Enshrouded is an upcoming survival-crafting RPG with action combat by studio Keen Games, the developer behind the open-world sandbox game Portal Knights. Enshrouded takes place in the post-apocalyptic fantasy realm of Embervale, where players step into the role of a Flameborn as they seek to survive the lands overtaken by a deadly and mysterious fog. Players begin with nothing yet have the capacity to create almost anything as they grow their crafting and survival skills to make the towering, creative structures of their dreams while battling the dark forces of the shroud.
Game ZXC recently spoke with Antony Christoulakis, creative director for Enshouded, about what it means to be a Flameborn in the lore and story within the setting of Embervale. Christoulakis also talked more about core survival gameplay elements in Enshrouded alongside crafting and combat, plus how multiplayer works and much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: What inspired the creation of Enshrouded and the game's name?
A: The game’s name - there have been lots of discussions. In general, the original idea for the setting of the game is much older. At that point in time, we really couldn't go for the project because it was a bit too ambitious, but it also had some changes down the road. We did another game called Portal Knights – together it was five games. That was more sandbox-oriented but also had this action RPG angle. It was squarely aimed at kids, so much more button-mashy, colorful, and all these kinds of things. We definitely wanted to build on this, as we really had a lot of fun developing that kind of game, and it was a bit of a new genre for us.
We did action-adventure stuff in the past as well - we do a lot of genres anyway. But that's the space we felt was really interesting – this mix of genres. That is a cool thing about survival games in general that combine RPG elements and action elements, and lots of freedom for the player, which is, I think, quite an exciting thing to go for.
Q: What does it mean to be a Flameborn with Ancient Powers of the Flame?
A: In general, the world of Enshrouded is a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. The world was a medieval fantasy world before, but now it's rather devastated and empty - you only find the remains of the past. There has been an event, which basically opened the door for an evil force to enter the world. That basically took out all the existing cultures that lived there before, like humans, and another race called the Ancients, which were less related to each other before this event. They basically saw the end coming and then created something that combined their powers to potentially have the chance to take back the world, as they couldn't prevent it themselves at this point in time.
So that's the general background for how the Flameborn came into existence - merging this human shell with the specific powers of this other race, which are more of a hive mind. I don't know if I need to talk too much about the details there, but yeah, they work a bit differently, collect knowledge, and are less interested in human things in general. Each single race couldn't face that evil at that point in time, so they tried to combine their force in that one.
Q: Cool, thank you for sharing that. Could you talk a bit more about the realm of Embervale and the impact of the Shroud on the game’s setting and story?
A: As I touched on earlier, the world has been swallowed by a deadly fog that came into existence. The original kingdom's power structures got a whiff of a magical substance, the Elixir, which can be found deep underground. It started a race to get more of this for your own faction, to some extent, and to shift the balance of power. But more and more of these mine-like structures, the Elixir Wells, were built. In the end, it opened the door for the fog and its transformative powers to enter the world.
As a result, the remaining humans were decimated, and the fog still exists in the world when you enter it as the player. It transforms the world into a new realm in those clouds, basically. You have this split world and the world above which still looks more peaceful and beautiful, like the beauty of abandoned places. Like still some rays of sunshine again, but it's all destroyed. Below those clouds, something more sinister and dangerous starts to evolve.
Yeah, I think I've seen a clip of the player having to quickly run into the fog and get something to help them stay there longer. So quite a deadly, dangerous place to be.
A: Exactly, there’s where the survival part comes more into play. You can't stay there forever, it’s basically something like diving - you go in there and can't survive forever. You can extend your timeline with certain items in the world and also by strengthening the power of the Flame in the world, in general. Every time you enter, you have to be a little more alert on how long you can stay and where you actually go.
Intriguing.
That's one general concept that also ties in with the game’s mechanics - I mean, we are less of a story-driven game. There was also a key aspect for us that Portal Knights didn't really feel like a consistent world - it was split into levels, and we had all these floppy islands. This time, it was another important aspect of a world that actually feels like a place, but the game is less about storytelling in a traditional sense. We're not aiming to be the next Witcher or anything like that. It’s still a survival game more from the openness and the general gameplay-driven direction.
