Game Chronicles Magazine

The Roots combines a classic RPG with dynamic gameplay and the fast paced plot characteristic of action-adventure games. The Roots has a complex, multi-threaded storyline and a vast world, which the player discovers whilst traveling with his party, fighting various monsters and living through great adventures.

The land of Lorath, which the game heroes traverse, is divided into over 24 regions. During their adventure players meet over 120 non-playing characters (NPC), with over 400 different items and 70 spells to fight off up to 100 monsters and human aggressors on over 70 battle arenas.

The player becomes involved in a mysterious world, which eventually develops into an adventure full of intrigue, unexpected events and sudden plot twists where an ancient evil has just started to awake.

Within the games` rich and dynamically interactive environment, interesting foreigners join our hero`s quest by adding power and strength through offering new weapons, intellect and tools.

The Roots will offer two mini-games, including Ballooncraft Race – a fast paced, spectacular arcade game, which gives players the ability to fly in a sky race, and Trion, an original logic game.

Game Chronicles goes inside this exciting new game with an exclusive GCM interview.

GCM: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Would please get us started by introducing yourself and telling us about the team behind “The Roots”
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: I am Piotr Krzywonosiuk (yep, that actually can be pronounced ;-)), an Operation Manager and Producer for Tannhauser Gate. Tannhauser Gate was founded in 1998. Our first project was a MMOG Mimesis Online, released back in 2002. The company is based in Wroclaw, Poland. At the moment our team is made from of 29 programmers, artists, testers and management staff working on The Roots for PC and Xbox. A separate team within the studio is developing The Roots: Gates of Chaos, a prequel for the original game, only for Nokia’s N-Gage game deck.

GCM: For starters, please give us a sense of the story driving The Roots.
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: For hundreds of years the land of Lorath has remained a peaceful and idyllic place. Mystical Trees of Elements have maintained the world’s harmony and the stories of great struggle for power that had taken place between Lady of Life and the evil Demon Lord slowly turned into legends that only few would remember. The Lord’s soul had been shattered to pieces and buried under the Trees roots; any danger faded.
Then, seemingly without any apparent reason, one of the Trees begin to die. This is when we meet Yan, our young hero. Yan was once adopted by the Sentinel of the Tree of Life, one of the Mystical Trees, which now begins to die. Brave Yan is sent for a journey of his life during which he will find out that the forces of evil have returned to threaten Lorath once again. The world’s fate is left to doubt again. It will be up to the player to solve the mystery and defeat the forces of darkness. It will be a struggle against destiny and ancient Gods, abundant in action turns, surprising events, sincere friends and sworn enemies.

GCM: The Roots is being described as an “Action/RPG.” What classic elements will we be seeing in terms of character/team advancement as well as dynamic storyline?
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: Gamers will affect the playable characters’ development in terms of their statistics, spells, skills, talents, equipment etc. The development and quests-rewards system will be a core of the RPG layer in the game. Depending what players do in the game, the decisions they take and how they choose to develop their characters is going to impact the gameplay.
We are focusing on development of relationships between certain party members during the game. The characters that will join Yan are not so transparent initially, and the player will get to know them better throughout the course of game. It provides a field for many surprising events that add to storyline’s dynamism.
All seems slow when you start the game, yet the atmosphere is being gradually built. Yan is still in his home village when a series of unexpected events is triggered. Things start rolling fast from then on; it is like a chain reaction. The gamer will be sucked in the whirl of events, they will be thrown into various places where they meet a different range of characters or enemies, and they will be told amazing stories.

GCM: How many members will the player be able to have in his/her team and how much control will the player have over their teammates.
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: Gamers will have an opportunity to control up to three characters, including Yan – the main hero, at any time. Yan’s fellows will come and go as the story progresses. Throughout the game, gamers will play seven characters that wield various weapons and specialize in different schools of magic.
In exploration, more players will control only Yan, who is automatically followed by his party members. As soon as a battle starts the party is taken to one of the 70+ arenas where the player is given absolute control over the party members. It is not only possible to decide on an action to perform, but it can be determined where a party member should end up after executing the move. We stressed on that aspect, since one of the ultimate goals of the battles system was to add tactical aspects to the arena battles. That approach, as we perceive it, makes the battles more interesting and challenging as well.

GCM: Please tell us a bit about the combat engine in The Roots.
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: The story gave us the freedom to create many very different levels without destroying the seamless look of the game.
Combat is no doubt among the most vital game elements. Battle system in The Roots is a mixture of a turn based board game and a real time action one. There are no conventional turns, since each character has its own initiative regeneration speed, and his/her “turn” is independent.
The combat in The Roots takes place in specially prepared arenas. As previously mentioned, apart from the main hero (Yan) there are seven more playable characters in the game. They will join and leave Yan’s party on different stages of the game’s story and help Yan out in his journey.
The party can consist a maximum of three characters at a time. It is a crucial part of The Roots gameplay to utilize the party members’ skills effectively. That is one of the main guidelines we refer to when the technical aspects of the gameplay is considered.
While the combat system in The Roots should be described as ‘turn-based’ it carries a few unique elements, which make the game more similar to the real-time and even tactical games. Namely, there are turns when certain characters take action, but the player is given additional control over each of the party members – it is possible to decide for example the position characters will take after executing the attack.
In addition, the initiative being one of the elements that describes any player character contributes to the tactical aspect of the combat. The initiative factor allowed for reengineering the classical turn based combat into a unique system, which gives players more control and encourages taking a more tactical approach to battles.

