Far More Gameplay Details Than Its E3 2017 Trailer
As revealed earlier at the Nintendo Spotlight video, Monolith Soft’s upcoming Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is still on its way to 2017. The trailer’s release window was probably the biggest stinger of the video, but Nintendo did a livestream of the game at their Treehouse booth at E3. And, we got to see a whole lot more gameplay details in it.
COMBAT
-The game will feature a Blade system which changes your equipment and arts (Xenoblade‘s combat skills). This mechanic is deeper than the name lets on as it revolves around finding and summoning different Blades which manifest as beings. You can swap between different Blades during battle to access healing arts, or more combo-ready arts too. On top of that, each Blade will give you a different weapon as well. One way to acquire new Blades is to draw them from crystals, but it’s unclear if it’s randomized.
-Some enemies from the first game reappear here.
-You can’t directly issue commands to your party members in battle, but you can switch over to them outside of battle, it appears. Each party member has their Blades as well, as Nia, the party’s healer, can even ride her tiger-like Blade like a mount.
-Like in previous games, different arts will hurt more depending on your position. There’s also a combo system as well that lets you juggle the enemies into the air.
EXPLORATION
-There will be a day/night/weather cycle. As you explore, tides will rise and fall depending on the time of day, which in turn, lets you explore new areas.
-Dying in battle sends you back to a checkpoint, but the game seems to auto-save often so it’s not a huge loss of time.
-Instead of the first game’s two huge titans, Mechonis and Bionis, you will instead find different living titans that look anything from giraffes, humans, or whales. Like the first game, your “overworld” is comprised of walking on these titans, each with their own biosphere and landscape. One titan may be more forest-y, another more water-based, and one could be more technological. What’s cool is that these biospheres also inform the towns too as the giraffe-looking titan has mostly forests and their town, consequently, deals with lumber milling.
-There was no loading between the areas in the stream which started in a jungle forest and ended soon after a boss fight inside an airship.
DEVELOPMENT
-The game will be fully voiced in English
-Tetsuya Takashi, the game’s Executive Director, was at the stream to answer some questions including his choice to call this new game “Xenoblade Chronicles 2”. He notes that this is closer to the original game than Xenoblade Chronicles X as the Wii U sci-fi RPG was more about exploration, but this upcoming game is more narrative-driven. That said, they were able to build this game in a quicker time because of the systems they created for Xenoblade Chronicles X.
-When asked why he kept using “Xeno” in his game titles, Takashi said that the word meant something different, and thus, the interaction between different elements lead to drama. This drama is why he is interested in adding that word to his game titles as they inform a lot of themes in his games.
Overall, I came away from the stream with far more enthusiasm for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 which looks like it marries the deep exploration of Xenoblade Chronicles X with the original game’s stronger emphasis on story.