Post Natal #10 – Battle of the Heodenings - part 2

Hello survivors! Time to talk about one other big feature of the second DLC of Dead In Vinland!

So, last time I teased you about another feature of the Endless mode, the now famous Battle of the Heodenings mode (yes, we couldn’t find anything shorter… just call it Endless mode like everyone else ^^)

In fact that’s something that was asked by the community, even since Dead In Bermuda… So it was high time we did it!

Choose your character

That’s right!! In the second DLC of Dead In Vinland, you’ll be able able to start a game in this mode with any four characters you want! Since we don’t have any storyline or whatever in this mode, we can do it more easily (with the story, it was just impossible without completely changing the game). You’ll now be able to play with your ultimate girl-only survival team if you want <3

When starting a new game, you’ll have to choose any 4 characters you want.

But we didn’t stop there…

You have a new starting option for this mode that will define your characters’ stats:

Generated like in the story mode: they will have the same generation algorithm, so the same overall skills and traits.
OR, Randomly generated: the game will follow the same generation rules than in the story mode (ie. the same amount of total skill points on every character), but all their starting skills and traits will be procedurally generated! It can lead to wtf situations where Knut has 10 in Strength and 80 in charisma, but who cares ^^

In fact the random mode is really fun to play for veteran players, because you can’t rely on what you know about the characters! You really need to find new synergies and an efficient way to use your characters.

Of course random mode can lead to easier or harder runs, but well, it’s the rogue-likish component of Heodening mode.

Customize your characters

But we didn’t stop there…

And what if you could customize your own little team of survivors? YES YOU CAN!

We didn’t want to have just a new random mode where player would re-roll and re-roll again and again until they get what they want… Now, in the DLC, you can customize all the characters you’ll recruit into your camp!

Let’s take a look at how it works ingame:

Any time you want to add a character to your camp, you can first check his/her starting skills, traits, and fighting skills.

On these pages, you can spend 1 Orichalcum Bead to customize the starting skills of this character. You don’t have to recruit him/her right away, his/her skills will stay like this until you recruit him/her. You can also customize again and again the same character, even if it’s not really recommended since Orichalcum Beads are rather hard to get (you start the game with some to customize your starting crew).

When you click on Customize, you enter this screen :

Here, you’ll be able to spend 120 points on Innate skills and 300 points on Acquired skills.

You can see that Innate skills can’t be lowered under 20 points each, and Acquired skills under 10 points. You also have a 80 high cap for innate and 40 for acquired. These are the same rules used in the random generation. This is meant to avoid a bit of min-maxing abuse (although you can still min-max pretty good…)

Two things to be noted:

In the system generation, be it default or random, we still add on top of this generation a random factor on Acquired skills (a value between -10 and +10), to make some little variations. That’s how in the story mode you can end up sometimes with Blodeuwedd having more Crafting skill than Eirik. Of course, that means that sometimes you get a bit more points total, and sometimes a bit less… But having a bit more points in skills that are useless for this character… it’s not inevitably better. That’s why if you customize your character, you won’t have this random factor on top of the points you spent. But since you chose how you spent them, it should be in general better than even a good luck on random generation.
In story mode, all the characters globally respect these rules, but not every one exactly. There are some exceptions, that makes sense balancing-wise. So don’t be surprised if you can’t do the math, there ARE in fact some discrepancies 😉

You can also spend 1 Orichalcum Bead to customize the starting Traits of the character :

The game will let you choose 1 Trait between a choice of 5 for all the starting Traits (historic good and bad, and the 3 random bad ones)

New strategies

Since Orichalcum Beads are rather rare (even in the DLC), I think one of the good challenges of this new mode for the players will be to decide if they should spend one to customize a character before recruiting him/her, or roll with his/her starting skills.

All in all, you should have plenty of new ways to play the game: do you want to go endless in the same setup as in the story mode? Do you want total random and roll with it? Do you want to create your team of ultra specialized survivors? That’s up to you!

So yeah, to conclude, you’ll have 4 camp slots at start. You can kick out whoever you want anytime and replace them with one of your remaining characters in the same way you chose the starting members. Beware though, kicking out is definitive, and if you lose ALL the characters, it’s game over. It’s not meant to happen soon though, you have a stock of fresh characters waiting to be recruited only 1 click away ^^ Just be careful to not lose all the characters in your camp at the same time, because it’s game over too ^^

Next time: I’ll talk to you about the new features of the free 1.3 patch that will be released alongside the DLC! It’s the last major patch we’ll do before a while (maybe the last one ever?), but don’t be sad, you’ll have good value for ~~your money~~ free!