Heil og sæl - Happy & Healthy
Greetings Kinsmen! We're pleased that you've joined us once more (or for the first time) on this journey of ours. While it has only been a month since the last newsletter, we’ve been busy. We have introduced some new weapons to combat, made more definitive plans for our release window and made lots of progress on our upcoming preview build!
Add to that a dash trivia knowledge a splash of Avellonian godliness, and you’ve got something delicious on your hands.
Enjoy!
A wild Avellone appeared.
He used “Legendary RPG designer knowledge”.
It was super effective.
Chris Avellone, handing out some of that legendary gamedev wisdom.
For the uninitiated, Chris Avellone is a game designer and writer, having worked on iconic titles like:
Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2 and New Vegas, all the Icewind Dale games, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Mask of The Betrayer, Wasteland 2, Alpha Protocol, Pillars of Eternity, as well as the upcoming Planescape: Tides of Numenera, Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Prey.
In short, if you like old-school RPGs, you’ve probably come across his work. If you don’t, odds are you’ve at least heard of them. Here at Logic Artists we’re big fans, so having Chris Avellone drop by and chat a bit about our game, and some of the challenges we face, was pretty great for us.
We got to ask a lot of questions about our game and ways to tackle the challenges we face, but we also had time for a bit of fun.
We won’t go into all of the stuff we learned during the workshop here. But if you haven’t seen it already, watch this video of us firing a tirade of questions at the man, who’s made it his business to write all the answers.
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In Development
It’s no secret that the Vikings were masters of warfare. The devastation they left in their wake was only possible thanks to their savvy tactics and rigorous training. One of our goals with Expeditions: Viking is to expose players to a variety of potential tactics to overwhelm and surprise their enemies in combat. At its core, the combat in Expeditions: Viking relies on positioning, proficiency, and deception. Positioning and deception are being expanded upon later, for now we’d like to show you a couple of of weapon proficiencies that we’ve been working on.
Dual Wielding!
Fighting a berserker with one axe is scary, if they’ve got two axes it can be downright terrifying. And we want players to experience the fear of facing a dualist and the opportunity to dish out some fear and damage of their own! Check out the sheer badassery and bravado of our latest dual wielding animation.
"Come at me then, if you think you're hard enough!"
Freyja’s Viking Facts
We all like a good story, and sometimes good stories become great stories by employing just a tiny bit of exaggeration. The pre-recorded era is hard to keep track of at the best of times, and the ability for people to make up their own, more colourful facts, doesn't help matters along.
But have no fear, your friendly neighbourhood Logic Artists viking-(sort of-)fact-checkers are here!
Each and every Friday on Twitter at
@expeditionsgame we’ll post some true facts about Vikings. Lack of actual recordings from the era notwithstanding, these facts are only slightly exaggerated (possibly). We’ve named each one of these “oh so scholarly” posts Freyja’s Friday Fun Facts after the goddess Freyja, whom Friday is allegedly named after.
There’s just one catch. Friday isn’t named after Freyja, it’s named after Frigga. Odin’s wife. Incidentally, they were, and were not, the same person. Confused? We don’t blame you! Let’s dig in, shall we?
Frigga, Odin's wife.
Some scholars hypothesize that both Frigg and Freyja may have their origin in a common Germanic goddess. There is no firm evidence for this, but scholars have found some similarities both in their mythological features and the possible etymologies of their names, as well as place-names associated with them. Due to linguistic variations between branches of Germanic languages, where even a god that is the same may be called by different-looking names, this confusion has not been conclusively resolved.
Both goddesses bear names with meanings tied to love, relationship, sex, and fertility however, so it’s not a far stretch to suspect they started as one idea. Add to this that their names seem to spring from Frijjō ("Frigg-Frija"), the reconstructed name or epithet of a hypothetical common Germanic love goddess, and a pattern emerges. Frijjō was the wife of Wōdanaz, the proto-germanic name for Odin.
But if Frigga and Freyja are the same, how come Friday isn’t named after Freyja?
Well, Frigga’s name in ancient Germanic was Frīa. Friday was frīatag (later Freitag). Likewise the Anglo-saxons referred to the day as Frigedæg, meaning Frige’s day. Frige was the name for Frigga, not Freyja.
So Friday seems not to be in honor of Freyja, the goddess of love and wisdom, but Frigga… The goddess of love and wisdom. But are we doing it wrong then? Well seeing as they’re pretty much one and the same goddess, the take away seems to be that while Frigga is apparently the namesake of the day, Freyja and Frigga weren’t actually separate deities back then. Proto-Frigga bore the day. But proto-Frigga became both Frigga and Freyja, so both are essentially heirs to the Friday.
The more you know.
Tala - Communicate
While not swinging a magic hammer or riding a chariot across the sky, Chris is bound to bring a bit of divine RPG thunder, either way.
There’s cool stuff on the horizon ahead, but for now the team is taking a well deserved summer break. Lots of exciting news coming in August, but until next time, safe sails.
