Enshrouded Q&A – Keen Games Explains All About Its Zelda meets Valheim Game

Indie game developer Keen Games (Portal Knights) shared a new video of its upcoming survival game Enshrouded yesterday. The footage is focused on the building and terraforming features, but in a recent roundtable Q&A with a few fellow colleagues from the press, Wccftech had the chance to learn a lot more about this Zelda meets Valheim type of game.

Creative Director Antony Christoulakis thoroughly explained everything there is to know about Enshrouded. The game is about to enter Closed Beta testing, with the goal to launch on Steam Early Access later this year. Keen, which is self-publishing Enshrouded, aims to launch the full version within a year of the early access debut.

What was the inspiration in terms of gear/aesthetics/folklore?  

We had a general idea for the world quite a long while ago. Back then, it was still meant to be more of a classical action adventure type of game. We had this split world where you had to dive into the fog that swallowed everything. But back then, it was just too big and too ambitious, so we shelved the idea and didn’t even pitch it to any publishers.

Now, as we had some really good experience with creating Portal Knights, we felt the time was right to actually go for it. I think the world is a bit special. We didn’t have a specific folklore we wanted to go after, but in general, we wanted a fantasy world that has a bit of its own touch in terms of the creatures we have there. And then the whole thing about the split world.

We have the above world, which is still ruined. It’s post-apocalyptic, but it carries the spirit of the beauty of abandoned places, which inspired us in terms of visual aesthetics. So there’s still the sun shining, but it’s also a bit about the hope of creating something new from the ashes of the past, going out in this ruined world and discovering what actually happened there and finding all these sad stories but also intrigue about what happened in the past, and then trying to take all these resources and then populate your own home that grows into a bigger place over time.

Then we have this world below, which is slightly more Lovecraftian I would say, in terms of the creatures that are down there, like undead creatures of various shapes.

That’s roughly where we came from. We drew inspiration from a lot of places. Mechanics-wise, Breath of the Wild was also an inspiration for us and part of the takeaways we had from Portal Knights and a lot of other survival games we’ve looked at.

So as Valheim came out during development, as we’ve been working on this for 3.5 years now, it was also quite encouraging to see that a more friendly approach to survival did actually resonate with people. It’s not all about being punished and killed all the time.

Is Enshrouded PvP, PvE, or can you play solo?

You can definitely play solo if you like. You can play offline and enjoy the game on your own.

But again, we think Enshrouded is much more fun if you have friends to join you as basically every game you can play in multiplayer brings this extra dimension if another player is within there. We definitely want to keep it friendly and focused on co-op.

The question about PvP came up, obviously, as we had a Closed Alpha already. We want to stick to co-op for now, but we’ll see what the community wants. While I miss this little button to enable PvP and allow people to just kill each other if they like, I also think there the focus is less PvP, at least from my personal experience, and more on playing and going on adventures together.

Are there any living parts of the world? Can you have your base coming under attack?

This is something we discussed a lot and have some plans for, but not for early access yet. One thing that was important for us was, in the creative aspect of base building, we really want to make the base a safe zone for now that players can really get creative and build beautiful and big places,

If we add base invasions like in 7 Days to Die or something where enemies come and trash everything, it might be frustrating. Or people might be very inclined to build big bunkers only, which is not what we hope people will do, as we’d rather they get more creative and build more fancy things. We had Steam Workshop support in Portal Knights where people could share their creations and they built some really awesome stuff there.

But base invasions are super exciting as well, so we’ll discuss with the community again and see what we do there. Maybe we do something in certain places where you have to build and then defend. We’ll see; there are ideas for that, but it won’t be in the early access version yet.

Can you talk about what really struck you from Zelda: Breath of the Wild?

I really enjoyed just exploring the world on my own and just going around the world and not following the main quest line. That’s the thing that inspired us.

Also, the combat is probably more towards Breath of the Wild than Dark Souls, as we don’t want to be super punishing in that sense.

Is the world of Enshrouded fully handcrafted, or are there any procedural elements?

We had this takeaway from Portal Knights where the procedural world didn’t really feel like a place, so we decided to go for a handcrafted world. Right now, the world is about 25 square kilometres in size. We have four different biomes and the fog is its own thing below.

There’s more to come. The full game world is 64 square kilometres, so after early access, we will fill more space. But I think the space we have filled so far should last for a long playtime already. The world is also fixed because we want players to be able to talk about places and discoveries.

There are some procedural tools we use in our own engine. We built a lot of tools around it to actually manage to make a game of that scope because we are not Ubisoft sized.

