Band of Crusaders is an upcoming medieval strategy RPG where players lead a knightly order against a demonic invasion of Europe. Developed by Polish indie studio Virtual Alchemy, Band of Crusaders straddles history and fantasy with its 1350 A.D. setting and invading demons. In the role of Grand Master, players must lead the fight against enemy forces, which include bandits, abominations, cultists, and archdemons. As a multi-layered experience, players can move their crusaders across a fully simulated and changing overworld map, develop and manage their party at camp, and face a mix of human and demonic enemies through real-time combat. Consequently, fans of medieval games and history may be curious to learn more about the historical backdrop behind Band of Crusaders and its specific brand of demonic creatures.

In an interview with Game Rant, Band of Crusaders‘ CEO Dominik Sypnicki and art director Kamil Mickiewicz spoke more about the historical significance of the game’s 1350 A.D. setting and why the studio chose this year specifically. They also discussed their recently announced partnership with GOG, Band of Crusaders‘ particular brand of demonic creatures, and much, much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Band of Crusaders’ Partnership With GOG

Q: Could you tell us a bit more about your partnership with GOG?

Sypnicki: Yes, we absolutely can and it’s an exciting story. We originally announced the game just on Steam and just recently added GOG as our platform for the future release of the game. It was a very interesting story because it was our community that stepped up and triggered a discussion around GOG as a platform that would potentially fit our game and its target demographic.

We have carefully listened to those voices and run some of our analytics to see how big this topic is among our player community. We noticed that this has been the second or third most popular topic that has been raised. It was quite evident to us that this is something that matters a lot to the community, and we started diving into this more and discussing it more with the team. At some point – happy to cover it in a moment – we were able to deliver on this expectation, together with our team and together with GOG.

What is also quite interesting is there was an element of coincidence in the story. Because when we were present at Gamescom with our game, we had our booth very close to GOG. They were able to see us performing some presentations of our game to the media. Obviously, they weren’t part of those meetings, but by our body language and our activity there, they noticed our game. And we started casually talking about Band of Crusaders, GOG, and the community. It became known to us that there was also some interest in voices from their side. Players, for example, started asking if our game would be on GOG and tagging our respective social media accounts. It was something that we weren’t aware of, but they noticed.

Mickiewicz: Yeah, it was very funny. For example, they approached us and said, “Yeah, we’ve been peeking over your shoulder for quite a bit, right now. From what we see, your game perfectly fits our audience. On our forums, we have a lot of enthusiasts of those games that touch some classic sentiments.”

Q: For the benefit of our readers, could you summarize your announcement with GOG and what you think it means for Band of Crusaders?

Sypnicki: Sure. We’ve just announced that Band of Crusaders will be published and will be available on the GOG platform. This will take place according to all the GOG platform rules. This also means that more players will be able to access the game in whatever form and platform they like, and in this case, we opened up the GOG platform. This allows people who like to play their RPGs on GOG to have it there if they wish.

For us, it really fits into the philosophy of our studio that we want to give players freedom in the way they play our games and experience our games. This is quite an interesting take in this situation because we usually think about gameplay when thinking about this. But in this case, we are able to deliver on the platform side.

The reason why we weren’t able to, or we weren’t ready to declare our readiness to go on GOG from day one of our announcement, is because we didn’t know that the community wanted it on GOG. Obviously, the more platforms, the more it is difficult to be able to handle communities and to handle the technicalities of the build, as well as frequent updates. It is very important for us to be able to react and lead the dialog with the community in a very active way, be able to push the updates for our upcoming game often, and meet the needs. That’s why it wasn’t an obvious decision from the start, but once we learned about the expectations and excitement at the scale of it, this was an easy decision to make.

Q: How does it feel as a studio working alongside GOG?

Sypnicki: For me, it’s a privilege to be noticed by a bigger partner and be able to discuss cooperation that ultimately leads to something good for all of us, meaning the players, Band of Crusaders, and GOG. I’m super happy about this. Usually, those big partners tend not to pay that much attention to the small ones, but in this case, we were positively surprised about the flexibility and the overall support we received. I must say there’s also the ease of adding our game to the GOG platform once it was already available on Steam. The technicalities weren’t a barrier here whatsoever.

