Descent Act 2 arrives this fall, increasing the Gloomhaven-like marketing campaign

Descent: Legends of the Darkish, the high-concept campaign-in-a-box from Fantasy Flight Video games, arrived to essential acclaim in 2021. The app-assisted board sport included greater than three dozen miniatures and practically 50 items of cardboard terrain — an enormous assortment of bits that created tabletop landscapes not like another. Now the writer is able to unveil its first deliberate enlargement, Descent Act 2: The Betrayer’s Battle. From Polygon’s unique early preview, it’s clear that what’s contained in the field seems much more formidable than what got here earlier than.

Picture: Fantasy Flight Video games

“No concept was too loopy,” mentioned lead designer Philip D. Henry in a latest interview with Polygon. “One in every of our ongoing refrains is, ‘Nothing’s totally a joke with Descent.’ If you happen to pitch one thing like, Hey, what if we did this? there’s an opportunity [that] yeah, we may do this.”

Descent is a cooperative board sport the place gamers tackle the function of heroes questing to defend the world of Terrinoth. On this sequel, all six heroes from the unique sport return with new and expanded talents. The motion picks up proper the place the unique sport left off, and the app will detect the endgame state at which gamers completed the earlier sport. On this manner teams are capable of protect their successes and failures from the final time they performed, and the in-app narrative system can steer the storyline within the applicable course. In the meantime, those that misplaced their save file shall be prompted with a Mass Impact 2-style survey that enables them to navigate to kind of the identical endgame place.

Picture: Fantasy Flight Video games

Henry was additionally fast to emphasize simply what number of twists and turns are anticipated this time round.

“One of many issues the app lets us do is, we will have all of those sorts of threads behind the scenes,” Henry mentioned, including that The Betrayer’s Battle encompasses a manuscript that’s greater than 140,000 phrases lengthy. “The gamers don’t want to fret about monitoring [what happened when they finished] quest 9 in Act 1. We are able to examine that at any time […] and we will use that to tell the story or the mechanics, or simply form of how the story evolves.”

Whereas we don’t but know precisely what all is contained in the field, Henry did allow us to in on just a few necessary particulars. First, gamers will want a replica of the unique sport to play this sequel, which technically means it’s an enlargement. That’s as a result of designers leveraged all of the miniatures and the terrain from the primary sport to make the second sport’s environments even larger. However don’t anticipate to must take out a mortgage for an even bigger eating room desk.

Picture: Fantasy Flight Video games

“All of our quests match on the established footprint,” Henry mentioned. “[This time] we’re going taller, not wider.”

Followers ought to anticipate the play area to succeed in no less than a full foot off the desk, Henry mentioned. These cardboard edifices shall be essential to steadiness out the size of The Betrayer’s Battle’s massive boss — a foot-tall pre-assembled miniature that serves because the centerpiece of the complete expertise.

Picture: Fantasy Flight Video games

“This was our probability to proceed the story we began there and see the place that took us,” Henry mentioned, including {that a} third act can also be within the works.

Descent Act 2: The Betrayer’s Battle will retail for $159.99, and it’ll arrive in shops and on-line this fall. Followers ought to see an app replace effectively earlier than then, one that features loads of quality-of-life enhancements for the unique sport in addition to its enlargement.