One aspect of the fog that also ties in with the gameplay mechanics, it's a deadly place, but you have this world where you see other places in the distance. You want to go there because there's something interesting there, an ancient castle or whatever. You want to reach in and try to explore, but you have to go through the fog to actually find a safe passage to get there. You have to prepare for your trip. And then the survival thing also kicks in - you have to be prepared to go into dangerous areas of the world.
Q: The Steam trailer shows the character, rope-swinging, gliding, and busting through caves with the voxel approach. How much freedom do players have to navigate the world, and what are the advantages of the different traversal methods?
A: Payer freedom in general is an important angle. I mean, in survival games in general too, our sandbox game has elements of both. So, we really tried to give players a lot of opportunities they want to go for like this castle looming in the distance or literal quests that also exist in the game, but it's not the main angle that drives you through it. It's really about intrinsic motivation. But yes, you have additional traversal mechanics in the world to make exploring the world more interesting as well.
I mean, it's a fixed world, which is important to mention. It's not a procedural world, which was also another thing. Portal Knights was procedural, and therefore discoveries felt a bit more shallow maybe. We wanted to have something that people can talk about and explore and share their knowledge about the world. We chose to have some variation of that, like the main locomotion is obviously on foot, like you have to walk everywhere. The world is not so small, but pretty much easy to navigate on foot. We added the glider which is somewhat similar to what you would find in Breath of the Wild. I mean, those things have existed before, but I think that was certainly an inspiration for us and many other games after that before, so that helps.
You can only go down to a certain degree, and you can’t fly forever. It’s stamina-based, but you have a little more speed once you've reached a higher point in the world to explore its surroundings. But again, looking at places, you see something, you might not go fully there, but you might reach another spot and then take it from there. So that just gives an interesting perspective on how you approach exploration in the game world, which worked extremely well in Breath of the Wild for my taste, so that’s definitely something that we took some inspiration from.
The grappling hook - I mean, it's another thing that also exists in other games - also opens opportunities to make exploration of the world more interesting. This is more for closed spaces or smaller navigation, obviously not for covering large distances. Exploring dungeons and the open world gives you opportunities to discover things that you might not see if you don't think about these tools all the time. Same for the glider, obviously, which is more naturally a part. But yeah, we think exploration is a key thing for a game like this - that there are interesting things to discover.
Also, to get into enemy camps, there is no one entry point. You can fly in, you can take your grappling hook if you find a point where you can enter, you can find some opening in a fence to sneak in, or you can dig a cave to get in there if you want to take the time. Again, we really want to embrace the openness of the world. There is no place that you shouldn't be able to reach. I mean, the game area will be limited to some areas, obviously, but within that, there is no real limitation that you can't really go there or something. If you can see it, you typically can at least hack your way through to get to somewhere probably. Obviously, the fog is a limitation. But really try to embrace this - you can go in any direction at any time.
Q: Yeah, the crafting looks very extensive with opportunities to make all kinds of creative structures. I think I've seen the Eiffel Tower in a video. Could you talk more about the role of crafting in Enshrouded? You mentioned it's not just for exploring, but it's a core part of the game.
A: Building in these types of games typically plays a relevant role, like having your home in this world and sharing it with your friends. It's also multiplayer - if you wish to play with other people. You can also play alone, but it's obviously more fun together. You will bring in new stuff, like finding recipes for props and materials, and all these kinds of things players can take home, like trophies and stuff.
So, it also tells a bit of a story of where you've been, how you played the game, and which areas you've discovered. It's really a long-term endeavor for a group of friends, and it's also what I really like about the way you play together. In general, you have a mixture of people, and some might not enjoy fighting as much as others do. So, building is an aspect where people can just lean into or gather resources, do farming - all these other aspects that bring the group as a whole forward, and everyone can invest the amount of time they like. Building is an important part of the mix, and we especially like to lean more into the creative side. Some other games in the space lean more into the defensive side.
