGs, are essentially an unattached band of heroes who go around and complete quests in order to keep their gold balance above zero, the main difference here is that your characters take a wage, and so that’ll have to be close enough. The latest title to let you lead a company of sellswords is The Iron Oath from Curious Panda Games and it’s available now in Early Access.īetween quarrelling nobles, remorseless demons and a giant evil dragon, the world of Caelum needs a hero sadly they don’t exist. Yet, despite that, more and more games are appearing that put you at the helm of your own gang freelancing sword-for-hires. Goodness, it’s hard to be a mercenary leader.

The iron oath