What Warhammer: Chaosbane Can Learn From Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr
Written by Jonathan Lee, 10:00pm, September 27, 2018. Tweet to: @WritersCube
Riding on the winds of Chaos comes Games Workshop’s next attempt at the third-person ARPG genre, this time set in the fantasy-based world of Warhammer Fantasy. Since the initial announcement back in June, a gameplay trailer for Warhammer: Chaosbane has come out this month to help tease what’s to come.
What Do We Know So Far About Warhammer: Chaosbane?
First thing’s first, the setting takes place in the old world of Warhammer Fantasy (before it became the current Age of Sigmar). The story takes place in the aftermath of Archaeon the Everchosen getting his butt whooped and the world thinking it’s been saved. But the forces of Chaos are eternal. And they are also really damn persistent. And it’s time to kick their butts back to the warp-spawned hole they came from.
So what characters do we get to play as? So far, the trailer has revealed that we have a fighter-type represented by a soldier of the Empire. Our spot for ranged magic caster is taken up by a High Elf mage, which isn’t surprising given the High Elves and their knack for magic, dragons, and their ongoing quest to stem the tides of Chaos to protect their lands.
And fans of Warhammer Fantasy video games will notice a very familiar foe. The forces of Chaos, particularly of the Chaos God Nurgle, the god of disease and decay. The forces of Nurgle were a terrible foe that one had to face in the first-person co-op bloodfest known as Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and that was very well-executed! But that’s not the only place we’ve been seeing the tendrils of Nurgle lurking about. In fact, the spawn of Nurgle were plodding about in a recent ARPG that Games Workshop had churned out through the developers at NeocoreGames. While the game was entertaining enough, my eager foray into that title found a few parts of the game wanting.
What We’re Hoping For…
I’m hoping they may learn from both the good and the bad. With luck, the developers at Eko Software have been paying attention to the reception of NeocoreGames’s 41st millennium-based game, and have been working to make sure they don’t make the same stumbles, while also paying attention to what Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr did right. Without further ado, let’s dive into what made Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr work and didn’t work, and see what we hope to have in Warhammer: Chaosbane.
The Story
Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr flirts with the concept of psychic blanks and the anathema nature of the God-Emperor. Which is really interesting actually! And the story mashes both concepts into a singular entity that your character has to track down. While that in itself is not a bad idea at all, and it certainly raises some intriguing questions about the direction in which the story could go with a sequel as well as how it could affect the rest of the Warhammer 40,000 universe at large, it fails to provide enough for the punchline we were all expecting by the end of it.
An anti-psyker turned into the most powerful psychic being of all time capable of literally killing daemon’s souls? Hell yeah!
That she has only a handful of sentences to speak of before the game abruptly ends?
This is too big to end it just like that! And while there’s seasonal content on the way, none of it details further developments on this most key of plot points. And yeah, the dialogue’s a bit on the campy side, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for a lack of expositional content. There’s no need to tell everything, but give us enough so we have something to hope to have answered in a sequel.
What Chaosbane Will Need
What Warhammer: Chaosbane will need to do to not land us in another climax of disappointment, is to ensure that there’s a satisfying payoff to reaching the adventurer’s goal. Understandable, whether it’s Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000, you’d expect some grimdark stuff to occur, but that doesn’t mean the ending has to be a downer the size of a Space Hulk.
The Gameplay
Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr plays like most other third-person ARPGs. A skill bar, attacks and abilities, and a skill tree with which to further level up and enhance your character. A problem comes in when some of your abilities are tied directly to the gear you’re wearing. This prevented a lot of free customization that could otherwise happen, and that I was hoping for.
I actually appreciated the way that Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr setup their skill trees. And during the story, the pacing of your Inquisitor’s leveling up was pretty fair. The leveling system was managed by the acquiring of better-leveled gear as well as the gaining of actual experience points, but your character’s power level was directly influenced by your gear, and that in turn influenced the difficulty of various missions you took on. It was interesting and different. But after the story missions, well, it gets a bit boring.
Let’s Keep Crafting Going
The crafting was one of the best remembered parts during my experience in the game. Not only was the crafting easy to navigate, but the upgrades that one could make to the crafting mechanism (one of the tech priests of Mars, probably the greatest technological minds of the entire Imperium) were interesting and provided something to do during the story as well as to continue working towards during post-story gameplay. But the best part about it? All the different items and weapons you could craft.
For Warhammer 40,000 fans, it’s a blast getting to craft our favorite things from the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It was satisfying to create a powerful Warp Rod for my psyker and to see it come out with some nice stat/ability boosters. And you can craft different tiers of items as well. I actually enjoyed the crafting in this game better than I enjoyed it in Diablo III. (And well, that’s not something I normally say when comparing any ARPG to the Diablo series!)
We’ve had crafting in Co-op compatible games now for a few titles: Warhammer: Vermintide, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and now Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr. I really hope we’ll have more crafting fun in Warhammer: Chaosbane.
On the Matter of Co-Op
Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr did pull off a nice co-op experience where you could take on the various mission types. The issue was that the three classes didn’t add too much to the team dynamics aside from aesthetic and gear differences. But from the looks of the Warhammer: Chaosbane gameplay trailer, I think there will be more emphasis on utilizing co-op during the game’s story mode. Something much like the Warhammer: Vermintide series did, where each character serves a distinct purpose or function.
How Not to Do End-Game Content
It takes a lot to reach the seasonal endgame stuff in Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr. Currently, there is a Season One event which introduces a new enemy from one of Warhammer 40,000’s many factions: the Drukhari! The Dark Eldar! Frikin’ sweet if only I could actually fight them. I’m currently at a power level of 715 and I’m still over 200 levels away from reaching the minimum. Better accessibility to the game’s additional content would give players a better impression in the face of repetitive post-story missions.
What Chaosbane Will Need
What Warhammer: Chaosbane will need to do is to provide the action-lovers with the right variety of abilities to mix-and-match according to their personal styles. Room for experimentation increases game longevity. This will prevent stagnation and increase replayability, reduce restrictions while encouraging creativity, all this contributes to player engagement. For RPG fans, Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr showed off some fun ideas with how the skill trees and crafting could be done. I hope to see some sort of adaptation of that in Warhammer: Chaosbane. And again, if the trailer is anything to go by, I suspect the story missions in Warhammer: Chaosbane will have some great co-op opportunities.
Final Thoughts
Alas, Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr is by NeocoreGames, and we have a whole different studio behind Chaosbane. Maybe they have been taking notes on how to make the world of Warhammer Fantasy as badass as possible. Or maybe they’ve been cooking up something entirely different and better than what I’ve been daydreaming of up to now. The trailers have done a fine job in showing us tidbits into what’s going to hit stores in January 2019. Expect to see more news as more information comes out! Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr was a fine game, and I enjoyed the journey playing it for the most part. But I do hope to see the formula improved in Eko Software’s take on the ARPG genre with one of Games Workshop’s properties.
Warhammer fan? ARPGs Not Your Thing? Check Out These Games!
Warhammer 40,000: Battlefleet Gothic
Warhammer 40,000: Space Hulk: Deathwing
Total War: Warhammer (but more importantly, check out Total War: Warhammer II!)
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III (But if you want a real good Dawn of War game, you’re going to want to check out Soulstorm!)