We also got questions about base invasions, and we think it's definitely a cool thing to add. This won't be part of our early access plan right now, but definitely something we want to integrate into the game at some point. The reason why we skipped that for now - I thought about it quite a lot - is it counters the creative aspect of building a bit because enemies can constantly destroy the stuff you've built. It might be frustrating, or you're forced to build bunkers and more defensive structures and find the maximum to achieve that goal.
The same for structural stability and things. There are also interesting building puzzle mechanics that can be quite interesting for people, but we decided to lean more on the creative side and if you want to have a floating castle, you can get there if you'd like to. Voxels were the other aspects that worked really well for us in Portal Knights with Steam Workshop support, so people could share their creations, and they built so many really cool things. I mean, looking at, obviously, Minecraft as the biggest example of voxel building, I think people have an extensive appetite for building cool stuff if they get enough creative tools.
We still want to make it in a way that's accessible enough because it's also a bit of a complaint we heard from Portal Knights, where people find it too tedious to build block by block and our blocks are even smaller. So it's not a meter-size block, it's half-meter size blocks to fit a little more with the more realistic look of the game. It's not really realistic, it’s slightly stylized, but more in that sense. We also added a system around it that you can use it more like a prop space system by planting bigger structures, but they're all based on voxels. You can modify them at any time and basically layout bigger spaces, customize them, and then tweak them to your liking.
Another angle is how it ties in with the gameplay, which obviously was one of your original questions - I got sidetracked a bit. In Portal Knights, there was no specific force that made the player build structures. It was more like something people build naturally because they could, which is also something a lot of people just do when we give them the tools. But we also wanted to tie it in the more gameplay loops we have, like there's a comfort system similar to Valheim. For example, if you decorate your home, and you have a nice place, then you get stronger buffs to take out into adventures that you seek in the world.
You will find NPCs in the world that you can revive and settle in your base, and they will help you with crafting. Specifically, they are all specialists in their field, and they will also give you quests as another angle that drives the player out there. That involves, for example, finding props for them, like long-lost tools or something that unlocks further recipes down the road, but they also want to have a roof to actually get to work and stuff like that. So, they will also push the player slightly to build a workshop for them or make a big home that has housing and workshops for each one of them. We also want to expand on that during and beyond early access, so that more and more of these characters can be found, so players have a good reason, like gameplay mechanics, that tie into crafting.
Q: Could you explain a bit more about how the farming side of it works and that kind of role? Is it more about this idea of being prepared?
A: Yeah, so the gameplay tie-in is obviously not having to gather resources in the world that you would otherwise have to find, like finding fruit and other things. But it's also not just for food, although food will be a relevant thing because it's something you consume again and again. It's really the comfort of having it at your disposal. There's also a general thing about survival games - you evolve yourself. You have a problem in front of you, and you have to evolve beyond that and face new problems. In the beginning, you have basically nothing, and you find your food in the field, and you can eat it, and that solves the problem of not being well-fed and facing enemies unprepared. But later on, food gets a little more automated, like farming, so part of the resource gathering goes away or changes its activities. So it can be easier acquired. You don't have to run around the full world trying to find your mushrooms somewhere hidden in the forest. You can grow them at home. But then it's a different activity, obviously.
On the other hand, it's general resources that you can then have in higher quantities. For example, you also need resources for all kinds of crafting. For building materials, you need a lot of plant fiber, so you can grow a little plant fiber farm or whatever it is. It's obviously also for decoration in the end, which is also something that people build beautiful things within Portal Knights. Having a nice garden that people could explore was something I remember, with built structures, but also nice plants everywhere and arranging them in cool ways. So it's also the decorative aspect of building a lot of trees around your base, along the road to your base, or something. I think there are multiple angles to the farming side, as well as NPCs dedicated to these kinds of things.
