Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms is easily one of the most ambitious games ever built in Italy. From Paduan indie developer Gamera Interactive, a studio founded by Roman industry veteran Alberto Belli, Alaloth is an action RPG with an isometric view inspired by classic fantasy games like Moonstone, with a Dark Souls-like combat system.
Alaloth has just launched on Steam with a PC Early Access build, which means Gamera will take its time to complete it along the way. However, the project itself was announced back in 2017 and was originally expected to release in 2018.
“2017’s announcement was a bit unexpected even for us,” Belli recalls. “Back then, we only had a 3D prototype, and we hadn’t even started pre-production. We had announced a collaboration with Chris Avellone, IGN learned about that and offered an exclusive unveil on all of its network. At that moment, we just couldn’t refuse that.”
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Development only kicked off properly in February 2021. “Before that, it had been only a matter of survival,” Belli says.
It’s interesting to note Chris Avellone’s role in the project. Writer and designer for famed games such as Fallout: New Vegas and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Avellone served as a creative consultant on Alaloth. In 2020, he was accused by three people of sexual misconduct and harassment, and in 2021 he announced he had filed a libel suit against his accusers. Because of the accusations, Avellone was removed from projects like Dying Light 2 and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.
While others have distanced themselves from Avellone, Belli notes: “Chris worked on the first draft of the world and characters. Cities, points of interest, companions, chronology, legends. From there, we iterated his work until we arrived at the current situation.” His relationship with Gamera had already ended “over 8 months” before the accusations went public and, as a result, the studio aligned with the formal statement from the then publisher All In! Games. “What I can say about that is Chris has always been super professional with us,” Belli says. “In the game, he’s credited as it’s always been.
“In 2020, we had built an entire summer of marketing on interviews and presentations with him, which obviously didn’t happen”
Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms moved from a simultaneous release on PC and consoles, to a Steam-only Early Access. Originally, the developer was also working on an Xbox exclusive, but that didn’t happen “for reasons out of our control,” and the “Early Access was dictated by various contingencies” throughout the development process. However, “considering the game’s nature, it’s always been our first option,” and, as soon as the studio got back “in control” of the game, Gamera Interactive “changed course, returning to the original idea.” The game is still coming to consoles in future, as part of that plan.
At any rate, the $24.99 game available now is just a taster. “When we got back to the game, we had two choices in front of us: run and finalize the project as soon as possible, hand it to a new publisher for the console versions, cash out, and sleep peacefully,” Belli says. “After all that we had been through, we decided to take all the time we need to pull out something well different from the original game, in terms of scope.”
Early Access can mean a lot of things in gaming. You go from little more than a demo to full-fledged beta builds that only need some polish. With Alaloth, “the game is playable from the beginning to the end, there’s nothing missing,” Belli explains. “The only things missing are polish and balance tweaks. We’re not speaking of an Early Access with just 20% of the overall content. We’re speaking of a game that only needs to be finalized.”
Whether the final version will include more features, regions, equipment, and any other additional content, that will likely depend on the game’s success. “During these months, we’ll figure out whether it’s the case to proceed this way or further expand what we already have in our hands. We already have a roadmap for that, which still starts from adding all the things we have announced and couldn’t finish,” Belli explains. “Now, it’s only a matter of adding stuff. What we wanted to have in our original vision for the game, it’s already in.”
Gameplay-wise, Gamera’s CEO and founder proudly says “a genre” that you could ascribe Alaloth to “doesn’t exist”.
”We’re inventing it,” he says. “We like to think that ‘ala-like’ could become something in the vein of ‘souls-like’ at some point. We often joke internally on that. We’re addressing two different targets that love the same genre. Players in love with cRPG, and those who have a passion for action games. For the first, we built a vast world and an immense lore; for the second, we have a combat system that doesn’t exist in other games. We’re trying to push the first to play like the second, and vice versa.”
Combat itself is the “toughest [component] to balance, of course, and this is the reason why we’re in Early Access,” he continues. “We have more than 100 weapons, 50,000 possible combinations of builds considering all the skills, 150 quest rewards, etc. Every time we touch a number, hundreds change subsequently, and we need to get back to testing.”
For a game including a competitive mode, where champions from other regions gather the same shards you need before you can face the main antagonist, a drop-in/drop-out co-op mode, and a world as deep as a cRPG’s but with all the tension from souls-like games, it’s an impressive statement.
Right now, bugs are being squashed almost on a daily basis, and Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms looks pretty close to being a Diablo game, with a bigger focus on action than on the role-playing component. You have quests to play through, but they seem more an excuse to embark on a journey across the world and further learn about the deep lore – which is presented in “around 300,000 words of dialogue,” so prepare to read a lot. In fact, you won’t need quests to move the story forward, as you’ll only be tasked with completing the most challenging dungeons to do so – a fancy approach that somehow adds to that “ala-like” definition devs seem to enjoy so much.
As for the future, Gamera appears more interested in expanding to more media rather than following the sequel path. A comic book is already available, and two books are coming soon. “Of course, we’re trying to figure out whether there’s room for other things like these, such as board games, pen and paper role-playing games, and who knows, maybe even a Netflix series,” Belli says. We have already mentioned Alaloth is an ambitious project, right?
Written by Paolo Sirio on behalf of GLHF.
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