Mickiewicz: I share the same feelings – almost nothing to add. It’s a very humbling experience, for sure. It’s also a highlight of our existence. We are kind of a fresh studio, so we don’t have a history of making games yet in this particular group. Being able to have those collaborations, and be able, as Dominic mentioned, to see them being so approachable and so open to possibilities and helping along the way. I

Our game, setting-wise and vibes-wise, is quite close to The Witcher. We draw a lot of inspiration not only from The Witcher, but we probably have very common grounds where our inspirations come from, meaning those cultural foundations of Slavic/medieval culture. I would say this heritage is quite alive. In Poland, for example, where we come from, you can still see, for example, places of cultural heritage where all those old buildings, old houses from back in the day, are still being preserved. They tell a story about past times and medieval times. To be able to share a little bit of those connotations – it’s huge. We would really love to be associated somehow with, let’s say, gaming culture and what it means for the games themselves.

Band of Crusaders’ Gaming Inspirations

Q: You’ve previously described Band of Crusaders as being a love letter to games that you’ve personally enjoyed. You mentioned The Witcher, but what games inspired Band of Crusaders and how did they specifically inspire the game?

Mickiewicz: Actually, The Witcher that you mentioned is probably one of the least referenced games [laughs]. Any comparisons to The Witcher come from very natural, genuine sources. We didn’t really look at The Witcher. We actually turned out to be like The Witcher by accident. As far as the setting goes, we just drew from the same source, I would say.

But we touched upon what we loved back in the days when we were kids. We were playing games obsessively, and we feel there are not as many of those titles anymore. I would point out Heroes of Might and Magic 3, for example, or any Heroes of Might and Magic. What I can say is we have some similarities in our campaign map: how it displays, how it looks even. Although, unlike Heroes, our campaign is real-time. It’s fully simulated, so it plays much more like Bannerlord or Wartales by Shiro Games. I mean Mount & Blade: Bannerlord in this example.

The music is another way that we connect with Heroes. Some people might remember Heroes was striking with those very almost opera-sounding vocals when you were on the main menu and multiple voices were singing in this very serious fashion, for a lack of better word. We have a very similar take on music in our campaign map because we emphasize male vocals a lot, and our music is, to a large degree, recorded live. We quickly understood that we wanted to strike this very genuine medieval tone, so live recording would be super crucial for us.

We reached out to instrumentalists and other people who can play those antique instruments or can perform those vocal performances in Latin, for example. We reached out to include those older songs from the period that we are depicting. Older performances are stylized to be those older performances Heroes also had. I might prolong my discussion about similarities. You’re a fan of Knights of the Old Republic?

Yes, big fan.

Often, I say that our game is very much like Knights of the Old Republic. Maybe not as much as you would expect when you’re a fan of the title. What I mean is RTP combat, which is real-time with pause, but very important that we don’t have a full pause.

The story of our development was that it was supposed to be a game like Knights of the Old Republic – of full pause under your space bar – or Pillars of Eternity. We were looking at those titles as inspirations. But since we technically did this with something called time dilation, we asked for the early prototype, which was this method. Our pause – the time was slowed down a lot. This was like mimicking the pause. In the process, we started to diminish this effect a little bit. What we ended up doing was entering slow-motion mode, and we started playing with this as an experiment. We couldn’t turn back from that point. It was the experience of the game where it always keeps you on your toes, so you need to make those calls on the fly.

Those are game references that we usually don’t see anymore, right? Those real-time but with pause. Usually, the market is filled with turn-based, speaking about our particular genre, and here we bring back inspiration from old times. In this regard, I must say that one of the recent releases that is probably striking this slow-motion combat is Aliens: Dark Descent. It’s a sci-fi game, a different thing, but apparently, we had very similar ideas. We didn’t know about them back then when we started with the production of the game. And then we heard, okay, actually, there are games like that roaming over the horizon? So, Aliens is one of those recent examples. Dominic, would you like something because I’m talking for a while?

Sypnicki: No, I like it. What’s interesting is that in today’s world, many games or every game is growing from some inspirations, many of which were already taken somewhere else or used somewhere else. Sometimes you take inspiration from either the source or something that already processed it. Because we have so many of those classic inspirations, it’s interesting to see that many reviewers or players can find their own associations of different games, depending on whether these are more original ones or something a bit newer. The titles that we most often hear with some striking associations, such as Baldur’s Gate 2 or Dragon Age: Origins.

We’ve already heard some players associate it with Diablo, which may be a bit surprising. If you wrap Diablo as a single-play experience and make it party-based, then maybe it’s kind of something that you can imagine. It’s been very broad. To be honest, I think it’s very satisfying that people find what’s interesting to them and what’s unique to them. That’s super cool. And I guess that’s something exciting as well.