For the activity itself, you can prepare all kinds of soil or fine soil in the world, then you can find these plants, and you need this NPC to basically get seeds for the plants that can be used or get seedlings - all of these things that you can then use for planting. There are different plants that only grow in different soil. In the beginning, it's simple -you can also plant it in the grass, and it will grow. But for more advanced stuff, you need special soil.
Q: Gotcha, moving on - could you talk a bit about how the combat helps accommodate different play styles and preferences? You’ve got the staff, the shield, and the sword.
A: Yeah. First, we decided to go for an action RPG style of combat like a lot of games, but this one is a third-person approach. In contrast to Portal Knights, we decided to not have a class selection at the beginning of the game. There you had to choose if you wanted to be a warrior, mage, or ranger. Later on, we added more classes, but this time around we said – again, embracing the players’ freedom - we don't want to choose before the player starts the game, because they don’t know how it feels to play a mage or how it feels to play a ranger or something. So, it's really also a bit of an exploration thing.
We have the open skill tree or skill map. Basically, you can skill in any direction. That starts to define your class, together with the equipment you craft or find. You can both find and craft different equipment, things like weapons and ammo pieces. The combination of that certainly defines you more as a class, or you can try to be more of an all-rounder. If you play single-player, you might still specialize in something, but it's more likely that you need to be a bit more of an all-rounder to solve all the problems that you face.
Especially when you play as a group, players obviously can specialize more, and hopefully, people will make use of that - to have someone be the tank in the front and do more area damage or range damage from the distance or crowd control to some extent, like slowing enemies or whatever to achieve succeeding in a complex or more challenging combat situation. I think a lot of these things can also obviously be overcome with a little more time and upgrading your gear and obviously skill on the player side. So it's always a question of how quickly you want to proceed and how to press into dangerous situations. But yeah, we hopefully have a lot of variety.
We have the skill tree to specialize. It's not all combat skills, but there are also some locomotion things in there or some more general purpose or exotic things that people can unlock. Also, we're a bit anxious and curious about how people combine all of this and probably find exploits that we didn't think of. But yeah, the idea is that people can really play and explore the different varieties.
In terms of the different directions, yes, we have a direction that is generally more warrior-focused, one is more mage-focused, and one is more ranger-focused. And within those, there are also different branches. We have different work-in-progress names for that we don't show in the UI. There are different specializations you can go for. You can unlock a lot of these skills, but not all the skill tree in the end game. There's a limited amount of skill points you can find, so you always have to make a choice, but you can rescale so there's also no danger to be stuck and go the wrong way.
We also have different weapon types. We have our immediate weapons like heavier and slower ones, and fast ones like a sword or smaller mace. We have big hammers or whatever that are slower to use and also use two hands, so you can’t wear a shield at the same time. We have ones like the smaller Harry Potter-like wands that are more medium-range and a faster weapon that you can attack enemies with, and you can wildfire enemies basically.
Then we have the staves which are slower, and a lot of them have more area or group type of effects like Chain Lightning or other things. They're harder to use as they are slower and require resources to use. Obviously, we have a bow - all different types of bows with lots of different arrow types like generally different strengths, but also like stun arrows, explosive arrows, or arrows that cast light in the environment, so you can use it for exploration.
Players are not limited to saying, “I only use a sword and that's basically it.” You can combine these things. You might not be equally well-equipped, in terms of the skilling that goes along with it, to use them all to the most effectiveness. But there are situations that will require a ranged weapon at some point. There are also throwable things and whatever. We really try not to lock ourselves in too much, as we need to make every situation in the game to be solved with every weapon well. You will have situations where you need the help of another player, or you need another type of weapon to make use of these things. Hopefully, that wasn't too much in one.
Q: How does online co-op work in the game, and what would yousay the benefits are of teaming up with friends versus single-player?
A: Just in general, I guess any game is more fun together with friends, so we decided to stick with co-op also for that reason. We wanted to have a game that encourages cooperation. We wanted to make it a place where you can meet your friends and go on adventures together, basically.
