King's Bounty 2: the game world - special

King's Bounty 2

From strategic with role-playing elements, to role-playing with strategic elements. The King's Bounty series is about to make an important leap with the second official chapter. Abandoning the map system of its predecessors for an open world structure and increasing the focus on the RPG side, the game developed for the Prime Matter label had to do a really impressive design job to adapt some systems of the old episodes to the new setting, including a complete revision of the role of the map and its general conception, where the starting imagery remains the pure fantasy, almost glossy, which has characterized the series since its inception.

So let's try to understand in this special the game world of King's Bounty 2, starting from its style to get to examine its function in relation to certain game mechanics.

Fantasy kingdoms

Some places are majestic, such as the castle of Marcella, the capital of the kingdom of Nostria, the scene of our adventures. King's Bounty 2 is set in Nostria, a kingdom shaped in the most classic medieval fantasy style. The game world, indeed, the game worlds, since there are more maps, have been made with all the possible stereotypes of the genre in mind. We start from Crucis, a fortress-prison located in a cold and inhospitable region and arrive at Marcella, the capital, which dominates a very large territory, full of majestic buildings, small villages and ruins of ancient civilizations whose memory is lost over time.

It is almost impressive to see the imposing royal palace, which inside looks more like a cathedral than a medieval manor, standing out above a village made up of two main squares and a handful of houses, surrounded in turn from farms, a clay pit and a refugee camp. Where visually we are faced with a very classic fantasy, with a realistic style and very saturated colors, the geography of the map betrays a strong Central European taste and appears as jagged and labyrinthine as ever, even in the landscapes themselves, dominated by an overabundance of elements . Wanting to make a comparison, however improper, we are more on the side of Gothic than Skyrim from this point of view.

As often happens in titles of this genre (a little out of necessity, a little out of art), the game map is also conceived in an expressive way: the farther you go from built-up areas, the more the environments are they make dark, dangerous and wild, with a nuance that goes from the palace, the center of power, passes through the houses and the countryside, up to the darkest woods, where the irrational forces of evil and magic still reign and where the death takes shape concretely.

A piece of the game map If we want, we are faced with a well-known role-playing exhibition, which arises from a precise vision of society: the city is the center of civilization, the place where we talk more than fighting, where missions are obtained that lead to the outside, where one trades and where one learns the most common knowledge, those that are part of the collective cultural baggage. Basically it is a medieval conception of anthropic space, not too distant from that of the Allegory of Good Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (just to give you a reference, even if the level of philosophical complexity is very different), very suitable for the genre and the way in which he tries to reconstruct certain real dynamics, even where he does not aim to assume any documentary value.

The world is a battlefield

Some landscapes are full of elements Unlike others open worlds, that of King's Bounty II does not allow you to go wherever you want and when we like best. What may seem like a limitation is actually an intelligent design choice, dictated by the hybrid nature of the game, which must inevitably take into account the combat system and the objectives of the gameplay. In fact, environments can also be transformed into battlefields as needed and, therefore, were basically conceived as such. We therefore have very wide streets, even in urban areas, squares modeled in "boxes", glades of considerable width, courtyards of enormously sized castles and many other inevitable geographical and architectural forcing, fortunately well disguised by the map designers, who have been able to balance necessity and likelihood. The fact is that, with a little bit of habit, it is possible to notice by eye where they will fight and where not.

The two images below show a perfect example of a game environment that turns into a battlefield. When the fight is over, we will be able to go around the areas where we have just fought.

The battlefield as it appears during the exploration phase Same location, but with hexes and forces deployed Also the choice to map the walkable areas, creating insurmountable barriers, was certainly dictated by precise design requirements. Leaving the player the ability to go where he wants, without setting him limits, would have meant having to manage the progression in a completely different way, too distant from that of the first King's Bounty. Moreover, the player would have been able to dodge the fights that are instead necessary for the progression itself, as well as to regulate the pace of the game. An alternative solution could be to make the units encountered always the same level as the player, as happens in many other open worlds.

In this way, however, a great deal would have been lost in terms of space management, since with the current solution every single encounter is the result of a strong design, which takes into account the units in the field and the morphology of the terrain.

The royal palace towers over the town of Marcella A solution with variable enemy troops would have impoverished the strategic part and would have deprived the encounters of their uniqueness, making the flow of the game much weaker for his typical gamer.

Whatever the basic idea is, it is interesting precisely because we are faced with an obvious case of a world modeled around game mechanics. In reality it is always like this, even where it is less evident, but here it stands out more clearly than in other titles, precisely because of the peculiarities of the gameplay.

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