Expeditions: Conquistador Interview
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Can you talk a bit about Conquistador's character development system? What kind of attributes, skills, and other character progression mechanics do you plan on implementing in the game? Are there going to be non-combat skills, such as persuasion, intimidation or bluffing?
The player character's skillset consists exclusively of non-combat skills. They are: Tactics, Diplomacy, Healing, Hunting, and Leadership. These skills are set at the beginning of the game and aren't levelled up manually, though some events may raise or lower one of your skills permanently. Each of these skills will open up new dialogue options in certain events, and a lot of the time you will be able to use them to change the premises of a battle (for example setting you up in a more advantageous starting position, reducing the number of enemies, or even opening up a whole new part of the battle field). They also influence different parts of the resource management metagame, with Leadership for example mitigating the impact of unpopular decisions on your people's morale or Healing reducing the Medicine cost of treating your injured troops.
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What are the differences between the player-created character and the followers? Are there more customization options for the player charcter?
The player character will not participate in battles, so there aren't really a lot of similarities between the player character and the followers. They both have first and last names, a sex, and a portrait, and your own character can function as a Doctor when you need to treat injured people. That's about it. The reason you can't fight is that anybody who participates in a fight can get incapacitated, anybody who is incapacitated can get an injury that carries over to the world map, and anybody who's injured in the world map can die if left untreated. We don't want that to happen to the player character.
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How much influence does the player have on how the story progresses? How linear or non-linear will the story be? Given the CYOA aspect, can you provide some examples of the choices and consequences we can reasonably expect from the game?
The main thing of course is that we have a faction system - the main faction is the Aztec empire, surrounded by (and actively oppressing) all the small scattered tribes outside the city of Tenochtitlan. The main faction plotline gives you the choice of allying with the Aztecs or uniting the tribes against them. You can also just try to take on everybody for the glory of King Carlos, or you can try to ignore them and just hoard as much gold as you can before returning to Spain.
Our aim is to put as much work into the smaller things as we're putting into the big things - as an example, in one event in the Hispaniola campaign, whether or not you attack two groups of enemies that are fighting among themselves will determine whether a native village will get burned down, which means you'll lose them as a trade post and any side quests you might have got there later will be lost as well. Another major focus area for us is making sure that victory or defeat in every battle makes some sort of noticeable difference - you can always keep playing even if you lose a fight, but you may not enjoy the consequences of your defeat. A lot of the time, the lives of important NPCs will be on the line.
