15th October 2024

TALISMAN: DIGITAL 5th EDITION - REAPER REMASTERED DEVELOPER BLOG

Hi Talisman fans!

In case you missed it, we recently proudly announced that we’re going to be bringing expansions from Talisman: Digital Edition over to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition once it launches, starting with The Reaper Expansion. Not only that, but if you already own The Reaper Expansion, you’ll be able to access the remastered version entirely for free!

If you want to know when you’ll be able to play Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, the best way to do that is by adding it to your Steam wishlist!

We shared some details about the process of bringing The Reaper Expansion to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition in that original announcement, but we figured you’d want to know more - so we’ve put together another developer blog, this time focusing on that process!

Deciding What to Adapt First

When it came to deciding which expansion from 4th Edition we wanted to bring over to 5th Edition first, we wanted to make sure we made the best choice possible for us as developers, and for you, our players. With 16 expansions to choose from, we had a lot of different elements to consider!

Thanks to 10 years of people playing Talisman: Digital Edition, we’ve got a ton of information about how players tend to play Talisman, the expansions they most often turn on/off during a game and much more beyond that. We also knew that certain expansions would take longer to implement in 5th Edition than others, so the complexity of the mechanics in the expansion was something we considered too - for example, implementing The Clockwork Kingdom and its crafting system into Talisman: Digital 5th Edition would be a much bigger undertaking than adding The Sacred Pool.

After looking at all our options, we settled on starting with The Reaper for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it’s a relatively simple expansion, from a mechanics point of view. It doesn’t add anything overly unique to the game aside from The Reaper himself, instead building upon the kind of mechanics already present in the base game. Instead of adding new mechanics, it instead adds balance to the adventure deck enhancing the base Talisman experience.

Secondly, we found that it is one of the most commonly enabled expansions among Talisman: Digital Edition players, even when players only enable a handful of expansions. Not only that, but across the different demographics we sort our players into (solo, online players, regular playgroups etc.), The Reaper saw consistently high usage across all of them.

Also, The Reaper was the first ever expansion we released for Talisman: Digital Edition all way back in 2014, so it felt a bit poetic coming back to it as our first remastered expansion for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!

Reaper Card Art Update

Anyone who’s taken a glance at the 5th Edition of Talisman will be able to tell you that the first thing that strikes you is the gorgeous artwork featured on all the cards. From the characters and items, to the enemies and strangers you encounter while playing, the entire game has a completely new look compared to the 4th Edition.

So, once we knew we were remastering 4th Edition expansions into Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we knew we’d also want to update all the artwork to make it ‘fit’ with the new style of 5th Edition. However, we wanted to make sure that anyone who played the original 4th Edition version of the expansion would be able to tell at a glance what the card was.

So, in order to do this, we took each original piece of artwork in the original Reaper Expansion as a starting point, our art team would get to work on painting over it in a style that matches the artwork that you’d find in 5th Edition. This way, we made sure the creation of this new, painted card art would always be true to the original 4th Edition artwork, while still feeling like it was made for 5th Edition from the beginning!

Reaper Warlock Quests

One of the additions to Talisman that The Reaper Expansion brings is ‘Warlock Quest Cards’ - instead of rolling a die to take one of 6 quests, you get to choose from 12 available quests at the Warlock Cave. However, the original 4th Edition versions of these cards only featured rules and flavour text, without any artwork.

Seeing as we were remastering the expansion, we figured it would be a great chance to update these cards with artwork! That way, it’s easier to get across to players the ‘action’ they’re performing by completing whatever quest they’re carrying out. Check out some of the new animated Warlock Quest Cards below:

Deck Editor Considerations

Another Talisman: Digital 5th Edition announcement we made recently was that we’d be including a Deck Editor - you can check out all the details here if you missed it!

As this is the first expansion we’ve added to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, it meant this was the first time we had to figure out how expansions would work with the Deck Editor. You see, when playing with The Reaper Expansion physically, the rules instructed you to “Shuffle the new character, Adventure, and Spell Cards into their respective decks.” With this new digital Deck Editor however, we needed to figure out the best way to enable players to customise their game without breaking anything!

So, we were presented with two options:

Allow you to individually add The Reaper Expansion cards into the base game decks when editing your decks.
Allow you to create custom decks just for The Reaper Expansion, which you could then choose between when you enabled the expansion.

Now, while it might seem that both of these options are practically identical, there is actually a major difference when it comes to our plans for the future of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. You see, there are a whole group of cards from different expansions that really don’t work if you don’t have the mechanics from that expansion enabled during the game. For example, the Queen Mab from The Woodland Expansion instructs you gain one Destiny when you encounter her. If we made it so that you could put Queen Mab into your Adventure Deck without The Woodland Expansion, she wouldn’t be able to perform that action.

Another thing we needed to consider was the sheer amount of cards that are going to be added to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition in the future. Part of the reason we talk a lot about legacy code issues in Talisman: Digital Edition making development difficult is due to us adding thousands of cards to the game over the last 10+ years. Rather than showing you each and every card at once and asking you to choose what you’d want to play with, having it so that you only need to worry about cards from The Reaper Expansion when setting up your Reaper custom deck makes it much easier to manage.

Making a New Reaper Model

Another highlight of The Reaper Expansion is the Reaper himself! Moving around the board and causing severely bad times for anyone he lands on, many would argue that he’s the defining feature of the Expansion. It is named after him, after all!

One of the changes between Talisman: Digital Edition and Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is that we now fully 3D model all of the characters that are placed on the board - and that goes for The Reaper too! The good news is that The Reaper already has a real-life model, as he’s a miniature in the original 4th Edition expansion, so we had a very strong starting point for making our Digital 5th Edition version.

We’re still polishing him up so he’s not quite ready to see just yet, but keep an eye out as we get closer to release!

And that’s the end of our latest Talisman: Digital 5th Edition developer blog! We hope you’ve enjoyed this look at how we’re updating classic expansions for 5th Edition, and can’t wait to show you more of the game as development progresses.

To keep up with everything Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, make sure you follow us on all the places we are online!

And don’t forget to wishlist Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to get notified when it launches!

And you’d like to find out more about Talisman: 5th Edition, you can do so by going here!