5th October 2021
NOMAD MONTHLY MAILBAG - OCTOBER 2021
Hello everyone!
We’re officially in the spookiest season of the year, and we’ve just released a new game onto Switch (check it out if you haven’t already) and we’ve been carrying on our work on some cool upcoming game projects.
This month we’ve had a few interesting questions to dive into, so thanks to everyone who sent in a question! If you’d like to be included in next month’s Monthly Mailbag, don’t forget to send an email over to questions@nomadgames.co.uk.
From Adam
“I am SO grateful to be able to finally play Fury of Dracula on my Android phone. Thank you so much! A couple questions -
When playing as the Hunters, the search option is always greyed out, I cannot ever use my magnifying glass. Has that been disabled for some reason? How do I use it if it is not disabled?
Will you be making improvements to the game still? I am really hoping for the following:
Better zooming/panning around the map
Difficulty options for the AI, whether Hunters or Dracula
Better Hunter AI overall
Ability to choose Human for only 1 hunter, AI for the other 3, and AI for Dracula. Right now, it is either all AI or all Human players. When playing solo, it would go much faster for me if I only picked one or two hunters to play, rather than all 4.
That last one is the most important to me. Thank you again for developing this as much as you have, it really is fun to finally have the ability to play anytime without needing board and players.”
A while back, we actually updated how the search function works as lots of players were wasting their turns by using it. In Fury of Dracula, the "Search" action is the trigger for a Hunter to engage with all of the cards in that location, whether they be face-up or face-down. Because of how the rules work in Fury of Dracula, there isn’t a situation where a hunter would be in a location where they’re unaware that an encounter is there. So we decided to only allow players to use the search function when it would actually do something, to avoid people wasting their turns.
With regards to your requests:
In order to know what people would consider ‘better’, we’d need to come up with some different proposals and work out what would work better than what we currently have. Which we could definitely do, it’s just making the time to do that.
This is something we’re continuing to work on behind the scenes, as the AI in Fury is proving more tricky than the AI we’ve worked on in other games - they’ve got a lot to think about!
We’re also working on making the Hunter AI a bit smarter in general, by making them focus more on important decisions and changing their priorities for different resources.
We’re looking to add this feature to the game once we’ve improved the hunter AI some more, as we don’t want playing with 3 hunters to be a frustrating experience!
From Pavlo
“Hi, Nomad team!
I want to buy the Talisman Digital Edition for PS4/PS5 but unfortunately it is not available in the Playstation store RU-UA, only in RU-RU. It cannot be found neither on the Playstation Store site nor in the Android PS App. Could you please add the ability to buy it from the Ukrainian PS Store?”
Due to regional requirements and some technical reasons we’re not fully allowed to discuss, we don’t meet the requirements for Talisman: Digital Edition to be sold on the Ukrainian PS store right now - we can talk to our contact at Sony though to see if there’s anything we can do though!
From Trevor and Michael
“Why have not done the Timescape board from the original game release?” and “Any chance the Timescape is coming to Talisman?”
There are a number of different reasons we’ve not done Timescape, despite being aware that it’s a fan-favourite expansion! For anyone unfamiliar reading this, Timescape was an expansion for the 2nd Edition of Talisman, set in the Warhammer universe. It looks like this (image courtesy of Board Game Geek!):
Some of the reasons include:
The version of Warhammer that Timescape is based on is mighty old. We’re talking way too old for our friends at Games Workshop to want to be associated with the current version of Warhammer.
The expansion was released originally for the 2nd Edition, so we’d have to put in a good amount of work to make it work nicely with the 4th Revised Edition that we’re working on.
Timescape doesn’t really fit with the fantasy aesthetic that Talisman has, so to anyone who didn’t know what Timescape was, it’d be super jarring.
We hope that answers your question at least a little bit!
From Lone Sylvan
“So... it sounds as though you are planning future Talisman DLC, which is cool, but I have previously started and taken part in a few discussions on Steam about the existing digital only expansion 'Realm of Souls' and possible improvements to that which I wondered if you might consider?