It’s still a tough challenge to make a game like this. There’s a team of 50 that we have in house right now, plus some externals, so we also use some procedural tools to populate smaller bits and pieces into the world. And there’s also procedural loot being laid out in whatever shelves and cupboards in the houses. And some of the destruction of the houses varies to make variations of certain things.

But the bigger things are all handcrafted, so we can control the level design and make it an interesting experience, and make discovery feel like a thing that is valuable to players, which often gets lost a bit if it’s procedural.

Can you talk about the multiplayer size?

Enshrouded can hold up to 16 people. We tried to expand the limit a bit. In Portal Knights, which was also coop-focused, we had only four players allowed to play together as the game was balanced for that amount. We also have dedicated servers, but they weren’t really used that much because four players was a bit limiting if you had to invite all your gaming friends.

I think it’s good to have the extra room. If a lot of people join and it’s fun, you have multiple groups roaming around the world and doing different things. But we expect a handful of friends will be the typical example. That’s the sweet spot, we think, having a smaller party and roaming the world and also exploring the combat side of things.

We are not an MMO where we come in with 16 people and have the big raid. That’s also not what we try to design the game for. We might have super challenging things, like we also added hard mode bosses and stuff in Portal Knights at some point where you need it for players to survive, but that’s also nothing we will aim for early access. Again, we’ll see what the community asked for later on.

Are there any balanced difficulty adjustments to account for having more players?

Yes. The game itself has a fixed difficulty progression, so it doesn’t automatically scale to your current level like some other RPGs out there where you basically can kill the final boss instantly with your level one character. We wanted to make a progression that you can feel. If you hit a difficulty spike in some places, you need to craft better gear or find cool stuff or play more skillful or get more skills. But you can overcome it, or you can bring in friends to help you.

So the game will get easier if you bring in friends, but it will also automatically scale. It checks how many players are in this local fight. Everyone close enough counts. So if you have actually a lot of people on the server, the game won’t scale to this amount of people.

It also won’t scale linearly with the number of people, so if you have two players, it won’t be twice as hard. It would just get slightly harder, so the fights don’t get super easy. There’s still a challenge, but you can feel the support is there for other players.

Can players live in a cave network underground? Will they be able to build furniture etc. inside a cave they have dug out?

Yes. You can settle down on every spot. To establish a base, you have to put this little flame altar that you can also upgrade later on, making sacrifices. That defines your building area so you can terraform anywhere in the world with the pick and stuff.

But to use the advanced building tools, you have to settle down the base. The base can then be upgraded at a certain radius to be a few hundred metres in size at its biggest version,

And you can have lots of these, so you can build whatever kilometre size base if you like to. This can be fully underground, fully in the air, or anything of the sort. We didn’t want to have limitations on structural stability, so you can have your floating castle in the sky if you like.

You can also furnish that with more than 100 pieces of props to decorate stuff with. There’s also a lot of terrain materials in the world that you can carry home and use in your base.

But yes, you can live underground or make a cave and then build walls inside to make a little dungeon or whatever.

Has there been talk of having just the build mode for those wanting to build enormous structures with friends in Enshrouded?

We stayed away from having a full-blown build mode for now. We also had tests with flying around to build stuff. We added a creative mode to Portal Knights at some point where you could just take off and fly around, have everything unlocked and just build as you wish.

We didn’t want to start with that. We want to start regularly, also because once we added the creative mode to Portal Knights, people complained that it felt like cheating.

But if there’s enough demand, we will think about that. For now, we hope that the quick building tools will help a lot. We actually added little scaffolds that you can very cheaply produce and stack on top of each other. These are like wooden scaffolds useful if you build a large construction, so you can quickly get up there and build stuff, in the ski or whatever, and not having to build, block by block, to get up there.

We hope people build giant structures. If there’s friction, we’ll hopefully find out during the Closed Beta, which is coming next. During early access, we’ll definitely continue adding more stuff to the game and really try to develop it together with the people out there.

We plan to support Enshrouded for years to come, also beyond early access, as we did with Portal Knights. There we had a publisher, so at some point, we had to stop as they said they didn’t want to finance any further updates. This time around, it’s just us and the people out there, so hopefully, we can keep on forever.

Can you dispel the fog, or is it a permanent fixture of the area where you find it?

For now, the fog is mostly static in the world. As I destroyed this plant’s mushrooming thing in the well, the fog went away. This is a temporary thing in this area and it’s pretty local. We only recently made the fog actual voxels as well. Before, it was a flat plane, and at some point, we decided we should make it voxels as well. So now it’s volumetric little voxels you could potentially modify. We didn’t add that yet, but there are ways to get rid of the fog locally, temporarily.

