If you’ve been thinking of The Exiled (formerly known as Das Tal) as a hardcore indie PvP sandbox where the players make the story, well, you’re not entirely offbase in that perception, but maybe that perception is about to change.
Game Director Alexander Zacherl admits in a dev post today that he’s not been happy with the lore of the gameworld that he wrote himself. “I’m way happier when I get to design game systems,” he says. “And so while I loved the base concepts it felt like our lore was all over the place, badly documented and very inconsistent. This came to a point where I could not even answer all questions in our lore forum anymore.”
Consequently, Zacherl and Fairytale Distillery announced today that they’ve procured the services of a freelance narrative design company called Talespinners to make sense of the lore and flesh out the world. The company’s reps say they’ve written for SOMA, The Bunker, The Descendant, the LEGO series, and Velocity 2X, as well as movies and books. Here’s how one of the writers has described the company’s work on The Exiled:
“The Exiled presented us with a few challenges due to the nature of the game’s setup. Much of our early work has been in finding solid in-game reasons that justify some of the more unusual game mechanics in the setting, but that broadly fit with the existing lore. Now that we have that background in place, we’re going back through all the lore. There’s a lot of good source material to draw from, but some of it is inconsistent or goes against our central ideas – we’re smoothing it out and tweaking it until it fits. Very few things will be dropped altogether. It’s actually helpful to have all this starting material, rather than to work from a blank canvas. Not only does it give us a basic framework and spark a whole load of ideas, it also gives us a very strong feel for the themes of the game; so even if we do replace a piece of lore, it will still have contributed to our view of the game’s atmosphere.”
