Book of Travels
Adventure in a world where you’re not forced to be the hero
Ilove playing the role of the wanderer in games, but it’s pretty difficult to explore virtual worlds without some bloodthirsty monster trying to kill me. It is too much to ask to quietly traverse The Witcher 3’ s Novigrad, collecting herbs and picking plants, without a ferocious wolf trying to gnaw my arm off?
I’m down for fisticuffs more often than not, but there are moments when I just want to explore and take it all in. Thankfully, Might and Delight has come to my rescue with BookofTravels, an upcoming RPG that embraces this wanderer philosophy.
Self-described as a “collaborative and friendly roleplaying experience”, there are no linear quests or nagging plotlines. Players are free to explore the handcrafted world of Braided Shore at their own pace. Might and Delight describes it as a TMO, a ‘tiny multiplayer online’ game, with a focus on exploration and companionship, two themes that the studio is more than familiar with.
“Making the Shelter games taught us how to evoke strong emotions and how to make simple things matter,” Might and Delight’s art director, Jakob Tuchten explains. “We felt we had stumbled upon many unique and interesting multiplayer mechanics that seemed to make people interact and roleplay in really friendly and creative ways, mechanics we wanted to develop further.”
BookofTravels will be Might and Delight’s first Early Access title, and after a successful Kickstarter with 7,000 backers, the team is more than eager to get the community involved in the development process.
“We see ourselves a bit like a dungeon master,” Tuchten explains. “We want to emulate what the community wants, taking into account what secrets they like, the direction of the game, and which storylines they react to. We want to tailor the game’s future to both match that and to also challenge perceptions people have in the game.”
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BookofTravels is definitely challenging perceptions. Might and Delight has been more than happy to celebrate that Bookof Travels is not your traditional MMORPG. Many of the story beats that guide the player through a fantasy world have been set aside. With no overarching goal, no real beginning or end, you are the one in charge of shaping your own journey.
“Our world is serene,” Tuchten says. “It’s not plagued by an evil monster or a bad king. It doesn’t have that cliché dark fantasy storyline where everything is about to go to hell, and you’re the focal point of trying to set it right.”
But just because BookofTravels’ world has a peaceful cadence, it doesn’t mean Might and Delight has scrapped all means of conflict. Tuchten explains how entering a fight with monsters is a serious event with consequences. The team’s still deciding the exact mechanics, but promise that encounters will often be traumatic and have an emotional aftermath—not something to take lightly.
“We have the opportunity to actually do combat that is meaningful,” Tuchten explains. “When it happens, it involves risk and has a dramatic impact on your character. We debated for a long time whether combat should be a part of the world at all, but we want to convey the serenity or the calmness of the world, and that needed to be accentuated by having a danger just outside of the road.”
Roads wind between important locations, but every wanderer knows what lies off the beaten path is worth discovering too, even if danger lies in the wilds. Luckily you’ll have plenty of skills and abilities to help you explore, and just like combat, Might and Delight has
ENTERING A FIGHT WITH MONSTERS IS A SERIOUS EVENT WITH CONSEQUENCES
approached these RPG elements in its own unique way.
“There is a sort of leveling-up system, but it’s not tailored to the same sort of framework as normal MMOs. It’s based around skill slots,” Tuchten says. “As you progress through the game, you’ll get more empty slots for learned skills you get from the world. You may have ten skills but only three slots, and each one takes up a certain amount of space. For example, a powerful skill, like the ability to transfer into an animal, would take up five skill slots.”
Skills are not something you learn automatically, but through teachings from the world’s characters. If you want to learn how to fish, you’ll need to seek out a fisherman. Same with tea brewing and knot tying—the two major magical practices in BookofTravels. Knots hold short-term magical abilities that when untied provide a short burst of magic (such as teleporting to the other side of a river), whereas teas have long-term magical properties, but must be carefully brewed while sitting next to a fire.
Abilities can be heightened with choices you make in the character creation process by choosing talents, backstories, and personality traits. You can be a carefree traveller who grew up in the mountains, a historian seeking to discover Braided Shore’s lost past, or a mysterious cloaked outlaw with a knack for the magical arts. It’s refreshing to see a character creator that puts the focus on things other than combat ability.
“The biggest thing for me personally is that we have developed a game design surrounding roleplaying freedom,” Tuchten says. “Because of the game’s open-ended design, you’re not forced to be a hero, which to us makes the roleplay aspects so much greater.”
QUIET COMPANIONS
One particular mechanic that makes Might and Delight’s game collection unique is that they create meaningful ways of communicating without using any words or dialogue. Creating companionship through wordless interactions has always been a key theme in Might and Delight’s games: The unspoken bond between an animal mother and her cubs in the Shelter games, the friendship between a bear and a lynx cub in Paws, and TinyEcho’s silent spirit delivering mail to a community.
In BookofTravels, NPCs will speak to you in little dialogue bubbles, but you and your party can only communicate through symbols and emotes. It’s an idea the studio explored in their first MMO, Meadow, where it created some surprising meaningful player bonds.
You don’t have to buddy up with others though, BookofTravels lets you be a lone wolf if you want. You can go off and have your own adventure, following story leads and uncovering mysteries on your own. There is a wealth of lore under Bookof Travels’s fairy-tale surface for players to dive into—if they so choose. It’s completely up to you.
One storyline kicks off in one of the game’s cities, Casa. It acts as the starting point for adventure when you first begin the game and it didn’t play out like I expected. “There’s been a murder in the city,” Tuchten says. “A mythical creature called a Sepra, which is what we call the genies of this world, has been murdered, and that’s never happened before. There’s a mystery surrounding how it died and how it’s affected the politics of the city.”
As serene as BookofTravels world may seem, Might and Delight wants the world’s cities to be like the metropolises of the real world—neither good or bad but somewhere in the middle.
Settlements are going to be bustling with activity and are supposed to make the player feel somewhat overwhelmed.
The world of Braided Shore looks stunning. It has Might and Delight’s signature visuals, but this time on a grand scale. It may look 2D, but there’s plenty of depth and, as you explore each area, layers of the scene fade in and out of the foreground, like a delicate paper theatre.
BookofTravels has taken traditional aspects of online RPGs and reimagined them in a very Might and Delight way. And, from the overwhelming success of the Kickstarter campaign, both fans and those not familiar with the studio’s work have been spellbound by the strange, whimsical idea of a serene RPG.
It’s not often a game gives you the opportunity to embody the archetype of a wanderer, but Might and Delight seems to be on track with BookofTravels. It’s a whole world designed for those who want to let their curiosity guide them, and that’s pretty special.
IT HAS MIGHT AND DELIGHT’S SIGNATURE VISUALS, BUT THIS TIME ON A GRAND SCALE