The upcoming Northgard from Shiro Games is sure to please fans of classic titles like the Settlers, bringing medieval village management gameplay to a nordic setting filled with harsh winters and deadly beasts. Not a lot of information is out there just yet, so we figured it was the perfect opportunity to chat with one of the developers about what to expect from the upcoming title.
Nicolas Cannasse is the co-founder of Shiro Games and the lead developer of the genre-spanning adventure, Evoland. Northgard is a very different title, and Nicolas graciously gave us a bit of time to explain the basics of the viking strategy game.
GameWatcher: We’ve obviously seen the trailer and such, but tell me a bit about the game’s Nordic setting.
Nicolas Cannasse: Northgard is set in a Norse mythology universe. You start as a clan leader, and a new island has been discovered. All the clan leaders send their best warriors to colonize it and take control of the resources it contains. So you go off and you land on the Northgard shores, where you start establishing a settlement. First you have your town hall, then you start producing food and wood to build more buildings. Then you explore the different areas around you. So you will send your scouts exploring the nearby area.
The core gameplay of Northgard is about managing your population. Your population will grow automatically if you have enough happiness. They all start at your town hall as villagers, then you can assign them to different jobs depending on what you want to achieve. For instance, you can assign them to woodcutters, to cut the wood and produce more wood, or you can assign them to merchants to produce more coins. You can assign them to warriors, as well, to attack the nearby areas that are protected by wolves or by mythical Norse creatures. That’s how you manage your village.
GameWatcher: That sounds quite similar to an older game called the Settlers. Was that title an inspiration for Northgard?
Nicolas Cannasse: Yeah, it’s one of the inspirations, but we have different things. In Settlers, you only build the buildings and the roads between the buildings. But in Northgard, you also control the population itself by assigning the jobs. You choose, for instance, to turn one villager into another job, and in Settlers it’s done automatically for you, but here you have more fine control of that. You have less large of a population in Northgard. Usually, your warbands, a set number of military units you control, go up to fifteen or twenty units, not much like very large armies.
GameWatcher: You mentioned armies there. How does combat play out?
Nicolas Cannasse: So right now war is divided into different areas. You have your own territory, which consists at first in one single area where you have your town hall. Then you explore other areas with your scouts, so when you explore you will discover new areas. If it’s empty–if there is nobody defending it–you will take control of it and add it to your territory. When it’s defended by wolves or by another player, you can send your warriors directly to this area, and they will attack automatically and the fight will resolve itself.
First your warriors will attack other defending units, if that’s warriors or wolves or undead or wyverns or whatever defends the area. Once you’ve defeated all the units, they will start attacking the military buildings, so the defense tower or other defense buildings. Then after that they will attack the civilian population, if there is any. At last, they will destroy the houses and the other buildings of the territory.
Once this area is cleared you get control of it. Everything is done in terms of priority, so you don’t have much control of the fight itself, but you can send reinforcements or retreat your unit. Depending on what you face, what kind of unit you face, you’ll have a different advantage.
GameWatcher: The materials on the game mention befriending giants. How does that work?
Nicolas Cannasse: Giants are one of the neutral factions of the world. They will not attack you if you don’t attack them. If you attack them you will be at war with them so they will fight against you, and you can’t befriend them anymore. But if you choose not to attack them, and instead trade with them, then you get some trading bonus.
After some time, if you are very friendly with them and you have enough trade agreements with them, then they will join you and you will be able to place them and attack with them. They are quite powerful units. Also if you choose to attack them and use your military strength to kill them, after you can also recruit them. They become not your allies, but you get control of them
GameWatcher: What’s the basic structure of the game? Is it a set of scenarios to complete or is the campaign more of a sandbox?
Nicolas Cannasse: Right now we are focusing on what we call “free play” mode, which is when you start a game you can choose different map size or difficulty settings, number of players. You choose either single or multiplayer. But we will work on a campaign to introduce the gameplay mechanics and a bit of story around the game and around the world we are building.
So yeah, we plan to have both. We announced Early Access recently, so we will have an Early Access at first that will have maybe the first chapter of the campaign just to introduce the gameplay mechanics, and then we’ll add more chapters as we go during the Early Access phase.
GameWatcher: What does multiplayer look like?
Nicolas Cannasse: You should be able to play with your friends teams, so right now we are only testing four player free for all, but we plan to have two players against two in cooperative. Each player will have his own territory and own units, but you will be able to trade resources and send reinforcements for the fights. Also we’re thinking–not yet sure if we can make this work well–but having like four players allied against one strength on the map. Like a “Winter is coming” kind of scenario.
GameWatcher: With Shiro having developed the multi-era, multi-genre game that is Evoland, how did you come to decide to work on a more sort of traditional strategy title in Northgard?
Nicolas Cannasse: Yeah, as a kid I’d been playing both Nintendo, a lot of them, and the PC. I owned both and I used to play both at the same time–not at the same time, but at the same age–both Civilization and Super Mario. I had this desire to create different kinds of games in me, so I wanted to try out a different thing after Evoland. So that doesn’t mean we won’t do anything more like this crazy game, but we have different things we’d like to do.
GameWatcher: When do you expect to release Northgard?
Nicolas Cannasse: We’ll have Early Access this year, and after, depending on the time we spend finishing the game, it should be out next year.
A big thanks once again to Nicolas. We can’t wait to see more from Northgard.
