Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms – Gameplay Sneak Peek and Community Q&A

With Gamera Interactive’s narrative-driven action-RPG Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms launching into early access in a couple of days, we get a chance to check out some gameplay featuring Alaloth’s Dwarven Champion. And afterwards, we can read a summary of a recent Discord community Q&A that covers a broad range of topics that include the game’s scope, difficulty, and systems.

Here’s the gameplay preview:

And a couple of sample questions:

about the size of the world and locations?

The game world [Plamen] is quite huge. We built it in a modular way to be easily expanded and to grant players playing different races balanced runs on the go. You start in your stronghold [more to say about this] and each kingdom has a bunch of places to visit: 7 cities [the capital, a major one, five minor], 7 Fighting Areas [FA are the places where you can get artifacts if you are lucky enough], many different points of interest and different sub locations [houses, cellars, throne rooms etc]. Moreover, we’ll have special FA popping-up on the map with quests

Will I be able to respec my character freely?

Yes, in Alaloth you’ll be able to respec your char through the Orbs of Chaos, special items you can find around to be sacrificed on a special shrine you can find in one of the sanctuaries on the map. There is even a second way to respec the char without using orbs but it’s way more lore-related and it differs from this one because once you’ve done with it, you can’t respec again [but you can get some extra help because of the hardcore choice]

is the targeted playthrough time (main story + all side content; only main story)?

This really depends by your style of playing and by the game mode you’ve selected at the beginning. First of all, in both modes, the artifacts needed to enter the endgame spawn in a random way in fighting areas. So you could be lucky or just need to clear every FA to get an artifact. You need 4 to be ready to do some “stuff” needed to enter the endgame. If you play solo not a big deal. If you play competitive, you have to take into consideration that IA champions we’ll do their own run. This means that they could find artifacts [there is one artifact per kingdom]. So if you have an artifact for example, they will need to hunt you at some point to get it from you. Same at the opposite: if you miss a piece [or more] and you know that other champions found it, at some point you’ll have to track them to get it back. Just this adds a lot of strategy to the game and could really change the duration of a run. Even consider that the main quest is basically “defeat Alaloth” and in theory you can beat him without doing any of the quest, just playing to find artifacts. We have more than 130 quests, random generated bounties, each champion in competitive, has a different behaviour [passive, neutral, aggressive] so the playthrough time could really be something like 8-10 hours up to 40, 50, 60. Always consider that the game has been thought to give the full cake playing multiple runs because you are probably going to miss some of the contents everytime [think about the timed stuff] and because different races give a different feel back to player through dialogues/barks/quests

Why is there a console interface in all the screenshots?

The game can be played both with mouse & keyboard and with a controller, so the screenshots you saw have been made while playing with a controller