Your Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades adventure takes place on the Stormtossed Isle. The island hosts several cities and settlements allied with numerous different factions.
Pathbreakers has two basic game modes: the first is the Story Mode, in which you select a character with their own origin story and play out their campaign on the Stormtossed Isle. The island is a large map with much to explore. It's a sandbox, with each character’s story determining your goal and victory condition.
The other mode is a Scenario Map, where you'll select the map size (small to huge) and several generating options. It's a vast open-world experience with no characters’ stories involved. Adding new scenarios is fairly easy, and modders can create new factions, enemy units, events, contracts, and other elements to customize and create new gameplay experiences.
Cities & Factions
Since Scenario Mode allows you to customize the whole world when you start your adventure and, therefore, always have a different experience, we'll be focusing on the Story Mode for this devlog.
The world map is a large, generated, playable area, although it has a few constant features tied to the story. It will have a large number of factions that are tied to the world’s events.
The Stormtossed Isle will have many cities, dungeons, enemy lairs, and unique spots to discover and explore. The island has varied climate zones that include snowlands, volcanic wastes, dry brushlands, lush plains, and coastal scenery. Different enemies, factions, biomes, and cities can be found in each of these different landscapes, making the Isle an ever-changing environment for mercenaries to operate in, full of opportunities to gather information and experience from different cultures across the land.
Towns are an essential hub for mercenaries: it's where they can pick up new contracts, bolster their numbers, purchase much-needed gear, rest up, and train. The world will have many cities, each offering different services and goods. Many will be easy to find and access from the Isle's roads, but remote and isolated settlements will require you to gather your party and begin an exploration.
Each metropolis is part of a faction, which controls several burgs. You'll be able to join one of the coalitions of your choice and get access to special perks and contracts reserved for faction members only.
Each city offers numerous contracts of varying difficulty - the more dangerous the job, the higher the reward.
The dangerous lairs and dungeons
Lairs are smaller pieces of land controlled by bandits, beasts, and various monstrosities as bases of operations. Usually, they are situated far enough away from cities that local militias won't find them, but close enough for raiding parties to make a nuisance of themselves. Dismantling them might well yield some rewards. However, there’s also plenty of risk in dealing with this danger.
Dungeons are bigger structures, like cave networks, mines, and ruins. Dungeons typically feature creatures that do not explore beyond the threshold of the dungeon itself, meaning some rather unique beasts can be found within. This uniqueness implies that dungeons are far more dangerous than simple lairs. Secret rooms, traps, puzzles, and multiple enemy encounters await you. The way will be treacherous, but there's almost always a big prize to be found at the end of it. Legendary equipment, ancient wonders, powerful and magical artifacts, you name it.
As you explore the world, you'll discover many such locations and even more wonders. Charting and exploring the Isle and its locations is a good way to earn coin, as many cartographers will pay well for such information.
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