Battle Chasers: Nightwar - Interview

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PCGamer interview the developers of Battle Chasers: Nightwar about what inspired them to make their game and the story of its creation.

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Dangerous game

Battle Chasers: Nightwar launched almost exactly two years after the Kickstarter campaign, which was one year after the initial delivery date. "To be fair, the game is about three times bigger than what we originally proposed, and our team had to grow," says Joe. He had nothing but praise for their patient and supportive Kickstarter community: "We did our updates. They knew we were still working on it. No one really complained."

The alpha for Battle Chasers: Nightwar began last spring for select high-tier Kickstarter backers, and the beta launched a few weeks ago, open to all of them. "We had a lot of feedback, bug fixes, and balance changes thanks to our alpha and beta," says Steve. He specifically points to an increase in run speed in dungeons as a highly requested change based on feedback.

In addition to feedback from forum posts, indie developers can now watch players stream their unfinished game as a form of live quality assurance. Most of the problems Airship Syndicate saw players encounter were due to a lack of communication. "We didn't have any description of what the stats actually did in our in-game manual," says Steve. "People weren't realizing that 'attack power' also affected shields and healing, in addition to damage. It was also a lot of little things, like watching players get lost in a darkened area, or not seeing certain objects."

They added a few more tutorials, but were hesitant to hold players' hands too much. "We tried to make our tutorials as unobtrusive as possible," says Steve. He singles out Persona 5, one of his favorite games, as an example of what they wanted to avoid. "In a [Persona] dungeon there'll be a cool puzzle, but the characters just tell you the solution. That would have been fun to figure out! 70 hours in and they're still holding my hand."

Battle Chasers: Nightwar is selling well, so are we seeing the beginning of a series? "I had way more fun working with the Battle Chasers characters than I thought I would," says Joe. "I joke that I want to make a sequel where the town NPCs are the heroes. They're all really badass! Why do they need these adventurers anyway?"

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