Virtual Alchemy on Band of Crusaders: "We don't want to cater to all the audiences out there"

While accessibility is of course paramount in today's gaming world, there is also still a place for titles that don't want to cater to the masses and instead aim to target a specific type of player. The folk over at Virtual Alchemy are doing precisely this with their upcoming dark strategy RPG project Band of Crusaders, as the team is developing an experience that is meant to be hard, challenging, and tough to overcome, something they affirmed to us in an interview we conducted during Gamescom.

Speaking about Band of Crusaders hardcore nature, art director Kamil Mickiewicz told us: "We are very aware we do not make a game for everybody, everyone. That's an important caveat for us. We don't want to cater to all the audiences out there, you know, how usually modern gaming works these days. We know we are quite hardcore about our approach. We want to, you know, strike first and foremost the core communities of games like Battle Brothers, like Wartales or Mount & Blade Bannerlord. Those are like direct references, but also we bring our twist, as Dominik rightfully mentioned, from games like Dragon Age Origins, for example, or Pillars of Eternity or even StarCraft II, WarCraft III.

"Why I bring those examples? Because the combat system in our game is almost RTP, which is like real-time with pause, and I say almost because we don't have full pause. We actually have slow-motion mechanics. I might mention that one of the recent releases, I guess, that featured this particular mechanic is Aliens Dark Descent, if you guys are familiar with this one. It's like sci-fi, so different cup of tea, but they have slow-mo. Main difference between what we do and they have is that in their case, you control the whole squad at once. So, yeah, if you order to, you know, strike with a certain ability or whatever, the correct guy is being chosen and everything is like kind of homogenised, like automated. In our case, you have like RTS controls. You have control over individual units. So it plays more like, imagine WarCraft III, but you play only champions and not like the, you know, the trash guys."

So, if you are looking for another sprawling and complex RPG to fill up your evenings, Band of Crusaders is definitely set to be one to watch. As the game was just announced a couple of weeks ago, we're still awaiting to hear when it will debut on PC, but until that information is made public, you can watch the rest of the interview below, where we also talk about the game's unique mechanics and systems, where it's premise came from, and more.