When I play with others, it's like you can just jump in, and you're not forced to be equally good in any discipline in the game. It's not like a team sport where you have to perform perfectly well, or you're out of the group, or you have to play five times a week to be a worthy part of the group. It's anyone can join, anyone is welcome, and anyone can contribute whatever it is to the overall progress. And as we talked about, there are lots of angles to do something in the world. That is meaningful progress for the group, like either exploring, finding new things in the world that unlocks potential new powers for the group, doing combat to overcome obstacles, opening parts of the new areas of the world that you couldn't enter yet, or strengthening the Flame, which gives also everyone a certain power bonus of the group.
There's some auto-leveling going on to adapt the enemies to the current group configuration in a way that it gets easier overall if you bring in your friends. It's not getting overly easy - it's not twice as easy with two players, but it also doesn't get twice as hard. On the other hand, it gets a bit harder, but you still feel the benefit of your friends. It also measures that locally.
Let's say you have 16 players on the server, which is probably a rare case; that's the upper limit we aim for. Most people won't have that many gaming friends to play in co-op with, but if you have that many, probably they will split up and be several groups doing several things all at once. If a group of five goes out and tries to find something, the combat situation will level to the group of five and not to the 16 players on the server. It's not punishing you for bringing more people in, hopefully.
On the other side, with more people who can specialize in different areas like in combat, we mentioned that you can specialize in a certain class or playstyle, but you can also specialize in different activities. Like, I know from the mix of people I play with, some only want to do combat and then don't care about the building aspect or other things. Others like building a cool home or doing farming and these kinds of things and preparing the resources for the other guys to go into battle well-prepared or something. So, I think that's also a big benefit.
Also, if you want to go for building, having a group of people obviously makes everything easier. You have more resources to go for, you can build bigger things, and have a grander vision of what you want to achieve on that end. So I think that there are a lot of angles why playing together is a good choice. So, we hope that players may start out single-player but then think about it and then try to bring in their friends or set up a dedicated server somewhere after playing a bit of peer-to-peer to have this persistent word feel that also makes it more attractive.
Q: What do you think about Enshrouded being compared with games like Valheim and Zelda? You mentioned Breath of the Wild inspired the gliding - how do you feel about the comparisons?
A: I mean, they're definitely valid comparisons because obviously, we were inspired by Breath of the Wild. I mean, Valheim came out during development, so we didn't see that coming while we were working on the game. We're quite surprised about its extreme success, and I mean, that basically made us quite happy. We're happy for them and their success because we feel like it validated that there's an appetite for this type of survival game because a lot of survival games lean more toward the hardcore side of things, not all of them. But I think that that was a cool thing to see, like a softer co-op survival game succeed, and these kinds of things that we also were aiming for.
I think that works extremely well and was more of a validation of the rough direction. I mean, they also have a fairly different game. Like, we're not about seafaring. It's not Viking-themed. It's not procedural. There are a lot of differences, I think, to Valheim. But if you think about survival games, we're probably much closer to Valheim than other survival games that come to mind, I would say so. So for us, it was a confirmation and also an inspiration as well moving forward.
For Breath of the Wild - I think it might have been out when we started or came out around the time. And I mean, Portal Knights also took cues from Zelda games in the past. I mean, I definitely have a love for Zelda. Obviously so are a lot of other games, and we looked at a lot of games for inspiration in terms of how we want to make our combat feel. It's not just “Oh yeah, Zelda's cool. Let's try to copy that kind of combat or whatever.” We look at all the games that come close in some way, try to obviously see what others did where it might make sense to take inspiration from, but also not try to copy something and shoehorn it together to make it actually click together. That's the key thing about this genre mix that feels like a cohesive thing after all.
Q: Yeah, definitely. You mentioned early access earlier. What plans have you got for Enshrouded’s early access? Are you able to talk about that?
A: Yeah, in general, we did early access for the first time in Portal Knights before we mainly shipped games as a thing that was shipped. Sometimes we did updates of things, but there was a bit of a new model for us. I think they work pretty well, like shipping a polished base game on where the essence of the game works well, and isn't a buggy mess or something - like it was also something that we see as a tricky point with early access games - that people at the beginning they’re quite excited about the prospect of early access.
