We got the chance to sit down with the team from Pagan Online to go over some of the updates on the game making waves in the action RPG space. In a genre which continues to innovate and bring players together from a very hardcore community, Pagan Online is bringing a fresh take on the hack and slash nature of these titles. Created by Uros Banjesevic and the team at Mad Head Games, Pagan is published by Wargaming.net which turned a few heads when announced. Overall, the game looks to break new ground and so far we like what we see.
Pagan hosts a family of heroes that the player will be responsible for. It is not just a single character going through all the adventures. You’ll be able to unlock new heroes as you go all tying into a god theme from ancient lore. Your team will be built out on various skills and you can choose which character may be best for the mission. Players will be able to unlock skins based on progression and not just micro transactions. It was important to the developers to really build a team based RPG system.
Wargaming got involved as the publisher had spent several years looking at different games after the launch of Master of Orion. The company had built up a small team tasked to find solid games for a publishing platform, even if they did not have any historical basis behind them. Smartly, Wargaming needed to diversify and they began to pursue smaller projects with studios that had a similar approach to their beginnings.
One of the big design tools that meant a lot to the team was switching Pagan Online from a mouse driven action RPG to a WASD movement system. These games can get slightly boring in terms of slowly directing the character around and the team wanted to build that up to make it much more dynamic for the player. The first step was using movement patterns commonly seen in third person RPGs. Skills and min maxing are built off of this basic idea. Another idea is the skill shot system which rewards planning out attacks and movement to set up a devastating skill. These high level moments are sometimes overlooked in action games because you are too busy grinding down hordes of foes. The team wanted to change that and bring highlights to every battle.
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Gear progression is another long standing tradition in the genre. Pagan Online wants you to have gear that matters for the fights you’ll be in. As you change characters to handle different tasks, your gear stockpile will build and eventually align to the types of battles as needed.
Narratively speaking the game has high hopes for years of content. Based in Slavic myths which Uros Banjesevic was told as a children to scare them, as all European ghost tales, there are many journeys out there for the game. Uros is a huge believer in games as a service and he wants to make sure players will always have a solid road to go down. The game will host four characters at launch and then build out from there. The team is always focused on skills and making sure the skills sets match the different characters as well as give the best options for each adventure.
Pagan Online is coming to the market at the perfect time. As fans of the genre are looking for a new game to play. There is a lot of hopefuls following the title. We are certainly excited to see what will be delivered and are looking to get into the beta soon!
