Upcoming tower defense game Defender's Quest 2: Mists of Ruin is looking to deliver some serious narrative content, far beyond what most of its genre contemporaries strive for. The game, which is set to release this year, is the follow-up to 2012's Defender's Quest, a cult classic hiding surprisingly deep and nuanced storytelling. Developer Level Up Labs is looking to bolster the strengths of the first game with the sequel, building upon the its foundation in meaningful ways.
To help make Defender's Quest 2's story as strong and inventive as possible, Level Up Labs brought Strange Scaffold CEO Xalavier Nelson Jr. Onboard as a lead writer for the game. The Best War Games recently had the chance to sit down with Nelson, who illuminated several intriguing elements of Defender's Quest 2 and its development. Among these intriguing elements is Defender's Quest 2's unique blend of narrative and gameplay, which seem to play off one another in an alluring ballet of storytelling.
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Story and Gameplay Are Intertwined In Defender's Quest 2
Defender's Quest 2 is set in a world that has been overtaken by a dreadful, cosmic blight known as the Mirk, a mysterious phenomenon that alters body and soul. To combat this, the game's protagonists must venture into the Shining Lands and face the Mirk's disastrous effects head-on. This is the conflict that the game's story is built around, and while players have seen mysterious cosmic threats in gaming before, Defender's Quest 2's storytelling methods promise to set it apart from the pack.
Speaking with The Best War Games, Nelson said that game developers "have the privilege and the pain of literally every artistic medium potentially being caught up in what they do." With this confluence of artistic forms comes both a unique potential and a powerful responsibility to make use of the full spectrum of narrative tools available to the gaming medium. For some games, this means a cinematic or dialog-driven experience with gameplay included as a sort of emotion-heightening agent. For Defender's Quest 2, it means weaving narrative fibers into the more particular and mechanical aspects of the experience. Nelson offered one particularly unique example of this interplay when discussing the player's cast of NPC companions:
One of the earlier characters we worked on is someone who fires things from different dimensions, like both "healing" and "hurting" bullets. I thought through the process of that, and I conceived of the idea to have this character fire little tardigrades, known as T-Grade bullets, pulled from another dimension, because a tardigrade is the sort of creature that could actually survive a cross-dimensional journey. However, the process of firing these tardigrades means that some piece of the character is being continually worn away.
Without spoilers, I can say that this character is being actively altered by the process of using their primary ability. This elevates both the story and the gameplay because the gameplay mechanics give you something cool to draw upon, while the story dictates that every time this character is used in battle, you know what that represents for them. You know that they are fighting for something that matters to them, in spite of the detrimental effects it is causing for themselves. The fact that this character chooses to face that is an act of defiance.
Multidimensional superpowers are nothing new in gaming, but Defender's Quest 2's presentation of this ubiquitous concept harnesses the interactive quality of the gaming medium. As Nelson says, understanding the narrative context behind this character reframes how the player may view their decisions in gameplay, leading to a collaborative, affecting narrative experience.
According to Nelson, this tardigrade-wielding character won't be the only instance of Defender's Quest 2's narrative-gameplay synergy. He also touched on a character who struggles with an addiction to an in-world substance—the same substance that is used to level up characters. In this way, the game is providing storytelling depth through its gameplay, demonstrating how video games can leverage their interactivity for greater emotional results. It will be interesting to see just how far Defender's Quest 2 goes in this regard, as its approach to storytelling is already looking promising.
Defender's Quest 2: Mists of Ruin is set to release in 2024 for PC.