Hey survivors! It’s been a while since the last blogpost… Today, we’ll be talking about the new DLC of Dead In Vinland, called Norse Side Stories, bringing A LOT of new dialogues, between secondary characters!
Don’t worry, we’re still surviving! We sent Manon fetching some beer water and Jacques and Thomas set up an expedition to hunt some food at the food truck. We even accepted fresh new recruits into our camp, we’ll soon grow into a real village!
Right now we have split the team in two: Matt is a team by himself and finishes the 3rd DLC for Dead In Vinland, while the others have fun working on a NEW, TOP SECRET game. We can’t wait to give you some infos about it! I think we’ll be able to reveal some things in the coming months.
Norse Side Stories
So the new DLC will be called Norse Side Stories. It entirely focuses on adding new dialogs between secondary characters.
The last DLC was more targeted to players who cared for the survival aspects of the game, and wanted to focus on that. But the characters and their little stories are a big part of the “Dead In” games, so we wanted to add more content for players who liked this aspect of the game. We thought it was a good idea to seperate the 2 DLCs like that, so that players who don’t care about one or the other aspect of the game wouldn’t be “forced” to buy something they didn’t want. Hopefully, some people will want to buy the 2 DLCs too ^^
Secondary characters
So yeah, for production reasons we explained that we couldn’t include in the base game interactions between secondary characters, it was too costly to make for an impact on the game that was really tiny, for many “systemic” reasons (the main one being that we can’t possibly know when or even if a character would be recruited, so combinations of several secondary characters were impossible to predict, and so a lot of the writing would go to waste).
We wanted to “repair” that lack of interaction with a specific DLC. It was interesting because we broke the classic “main family centric dialogs” we had before, and could explore some totally new paths for the characters. How would Parvaneh and Eustache interact, for example? Or Angelico and Shanaw?
Some combinations were easy to work with, considering the stories they already had. But some combinations were… well… rather unlikely… (Knut and Cissé ??). It was hard work, but we wanted to have at least a minimal interaction for EVERY single combination of secondary characters.
In the end, everyone has at least one new dialog with everyone else, and some combinations were more interesting and led to advanced dialog chains, comprised of 4-5 dialogs. In general, most characters have 1 or 2 advanced interactions.
During production, we made a little sheet to recap how many interactions each character have with each other. I can share it to you so you see what we did.
New romances!
As you can see, some cells are coloured in red… because they indicate new romances included in this DLC! A total of 3 new romance option are added with the DLC (and half of one…)
Of course, new romances = new endings! We added 3 new endings for these characters, taking into account the new romances options.
Free 1.4 patch!
But we didn’t stop there… as we always did for previous DLCs, we wanted to add some free content in the mix, so we wrote an addition of 11 new free dialogs integrated into the game even for people who didn’t bought the DLC o/
And… it’s not some random dialogs, it’s 2 new romance options for 2 of the main characters! You’ll get:
- A new romance option for Moira. She was kind of explicit about being bisexual, so it was a shame we didn’t have a same-sex romance option for her in the base game!
- A new very surprising (or not that much? x)) romance option for Eirik. We wanted to somehow have a same-sex romance for a man in the game, but considering our cast it was not that easy. So we tried to handle it in a “subtle” way. It’s totally optional, but one of Eirik’s “bromance” can turn in something totally different…
- A special event between Gudrun and Freyja, just for fun. (and because Völvas were tied to Freyja)
“Norse Side Stories”, alongside the free 1.4 Patch, will be available in Q2 2019!
I think that’s it about the 3rd DLC? We nearly added a hundred of new dialogs (~22.000 words) in this DLC and had a good fun coming back to these crazy characters, but I think we wrote all we could about them.
At the moment, there are no plans for a new DLC, but who knows? If you want to help us, give us a thumbs up on Steam and recommend it to your friends ^^
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Happy surviving!