But over time, that faded for a lot of people as they were burned by really super half-baked things. That made them feel like, “If it's early access, I won't touch it.” But I mean, that's totally fine. But what we really liked about it, was that we could launch on a single platform. I mean, back then, when we did Portal Knights, we worked together with Spider Five, as our publisher. This time we are self-published, so it's more of our own in any way. But it was clear from the beginning that we want to go to multiple platforms to support consoles, and something like this.
But deciding to go for a single platform first, during early access - basically reaching an audience that is really leaning into the product and likes this kind of thing and is willing to invest early on and wants to bring in their opinion into the development of the game. So we can really polish the game even further, see what really resonates with people out there. I mean, we have a lot of ideas, about what should work. And then we see the hard truth when we give it to people to play it. And we always did this with friends and family testing, like bringing in strangers or people who know, early on to test things. But having a larger group playing the games is certainly a different beast.
And this worked exceptionally well, from our perspective in Portal Knights and going beyond just having a closed beta or something. And I think we stayed there for about a year or something until we finally felt the game’s fleshed out. And we have added more content, more features, more polishing to the balancing and all these kinds of aspects that we felt okay, now it's a good time to grow potentially the amount of platforms and go for consoles and stuff like this.
So we have a similar approach in mind here. We didn't start setting out a fixed date when we might think the game feels like a release version or something. So it's really up to the feedback we get during early access. We just closed alpha and beta now. We got a lot of good feedback that also informs us what we still need to do for early access. But it's really our aim to work together as a community, take in a lot of feedback, and try to figure out how our roadmap that we have internally matches with what people actually want. And then try to find a good path forward together to make the game people would wish it to be, which is always a bit of a struggle because lots of people have different opinions.
But I think they figured out good ways to manage that and to hopefully give people an idea of what we're doing. And yeah, also building up the confidence that a product is not dead. That was also a concern raised earlier when we launched Portal Knights like “Oh, it might be the dead, the devs don't respond instantly.” [laughs]. So yeah, we can definitely assure you that we want to develop this game for hopefully years to come beyond early access. Also beyond release, similar to what we did with Portal Knights, and as we said, publishing is much more on our hands, how long and how intense we want to make this collaboration with people, as there's also no additional layer between us and the community out there. And I think for the beta, the closed test that we made - I think this worked really cool for my taste. So, I'm a bit nervous but certainly played quite eager to get more people into the game and see what they have to say about it.
Q: Is there anything else that you'd like to add today?
Q: Yeah, I mean, for us, it's really interesting. One of the last points we touched on, is that we work closely with the community. In the end, I mean that, in general, building games that were box products in the past, was always a bit of a struggle. You make all these assumptions, about how a game should be and that it's cool, and that it's fun to play. And they have to ship it. And in the past, it wasn't impossible to make any adjustments afterward, it was just out there. Nowadays, you can really work closely with people, and you can also work on this game over the years to come. And it's all something I really love about this whole thing, like not just about the genre, but also the whole process. It's always with every project, you have the feeling like, “Oh, we have this thing that could be better, or we have these other features we wanted to put in. And we just don't have enough time to ship it in time with all the stuff we want to make.” So no game ever feels complete, I guess for any designer out there.
So being able to continue adding on to this and also hearing the feedback directly from players, positive and negative, really encourages I guess a lot of the team as well. It’s also what I said internally - we definitely need an announcement, we need some confirmation out there that we are on the right path of stuff. Because that makes a lot of people happy and willing to work hard on everything. And that's especially very true for me at least. So I'm really excited about this. Obviously getting this right is a tough spot. Like, how do you deal with players' expectations in a way that people don't get upset and angry that we don't ship this specific feature all at once. But yeah, we will hopefully find a good way to make it work and create a positive community around the game and move forward with this. That's what gets me excited really.
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Enshrouded is currently in development.