It might feel too late for changes, which I'd understand, but I'd still love to see it get attention.
It isn't a very popular expansion in multiplayer matches which I think is due to the possibility of it dragging out the game length - and the inability to 'kill off' characters. Many of us have suggested a 'one time only' ghosting... that is, you can become a ghost the first time you die, getting a wee second chance, but the next time you're a gonner for good. That could even be a toggled house rule.
Another thing mentioned is the lack of interaction the ghosts have with other players. My personal wish would be the ability to 'haunt' other characters you land on. That seems like an obvious thing to me, and I want to do it sooo bad! I mean... how fun would it be to be able to mess with the guy who just killed you? I imagined things like causing them to drop/ditch items... making followers run away... ditch them and move the card 3 spaces anti clockwise? Losing all their fate through fear... things like that... maybe by choice, or maybe via a good ol' dice roll.
Plus... this one may be a stretch... add some 'sage' cards in the adventure deck from the ROS pack... The holding of which makes you immune from being haunted.
-And after all that, as a connected question... how open are you to community suggestions for features?... That is, could you/ would you want to take our ideas and use them or do you have an aversion or legal concern about doing so? I'm sure that if you put out a call for future DLC ideas you'd be swamped with some amazing and very plausible community concepts.
Thanks Nomad.”
This reply is straight from Carl Jackson, our Design Director - "A great deal of time went into making sure the Realm of Souls expansion was balanced and worked well with all the other expansions already available in Talisman. We have lengthy processes we must go through when designing original content, including an approval process with Games Workshop. Making any changes to content which has already been through these steps is quite time-consuming and therefore must be balanced with work on new content or projects. For these reasons, we are unlikely to revisit the Realm of Souls expansions to make the suggested changes, despite there being some very good ideas there!"
With regards to community suggestions, we’re always happy to hear ideas for what people would like to see in Talisman! A lot of the time it’s things we’ve already considered, but having people ask for it means we know what the community wants.
From Daniel
“I read that you are looking for someone to help out a bit with the German localization of "Fury of Dracula". I’d like to sink my teeth into it.
Until recently, I worked on "Realms Beyond" and spent quite some time translating the texts of our English-speaking employees into German. If you still need help, please feel free to contact me.“
Sadly, we’ve already got an external company to handle our translations - and we’re quite happy with the work they’ve done!
From RC T
“I've really gotten into Talisman since I found it on PS4, and it's got a unique mix of elements that really appeals to me. I bought all the available dlc, but I noticed that when I look at the menu, it shows a tab for Talisman: Origins, but I can't access it. I looked it up online, and found out it was a dedicated singleplayer mode with story, and that's exactly what I've been hoping you'd add to the game. Even if it was just a singleplayer mode for any character with SP event cards and endings, something like that. I actually play singleplayer against the AI most of the time, and so this is great. Are you planning to release Origins on PS4? I also saw in the mailbag on your site that you weren't planning to make more Origins dlc. Maybe if you release it on consoles, and market it as a fully fleshed out singleplayer version, it might drum up enough sales to justify more Origins dlc. It's a new market. I'm not really interested in mobile, and I've already invested so much on PS4 I probably won't move to PC, but I'm very interested in Origins for PS4.”
One of our favourite things to come out of these mailbags is all the love that Talisman Origins has been getting. With specific regards to the tab that shows Talisman: Origins, that was a slight error on our part. Back in September, we added that tab to the game in order to promote Talisman: Origins on both PC and mobile. What we didn’t account for was that the tab would be added to all versions of Talisman: Digital Edition - even the ones on platforms that didn’t have Origins! We’ve since fixed that mistake, but that’s why you could see it.
We’d love to release Origins on more platforms to see how it performs - we’d need to work out the development time and risks first though. But if it did sell well, you’re absolutely right that it would push us to make more DLC for it. The more people own the base game, the better an argument we can make for producing more DLC!
And that’s the end of this edition of the Nomad monthly mailbag! Thanks to everyone who sent in questions, and don’t forget to send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk if you want us to answer your burning questions next month!