It’s also temporary for now because it’s a multiplayer game where people might join in late. We don’t want to make permanent destructive changes to both areas and stuff so people can join in and enjoy these places.

Do those little capsules that extend your time in the fog recharge?

Yes. The world outside your base will refresh at a certain time. We didn’t fix the interval for that yet. If you go back into the world, you can harvest resources again, so trees and stuff will respawn, but not in your base.

It’s also to prevent people from blowing up the entry to the boss dungeon or something. And there’s a big base you can’t enter anymore, so it will refresh to prevent that.

There’s some no-build zones in the world as well. You can’t settle in the fog right now, as it’s a hostile environment. There’s also some really small places above the world where we prevent building for some gameplay reasons. But otherwise, you can build everywhere.

Can you increase the time your character can stay in the fog with proper equipment?

Yes, there are ways to extend that. I mentioned the sacrifices to the flame a bit. You, as a group, can make sacrifices to the flame and level it up. This will unlock certain areas in the world.

You might have seen the red fog, which might change its appearance a bit later on, which is still super deadly. If you enter that, you can’t stay there for more than a few seconds or something.

You have to upgrade to actually unlock certain places in the world, but it will also increase the time you have in the other fog areas that are available to you. As such, you will have more time to really explore these places.  There are also points of interest in the fog, and obviously, you will need time to explore those.

Do items have weight, and if so, what is the limit to carrying weight in Enshrouded?

No. We actually decided against weight. We had that concept in the beginning but then decided we didn’t want to make it a puzzle in your inventory. We skipped that part for now as it might bring another layer of balancing we would have to deal with.

If the community asks a lot for it, we might pick it up.

What happens if you run out of stamina while climbing a wall in Enshrouded?

You will fall down if you don’t have stamina anymore, so you need to be careful. It’s like in Breath of the Wild. Flying also will cost you stamina. If you don’t have stamina anymore, you will fall, so be careful where you fly to and how far you try to fly. There’s also better gliders to accommodate that and we have lots of food to give you much more stamina.

Is there legendary armor in the game, or do we have to craft all the clothing?

There’s armour to be found, which is special in multiple tiers across the game progression. There’s also multiple tiers of armour you can craft at the various NPCs, like Ranger, Warrior, and Mage armor types of several levels.

The endgame armor looks pretty fancy. You might have seen some stuff in the videos we’ve released already, but you can also find more special, legendary stuff in the world.

We decided to make most of the armor craftable as it will be tough to find all pieces of the set. If you have to find it in the world, you might run past pieces and never find them.

With weapons, it’s the other way around. You can only craft the most basic stuff and find all the fancy stuff in the world, so there’s lots of room for weapons to be found as well.

Can you move the building area?

Yes, you can. Just dismantle the altar and put it somewhere else, but you will be warned that giving up this space will destroy what you’ve built there after a while when the world refreshes again. So, it’s better to build a second altar to keep your stuff.

Could you build a tower climbing out of the fog or a bridge to cross over it?

Yes, there’s ways to do that.

Are there any costs or limitations to respeccing your skills in Enshrouded?

We’ll have a small cost to respeccing your skills. I’ve talked about unlocking the extra perks in your legendary weapon, for example. The same resource you will need to unlock these perks will be used to respec your character. You can reset and get back all the skill points and can distribute them again.

We decided to have a small cost to it so people don’t constantly switch on their stuff while they’re in a dungeon, which can get annoying to other players that are with you. Still, we want to make it easy to do it again and again because we wanna make people experiment guilt-free. We definitely don’t know what combinations are possible, and we’ll see what comes out of that. We’ll try to have a good balance for that.

Beyond the starting area, how do you restrict player access to new biomes or tougher dungeons?

As I mentioned before,  there is some fog that is actually deadly. You will have to level up the flame to actually be strong enough to go there. This leveling up the flame is also giving you a base bonus of strength to all your attributes for the whole party.

So if someone joins in a bit late, like you are at level 10 already and they’re just starting out, there’s a base strength that comes from the flame itself. If you upgrade the altar, everyone gets stronger. It is a way to bring everyone together. Obviously, you can give them good gear and stuff, but they’ll still need to be careful not to die.

Skill points dropped by bosses can only be collected once, so you have to go out there to collect all of them. We want to make everyone want to enjoy the progress.

What kind of survival elements are present in Enshrouded?

Some classical survival things like extreme cold or extreme heat. There’s also poisoning and other things that you need protection from.

Could a player simply run through the tougher biomes and snatch a few items?

You can definitely do that. so you can run on land, not going through the fog, into two other biomes right from the start. One is slightly tougher than the other, but both are higher level.

You can try and also choose your path. It’s not a linear progression in that sense.

Thank you for your time.