Expeditions: Rome

Swords, sandals, and a serious RPG under the toga

The Expeditions series has invaded Mesoamerica with the Conquistadors and raided England with the Vikings, taking the idea of a historical RPG from a niche concept to a fan favorite. Now, Expeditions is going to ancient Rome, and it’s asking players to become one of the greatest conquerors of the age.

Expeditions:Rome is the latest in the series, coming this year. It’s a sprawling work of historical fiction set in a world where the player’s custom character walks in the footsteps of Julius Caesar. Like previous games in the series, Rome won’t focus on a precise retelling of the history, but rather use history as a jumping-off point. It’s also going to take advantage of the new setting to shake up the underlying RPG mechanics, making the tactical battles more exciting and faster-paced than they were before.

“We never want to constrain ourselves to writing about specific events in history, but rather think about how to stay true to historical figures, periods, and details such as how people dress, how they’re armed, their religion, their view on other cultures, and so on,” says Jonas Wæver, creative director at Logic Artists. Wæver has a passion for history—his father was a history teacher, and gave him “quite the stack of books” as mandatory reading about Rome. The studio’s spin on Roman history shows in what I saw of the game, including some social encounters and combats spread across three regions of the ancient world: Asia Minor (part of Turkey these days), Egypt, and Gaul (now known as France).

“Historical events can be a jumping-off point for us when we insert the player into a particular part of history, but once the player character enters the world stage, all bets are off,” says Wæver. “After all, this is a roleplaying game, and one of the most important things for us is that the player should be free to choose, and can act in completely ahistorical ways.”

HISTORY BOYS

Thus, you’ll be your own Caesar: You’ll meet major historical figures, but you’ll form your own relationships, rivalries, or alliances with them. Customizing your character in true RPG fashion means choosing a class and skills, but also a gender. Female and male characters have slightly different subplots to contend with, as the deeply-rooted sexism of patriarchal Roman culture will stand against women who seek power in Rome. “We wanted it to be a story of triumph and overcoming that adversity, so some artistic licence was needed,” says Wæver.

And it sounds like there’s a lot of triumph to be had, given that the game has seven endings and a “huge amount of further permutations based on the outcomes of side quests”. Each of the five companion characters has their own set of outcomes in the end, as well, depending on how they approved of your choices.

Your character will be one of a handful of classes, each with three subclasses. These are Roman roles, each with access to a different set of weapons that give them their basic abilities. Thus you get classes like the shield-and-sword-wielding Princeps, a heavy infantry soldier who can be built as a shield-based tank, a crowd-controlling brawler, or an allysupporting buffer. Other classes include the support-focused Triarius, a secondline veteran; the skirmishing Veles, dart-throwing light infantry; and the Sagittarius, a consummate archer. Unlike in previous games, characters get their attack actions from the weapon they have equipped—there’s no basic attack to be seen. Wæver says the team was “really pleased” with eliminating the basic attack action from combat, because just swapping weapons opens up new options for the characters.

CHARACTERS GET THEIR ATTACK ACTIONS FROM THE WEAPON THEY HAVE EQUIPPED

“Now you get multiple different attack skills from the weapons you’ve equipped, and they’re never just an attack—they always have some extra effects, such as applying a status effect or dealing extra damage under specific circumstances, which raises the skill ceiling and rewards you for playing smarter,” he says. It’s all part of an increased emphasis on the mechanical design of the fighting in Expeditions:Rome.

“We have a much more significant power curve in Rome than we’ve had in previous instalments,” says Wæver. “Health, damage, shield strength, armor, resistances, and skill complexity all ramp up gradually throughout the game.” Those will be improvements from the style of game featured in previous Expeditions RPGs, and they’re not the only ones. Wæver was clear that Rome’s three act structure provides more than just a plot. “Unlike in Expeditions:Viking,” he says, “we’re not dropping you into the deep end during character creation this time—skill choices are unlocked very gradually.”

WORLD TOUR

The game starts during the wars between Rome and the Kingdom of Pontus, in what is now Turkey, then known as Asia Minor or Anatolia. The king Mithridates Megas has gathered Hellenic peoples, Greeks and Greek colonists, to go to war against Rome. The character is a young Legatus, a high-ranking military officer, and must fight both personal battles and make military campaign decisions in order to further their career as a Roman head of family and politician. Fighting Mithridates is the first step. “Then the story moves to Africa where we get to interact with the Berbers and the Egyptians,” says Wæver, “and finally we head to Gaul to meet some of the myriad tribes of what is now France, Switzerland and Belgium.”

Between acts the character goes back to Rome and checks in with their family, sees the benefits or takes the fallout from their actions in the field, and tries to advance themselves politically before they are sent back into the field. “That’s really where the political aspects of the story unfold, and also where the consequences of all the decisions and all the actions you take during each of the wars really come back to haunt you,” says Wæver.

One example was a smuggler working for the player’s political rival. On finding the smuggler in the field supplying the enemy army, the player had to choose between getting the smugglers’ boat before it escaped or going after the shipment of weapons and supplies that would make their next battle more difficult and get their soldiers killed.

And getting killed is a real danger. In tactical battles your party is generally outnumbered by the enemy, making a clever approach and smart positioning key. “Our goal has been to make combat feel fast and deadly,” says Wæver. “Though you will sometimes run into very tough enemies, by and large the increased challenge comes from having to fight more and more enemies. We really want the player to live that fantasy of being a heavily armored Roman soldier holding the line against a horde that vastly outnumbers you and your men.”

To that end, Logic Artists has focused the new combat system on large combat arenas and mobile encounters. Moving quickly to avoid fighting unnecessary enemies and positioning yourself in striking distance will be a key tactic.

ORDER UP

More than anything, Wæver and his team focused hard on speed. “One huge improvement we’ve made is to allow simultaneous execution of orders,” he says, “This means you can tell one of your characters to move up and attack, switch to another character, and then tell them to do something else while the first character is still moving or swinging. This also means that interrupts such as attacks of opportunity no longer pause execution, they can just happen fluidly as part of another character’s action. The AI can move multiple characters at the same time as well, which reduces the amount of time you spend waiting for the enemies to finish their turn.”

This is the third Expeditions game, and it’s been four years since the last one. Viking was well-received, but Rome is far more ambitious, aggressively moving the series’ design forward. The narrative writing, characters, and combat that Logic Artists showed off in the preview were all more advanced and compelling than anything in its prior games. We’ll find out if they can pull it off when Expeditions: Rome releases this year.

Jon Bolding

IN TACTICAL BATTLES YOUR PARTY IS GENERALLY OUTNUMBERED BY THE ENEMY

The forests of Gaul are a far cry from other environments.

Your legion’s camp upgrades over time, giving you benefits.

The dusty environs of North Africa are lush, in their own way.

Every weapon class has its own attacks. In purple are the spear’s.