Review: Thrones of Britannia

Marcel Gagné — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 14:59:34 +0000

A look at the recent game from the Total War series on the Linux desktop thanks to Steam and Feral Interactive.

Back in 878 CE (or AD, if you prefer), the British Isles and England were far more exciting than what we see there today, especially if you are into historical dramas with lots of kings and knights in armor fighting for God and glory. Throw in Vikings launching an attack on the adolescent England, the retreat of its king who then gathers support from the provinces for a decisive counter-offensive against the horned warriors, and it makes for pretty cool story telling. Even if it is all true.

In January of that year, Vikings did attack at Chippenham, which is a little Northeast of Bath and Bristol. Alfred the Great, King of the Anglo-Saxons, was caught by surprise and retreated only to gather reinforcements from the counties of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. In May, Alfred's combined forces met King Guthrum's army in Edington in Wiltshire, formerly known as Ethandun. To make a long story short, the Brits won, the Vikings lost, and the rest as they say, is history.

The cool thing about fiction, and video games for that matter, is that you can take a decisive period in history such as this and re-imagine it by asking what would have happened if the Vikings had won. Or maybe some lord from one of the counties would have seen this as a good opportunity to get rid of Alfred, make some backroom deals with other counties and districts, and maybe even the Vikings, and you'd have a very different England today.

Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia by Creative Assembly and SEGA, along with Feral Interactive (who brings us the Linux version of the game), asks us to envision these types of scenarios and rewrite history. Thrones of Britannia is a turns-based strategy game, with real-time elements, that asks you to join one of several factions (the British, the Welsh or even the Vikings) from which to build your empire (Figure 1). Each faction comes with its own regional strengths, goals, features and troops. No faction gives you a definitive advantage over the other, so take the time to read up on each and see what feels right to you. So far, I've played the Welsh and Gaelic kingdoms.

Figure 1. Choose your faction.

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Crossing Platforms: a Talk with the Developers Building Games for Linux

K.G. Orphanides — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 21:52:14 +0000

by K.G. Orphanides

Games for Linux are booming like never before. The revolution comes courtesy of cross-platform dev tools, passionate programmers and community support.

In the last five years, the number of mainstream games released for Linux has increased dramatically, with thousands of titles now available. These range from major AAA releases, such as Civilization VI and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, to breakout indie hits like Night in the Woods

For this article, I spoke to different developers and publishers to discover the shape of the Linux games market and find out what's driving its prodigious growth.

Figure 1. Multi-award-winning comedy adventure game Night in the Woods is one of many games simultaneously released on Linux, macOS and Windows, thanks to development tools that can build for all three platforms.

Why Develop Games for Linux?

Support for Linux has boomed with the introduction of cross-platform development tools that make it comparatively easy to release titles on multiple operating systems. Perhaps more important, almost all the developers I spoke to personally support the Open Source movement, even if their games are proprietary.

For Zack Johnson, creative director of asymmetric's stick-figure comedy RPG, West of Loathing, the game's origins as a spin-off from popular browser game Kingdom of Loathing played a significant role.

"There was a vocal contingent of original Kingdom of Loathing players who urged us to [release a Linux version]", he said. "We knew we'd be able to get information and support from them during development, so it seemed like a worthwhile thing to do."

His experiences making an online game also helped form that decision: "My first game project was built on the LAMP stack, so I wouldn't have a career without open-source software. And just in general, it's hard to understate its importance to the fundamental underpinnings of the internet."

Figure 2. New Britannia, the online world created for Portalarium's Shroud of the Avatar, has been accessible to Linux users since its early pre-Alpha releases.

At Portalarium, the company behind Richard "Lord British" Garriott's latest fantasy RPG epic, Shroud of the Avatar, tech director Chris Spears says the drive to support Linux came from within:

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