All Hail Temos, a single-player fantasy action RPG releasing on Steam this Fall, will hopefully achieve a narrative greatness that Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim fell short of. The game, developed and published by Geoffrey Howland, is planned to be in Steam's Early Access program for three months prior to its release. Steam's Early Access program allows gamers to try a game in development to play it and provide so that development can adapt accordingly. A demo of the prologue will be available to play sometime in September.
Skyrim remains one of the most popular video games to this day, although it released in November 2011, and it remains one of the most well-known RPGs of all time. Its one glaring flaw was that the player, the Dragonborn, could not ultimately change the game's outcome. Skyrim's hundreds of hours of side quests (which were arguably more diverting and interesting than the main quests), did not really matter at all, either to the end result or to the unchanging game map. This can be pinned on the "Chosen One" trope, which implies a destiny that cannot be avoided, and which, thankfully, All Hail Temos will not include.
While All Hail Temos is a small hand-crafted world, it has all the depth of lore one would expect, and it will give players the power that Skyrim withheld - the power to affect and change the ultimate outcome of the story. The true power in All Hail Temos is the ability to change its world. There is no "Chosen One" in this game.
All Hail Temos Will Be Many Stories And Side Quest Threads That The Player Weaves
All Hail Temos will not feature a main story, but rather multiple side quests with intricate cause-and-effect mechanics that will change the game world according to the player's actions and dialogue choices. An in-game journal will track changes that the world undergoes with each important decision, culminating in multiple possible endings for the player to unlock. Players will be able to decide the fate of NPCs (and not just by choosing to kill them for whatever reason), and conflict can be solved with violence or diplomacy. Players will even be able to claim ownership of buildings, or even entire towns.
All Hail Temos will likely be a memorable game (even when it is dwarfed in size and visuals by Skyrim), and may find its way to the top of the Best Indie Games list when it releases. It is to be hoped that more big-name game designers follow the trend that Indie developer Geoffrey Howland is setting: to allow players the power to determine the fate of the world (no matter how small it is).