Mickiewicz: I might add a little bit because I think there is also something apart from just inspirations. There is something about a developer’s approach that can be applied or not, depending on the choice of developer. What I’m going to mention is we are willing to allow people to play the game as they want to play the game. What I mean is we will not try to prevent, for example, save scumming or something. We will not try to make certain character builds purposefully unfun because they are overpowered.

Of course, probably during testing when the game is released to the public, or to some large communities, people will find out that maybe some character builds are super over-performing. If this is a problem to a degree that among players nothing else is being played, then we’ll probably nerf certain things and try to make all the areas of the game competitive as a package next to each other. But what I’m trying to say is we’ll not be obsessed with it.

This is the approach that we will be trying to keep as long as this does not break the game, like in some obvious sense. We’ll not try to prevent you from saving your progress. We’ll probably have some limitations where you can save or cannot, but this will basically be more drawn from gameplay itself where it makes sense.

Freedom of choice, as Dominic mentioned. Not only the expression of you as a game player, but also GOG, as we mentioned. GOG allows you to even pick older versions of the build of the game from the platform if you’re really willing to step back and experience the game how it was a few versions below the newest version. You are able to do this. And this is where we say, “All right, this is your game. You trusted us enough, to get it, to buy it, to support us with this decision. So, we try to support your good time in a way.” That’s how it goes.

Band of Crusaders’ Class Agnostic System

Q: Is freedom of choice for players one of the reasons you went with a class agnostic system rather than traditional RPG classes? What was the reasoning behind that?

Mickiewicz: Yeah, there’s a couple of reasons, but one of them is actually the source material of those medieval depictions. We wanted to be a little bit more truthful than your usual fantasy RPG. Of course, in real life, you don’t usually have classes [laughs]. That’s one of the reasons. We don’t think that a game should necessarily depict real life because the gameplay is first, and we also have this mantra in the studio borrowed from Nintendo a little bit, but in a different sense, right? That the gameplay is always first, and we twist and tweak certain things for them to place in a satisfying way, even if they are not super realistic.

This is a fantasy of a medieval knight. They were kind of capable people back then, right? They could shoot a ball. They were trained in multiple facades of those fighting styles and this is how it’s reflected in our game. We have fighting styles. Also, we really wanted to, when speaking about this experimentation, allow people to go crazy and hybrid. We also know that we are a very small studio, and we can make a game that is complex to a degree. We know we cannot do everything yet – maybe in the future, when we grow, we have more possibilities, so that’s why we approached designing it almost like designing one class from a very complex game. In such games, you should be able to mix and match certain play styles, passives, and whatnot to your liking to come up with something probably fresh for your style. This just suits our game and our progression system.

We allow them to spec a singular character fully passive, if you like. Let’s say you bring a group of six people into combat and maybe you feel comfortable micromanaging active skills on the battlefield for maybe three of them at the max, or two of them – you have your two favorite Crusaders. You feel comfortable doing some skill shots here and there, but the rest of them are too much for you. You would rather have them auto-attacking stuff and being those background guys that are supporting the action. That’s your choice; you’re able to do this. You can completely bypass any active skill. The skill tree is designed in a way that does not block your progress to any degree, and you choose how much you want of this versus the other.

Another reason is our game is kind of complex, a complex campaign, a complex camp. I mean, to a degree, we are having those discussions in the team: how complex each layer should be to keep things fun. But it’s not your typical RPG where you are just character-focused. Characters are actually just one part of the game. You can play those types of games, focusing, for example, on economic progression. You can bypass certain difficulties on your way through the game by very mindful trading, building your wealth that way, and bypassing certain challenges by equipping your characters in a certain way, not necessarily gaining experience, and scaling them up as starting containers. That’s also one of the reasons why we don’t go extremely complex. At some point, it can be a little bit too much to remember for one player to tackle all these things. It can feel like a chore instead of a cool experience.

Band Of Crusaders’ 1350 A.D. Medieval Setting and Demonic Creatures

Q: Looking at the historical side of things, why did you pick the year 1350 A.D. specifically? Could you talk about the historical significance of that?

Sypnicki: Sure, so it just clicked with us. The reason why it clicked with us is because there were a couple of historical events or arguments around those days. Firstly, it’s the time when we had the Black Death epidemic in Europe. That was a cataclysmic event on the Europe scale – so many people died. Their countries changed, their cities changed. These cataclysmic events remind us of an apocalyptic world that is being affected by some external events. For us, an invasion of demonic forces is such an event. We’re taking 1350 as a moment in Europe’s history when something meaningful was taking place, and we’re drawing our own interpretation or alternative history using this period.