GCM: As for the player’s arsenal, what will they have at their disposal and how is equipment acquired?
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: Characters’ equipment is a very important game element, especially in role-playing games. There are 400+ items players may come across when in the game. Apart from standard ones there are rare and unique items out of which some can only be gained thanks to solving quests. Such items are almost priceless and will help during most heated battles. Most items can be gained either upon a victorious battle or in a local store. Thanks to some items it will be possible to boost characters’ statistics and skills.

GCM: What sort of enemies will the player be up against?
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: Each location in the game will feature its unique environments and thus overall style. Consequently, players will meet different enemies when progressing in the game.
Since The Roots is a game of fantasy genre there are going to be orcs, trolls, demons, skeletons. However we have prepared many more nasty creatures. Players will also encounter a number of unusual monsters, different both in terms of their look and in terms of behavior. I wouldn’t like to reveal too much now, but this feature should be a nice surprise for everyone.

GCM: What can we expect from both the A.I. in The Roots concerning both friendly and hostile NPCs/creatures?
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: NPC play an important role in the game. Some will be there to only chat around with, yet some will give interesting hints and bits of information players may want to listen to carefully. You will be able to play mini-games with some individuals, and trade with others. Lastly some NPCs will act as coaches – in certain circumstances players will be able to learn their characters certain skills or spells unavailable otherwise.
We wanted the NPCs to contribute to increasing immersion in the game world. There is a system which ‘manages’ the NPCs their behaviour in the game. Consequently, some NPCs will be performing their daily duties according to a specific schedule; for instance, when it starts to rain they will stop their farming work and come back to their houses until the weather improves. They will also leave the blacksmith once it gets dark to return to work in the morning.
Enemy’s combat tactics and general behavior depends on race factor. It means that if you get attacked by, for instance, wolves which are social animals, will cooperate in order to inflict the highest possible damage to your teams Individual opponents, on the other hand, you can sometimes call for some help and when such arrives, players may have to redefine their tactics. Each type of opponents will challenge players to prepare a different, individual combat tactic, and not always will that be according to the old saying “the best defense is to attack”.

GCM: What do you feel will set The Roots apart from other games in the RPG genre?
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: We feel very confident about the game’s combat system, which even if not revolutionary is a quite unique feature in The Roots. Also the art direction we once chose is proving to be distinctive from that found in other games. That is certainly a good thing and should visibly distinguish The Roots from its competition.

GCM: As for graphics, what do you feel will really “jump out” at gamers in The Roots?
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: The Roots isn’t a Doom 3 flashy kind of game, so I am not sure about that “jumping out”. However, we feel pretty confident about the graphics in the game. I hope players will enjoy the overall visual style. The Roots’ art direction can be summarized as a desire for fairly unique and attractive world, which will be a mix of anime art styles and European culture elements. The game world is diversified. It is made of sometimes contrasting areas and players will get to see snowy mountains, hot deserts, damp swamps, dense forests and more. Day/night cycle as well as realistic weather effects should contribute to, hopefully, an experience to be remembered. Special effects in combat, the thing that is being polished while I am writing this, also look really amazing. We are also working on some extra effects that will be used in a Ballon race mini-game, like blur, refraction and others. The mini-game’s dynamism underlined by the effects has a good chance to impress the gamers.
Technically, we are using all that can be sucked of the latest hardware (GPUs) and supporting most of DirectX 9.0c features. We have been working with NVIDIA for quite some time now, also on The Roots. Recently, the game has been qualified to their TWIMTBP program what certainly is a mark of distinction and no doubt will increase the overall quality.
Finally, a huge amount of work has been devoted in cut-scenes in the game. There will be over 150 cut-scenes all of them produced using Motion Capture technology. The cut-scenes help carrying on with the plot and are also used to underline the emotions among party members. The cut-scenes needed to be as descriptive and eloquent as possible thus we haven’t been sparing the time and effort; I really hope players will enjoy them.

GCM: Lastly, what can you tell us about the sound effects and music in The Roots and how important has audio presentation been to the development team?
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: Even a very good game can easily be spoiled if the audio part sucks. Knowing that we are devoting lots of effort into audio. Few things contribute to building the game’s atmosphere more than the music. We have already prepared unique tracks for all stages players will be travelling through. The soundtrack will be over 120 minutes long. The music in the game is ubiquitous – different themes have been carefully prepared for each of the locations to reflect its unique style; there is also music for special events, such as the combat or mini games. The same amount of work has been devoted to the sound effects in The Roots; we are making sure that it is the highest quality and fits well with the overall style.

GCM: Thank you for your time! Would you care to wrap up this Q&A with any final thoughts or impressions for our readers?
Piotr Krzywonosiuk: Well, I hope I’ve got you interested in the game. If so, be sure to visit The Roots website at http://www.theroots-game.com/.