Expanding EBR’s Open World

This article originally appeared as part of the Earthborne Rangers Second Printing Gamefound campaign.

Hi Everyone,

We’re so excited by the reception of the second printing campaign so far! Bringing the Earthborne Rangers to life has been a labor of love that’s now entering its fourth year, so it is incredibly rewarding to see so many of you enjoying it as much as we’ve enjoyed making it. And for those of you getting on board for the first time, we can’t wait to get the game into your hands so you can experience it for yourself!

Today I’m going to write about the game’s open world. Some of you are Ranger veterans who have already played through the entirety of the core game’s campaign, but for you new recruits, you can check out this article from our original Kickstarter campaign to read about our vision for the open world and how it works.

For today’s design update, I’m going to be discussing the process we undertook in modifying the core game’s open world in order to allow for the new paths, locations, and characters featured in Legacy of the Ancestors. Expanding the game world into new areas proved more challenging than we originally anticipated, and it required some creative problem solving to get it to feel exactly how we wanted.

A Note on Spoilers: In these design updates, we will be sharing some parts of the campaign expansion and Ranger cards. We will not be spoiling any details that occur past the first day or two of the new campaign or that aren’t readily apparent from reading the rules and components of the new expansion. However, if you want to go into the new content completely sight-unseen, I’d recommend not reading these design updates.

Perilous New Pathways

We started expansion development by creating the lore and general layout of the underground sections. This involved a few in-person meetings between Sam, Luke, Andrew, and me, a lot of writing by Sam to capture those discussions, and some trial and error as I designed the first map concepts. Once that was done to our satisfaction, adding this new region to the open world, from a mechanical perspective, felt like a fairly straightforward proposition: we designed a new map with new locations, and designated some paths that connected this new map directly back to certain locations of the Valley.  In this way, the new areas simply expanded the original map, creating one giant world for the Rangers to explore. They could go anywhere in the original Valley, and explore underground. This seemed like a slam dunk, and we felt it would provide players with the maximum amount of freedom. Unfortunately, however, it didn’t work as well as we had hoped.

As we started testing, we realized that we were ignoring one of the key components that makes the open world great. The open world of Earthborne Rangers provides two key experiences that help the game feel unique from others in the genre. First, it gives you an immense freedom of choice that makes the story feel like your own. Second, it reacts to your decisions, making it feel alive and like a real place that could actually exist. Both of these are key to the experience. It was this second experience that our new map wasn’t delivering on.

Due to the sheer number of different people and places you can visit in the Valley, we couldn’t update the text for all of them for the new expansion. (If we did, it would take up the entire page count of the new campaign guide!) Instead, in our initial prototypes we only updated characters and locations relevant to the plot, leaving the others to use their text from Lure of the Valley (the core game campaign).

This seemed like a good compromise, but as we started playing, we realized that it wasn’t working. It felt strange. Some people in the Valley had advanced their storyline - they had changed and grown since the first campaign, and were now reacting to the exciting new things happening in the Valley. But others seemed frozen in time, unchanged by the events unfolding in Legacy of the Ancestors. Seeing these two side by side during gameplay created a narrative dissonance that undermined the feeling of the Valley being a real, lived-in place. Something had to change.

A More Immersive Valley

One approach we explored to solve this problem was to simply isolate the expansion to the new, subterranean map. In this approach, you would start the new campaign already at an underground location, and be limited to just the new region for the duration of the expansion’s campaign. This solved the problem, but it made the expansion’s story feel far too disconnected from the Valley itself, and we wanted to create a contiguous open world both geographically and narratively as best we could given our constraints.

In the end, we landed on a solution that mixed both approaches, giving you the best of both worlds. Now, you start the expansion campaign at Lone Tree Station, the headquarters of the Rangers, and the most logical place to begin your adventure.

From there, you can venture into the Valley, but you are limited in where you can go to a discrete section of the Valley, with the locations that are the most relevant to the expansion’s story. This way, everything and everyone you encounter in the Valley can have new story and new side missions for you to pursue. You’ll discover that everyone you encounter has grown and changed since the events of Lure of the Valley, and that they react in one way or another to the choices you made during that first campaign. When it comes time to delve into the arcology, the subterranean map connects directly to this section of the Valley, keeping the continuity of the open world intact. This approach makes the world feel wholly reactive, connects it back to the Valley, and gives you interesting choices as to where to explore next.

In this expansion, you are going to be exploring the caverns and the arcology ruins beneath the Valley, venturing deeper underground and deeper into the past. The map is divided into strata, each representing an area deeper than the strata above. To avoid spoilers we won’t show the entire map here, but we can definitely share the two uppermost levels: the Valley and the Arcology Stratum 1. All told, there are 21 new locations to visit, and 5 new terrain types to traverse, and like in the core game, there are pivotal locations with unique beings and features as well as wandering NPCs and mysteries to discover at non-pivotal locations.

Note: The bottom 2/3 of the Arcology map is not shown below to prevent spoilers.

Thank you everyone for reading! You can look forward to more previews in the weeks and months to come!