Additionally, we’re also building some background story into the context of the world that we use, whereby the Templar Order has vanished from Europe. And the Templar Order, apparently, supposedly in our world, has had this function to safeguard Europe from demons that have been looking for the opportunity to invade. Maybe some older people weren’t aware of this special role of theirs, but once they’ve vanished, this threat starts being more and more evident to folks and ordinary people as they start seeing the result of this.

Q: Could you talk about the folklore and biblical inspirations behind the creatures and demonic forces?

Mickiewicz: When speaking about those demonic enemies, about our game, we have a specific take on them. We call them abominations specifically, and we split them into two different groups.

I will tell you this anecdote. Because I am the art director of the game, among other things, when I work with character artists or concept artists or concept things myself, as far as work on the demons goes, I tell them to imagine that the demons do not come from some external universe or external place. Even if you take Dungeons and Dragons as an example, you can see that there is some portal to another dimension, and then demons can go in or out through some alternative reality. If you take this example of Dungeons and Dragons, you can have Cambion, for example, and he can wear a breastplate or sword – man-made objects. Our demons are the opposite of this. Our demons are purely animalistic. When I work with those artists, I usually tell them, “Okay, imagine you are just a pure, evil force – an unseen thing flowing like a wind through European lands and just picking on some objects of the land. And they can be the remains of dead animals, human body parts, and stuff like that. You just make abominations out of those hybrids of those biological materials of fauna or flora.”

In a sense, Europe and this medieval time, is a source of inspiration in itself. We don’t use myths or anything like that. We just actually make them from what we have. What we have as a part of building blocks, like those Lego blocks that you can combine, and we also don’t explain how exactly they came to be. Those supernatural forces that we cannot even comprehend, that’s one thing. If somebody sees, let’s say, Striga or another Slavic monster in the depiction of our monsters, that’s cool. We don’t necessarily name them like that. We didn’t necessarily look at them for inspiration. That’s why they say they are accidental, but we do not also try to deny them. If somebody sees similar, that’s okay. That also, in our opinion, makes things more believable. But different cultures, maybe, have different names for this specific thing. What is the source of those demons? It’s like the scene itself, yeah? And where we go with this logic, we arrive at the shores of religious beliefs, Christian beliefs, actually.

In Christianity, you have something called the Seven Deadly Sins. They sometimes, in this mythology, come in the form of archdemon. We say that, very vaguely, the grand goal of the game, from a player perspective, is to defeat those Seven Deadly Sins. We will meet the personifications of those things. In the announcement trailer, you can see a glimpse of Beelzebub, one of our archdemons. How we went about creating this guy is we picked two different “worlds” and mixed them together. One of the worlds was insects because, in pop culture, Beelzebub is also known as Lord of the Flies. The second was gluttony. Because in religion, he’s known as the demon of gluttony – an obsession with food and stuff. That’s why bashing those things together, those two worlds together created this guy. He’s surrounded by a lot of insects, but he also has this belly as a focal point of his design. His belly is created from humans trying to eat the larvae out of his stomach and stuff. We picked a very simple combination to not have inspiration all over the place, but we tried to double down on those in the creation process and let the image evoke those associations.

Q: Is there anything else that you would like to add today or tell our readers?

Sypnicki: We certainly want people to follow our game, voice what they think about it, and bring their ideas and opinions in. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those opinions individually will immediately lead to design changes whatsoever. But as a whole, it will be this suggestion that will help us to focus on the things that are most important for the players. Maybe sometimes these will also inspire us, basically something that we didn’t think of. Someone can bring in an idea that is fresh and fitting. The best way to raise those opinions is to comment on the interview. We certainly will read those comments as well as join our Discord and join our forums on the marketplaces. We will read, and we will engage and answer there. We really encourage you to do so.

Mickiewicz For sure. What we can promise is that all of those will be taken into consideration. As Dominik mentioned, it doesn’t mean that we apply them immediately, but it will be taken to the team to discuss. We will take a look at those opinions. This we can promise, for sure. If you stay in touch with us, it’s a good way to have a direct connection with developers in a way and, hopefully, maybe influence a process.

Sypnicki: Maybe one of the very last things – if you want to hear and learn more about the game, want us to focus on certain aspects of the game in the future, pieces of coverage, please comment. Let us know what you would like to hear about, and we will try to deliver it.

[END]