Expeditions: Rome Post-Release Developer Diary

Having released Expeditions: Rome a couple weeks back, THQ Nordic now brings us the first post-release developer diary for their historical RPG. The article talks about the game’s positive reception and its immediate future that includes a slight overhaul of the third act, some legion system adjustments, and at least one piece of DLC.

Check it out:

Ave, and welcome to another DevDiary – the first one since the glorious release of Expeditions: Rome in fact. We skipped last week due to being rather busy with the launch, but this week we are back to talk about the reception and our support plans.

It’s been hugely exciting for us to finally let you all play the game we’ve been making for the past 3 years. We’re loving the discussions on Steam and Discord, and it’s been particularly fun to see you guys compare notes and gradually realise how far-reaching the effects of your decisions throughout the game can be, and how many things change depending on your choices and even your gender. We’ve spent a little more time than we perhaps should over the weekends watching Cringer, Bikeman, BurkeBlack, CohhCarnage, and others play Expeditions: Rome on Twitch, and chatting to their communities about the game.

All of us at Logic Artists and at THQ Nordic have been very pleased with the game’s reception – the critical reception and the player reactions have both been overwhelmingly positive. There’s no doubt this is the best and most successful game in the Expeditions franchise so far, as we always felt it would be. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for playing our game!

Since the release, our main priority has been to keep an eye on the reception of the game and what you’re all saying about it, fix the bugs that have surfaced, and make whatever tweaks or improvements we could quickly do to improve the play experience. We’ve worked hard to ensure that we would be releasing a stable and polished game, and it’s very gratifying to see that we haven’t received all that many bug reports. As you may have noticed though, two hotfixes did go out last week to address the few major issues that popped up early on, and a more significant update is currently being tested that will fix many smaller issues and add some quality-of-life improvements overall. That update will be released as soon as we feel certain that it doesn’t introduce any new problems.

One of the major things this update will do is to loosen up the structure of Act 3 a bit. Many players have expressed that the campaign feels too linear and drags on for a bit too long, and we agree. The upcoming update will reduce the amount of mandatory regions you need to capture to complete that campaign, and it will also make it possible to do some of the main missions in a different order, so it isn’t as linear. That way if you just want to get to the finale as fast as possible, you can skip some of the pacification content. If you do decide to stick around and complete your conquest, there’ll be a nice new colour theme available for your legion as a reward for your efforts.

The other major piece of feedback we’ve received is that the legion battles are just super difficult to figure out. A lot of you really want to understand what’s going on under the hood, and the game doesn’t do much to explain. Addressing these issues will take a little longer, so this next update will not have anything for that yet, but we are discussing what to do with the legion battle system in general – how to better communicate what’s going on and what your choices are doing, and how to make it feel less random.

Now that the initial reactionary bug fixing and improvements are done and being tested, we are able to set our sights on the next thing – which leads us to the answer to a question that has been burning on many players’ minds. Expeditions: Rome will have DLC, and we are working on that as we speak. We can’t yet talk about what the DLC is going to be, nor when it will be released, but it’s going to be very cool. For this new piece of content, we have chosen to add something more to the existing game rather than making anything self-contained. It will add something new for you to do as you replay the game’s story to see where other choices would lead you, and it will add new ways for you to engage with the combat system that we are so very proud of.

That’s it for this one! Despite the lack of DevDiary last week we had a great time hanging out with you on Twitch in our usual DevStream timeslot, playing a bit more of Rome, and answer all the questions you guys had for us. Let’s repeat the success this Wednesday, February 2nd at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT at http://twitch.tv/thqnordic. If you have any particularly pressing questions, please remember that you can post them as comments on this article and we will prioritise getting you some answers during the stream.

Valete!