The Bellwright team talks about expanding the massive survival game with new content

Bellwright is a massive open-world survival game that fuses Rimworld's city management with mount and blade combat. The game recently received a major expansion to the base game, the Maiden Voyage DLC, which transforms the already endless gameplay experience into a whole new way of playing with branching faction questlines and new replayable content. I chatted with the Donkey Crew team via email about how they worked to bring Halmare Islands to life.

This new area plays more like an exploration or raid map than the original Karvenia map. “Halmare Isles, which is a new map and additional content for Bellwright, is not small because you can actually replay it,” the team told me. The goal in Halmare's mind has always been to create a place where players can get away from city management and provide for your citizens, with a new area that “enjoys story beats and interesting new loot rewards.”

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Unreal Engine 5.6 means the game has received a performance boost

One of the concerns I've had with Bellwright in the past is performance. Nothing too serious, but the sheer scale of the game can sometimes cause problems when you have very large cities full of citizens. I was curious to know if the new map would cause problems for players with existing saves full of moving pieces, but the team assured me that they made the changes aimed at improving performance. “Our main map, Carvenia, is very heavy for players, although we updated it to the new version of Unreal Engine 5.6, which gave us a performance boost.”

The new map is completely separate from the original map, allowing the dev team to provide players with fun new tools to expand on Bellwright. “But making the maps separate is also a great opportunity for us, giving players new tools, like modders, who can now create their own maps that other players can use and explore. So it's not only good for performance, but it's also great for the future development of our game.”

More education, more ways to experience Bellwright

More content means more knowledge. Bellwright's lore goes above and beyond most survival games, especially of this scale. The story follows you, the main character, who is a simple peasant who is falsely accused of murdering a prince. You led a rebellion in Curvania, defeated the crown, and eventually built such a reputation that you essentially rule the region. Any new content on Halmare Islands “must fit into the main game loop and progression”, and this was a task for the story team.

“They start by looking at the lore of each location, deciding what characters are needed, and making sure everything in the world feels natural. From there, they outline the story, define the main characters, and shape the lore to fit the mood of each area. It's an ongoing process of brainstorming, collecting ideas, and researching. For example, the Halmare Islands were the capturing targets for my culture. With new types of quests, dialogue, and story structure, A very different feel from Carvenia,” explains the team.

Halmare Island offers three different ways to play the end game: there are two different factions you can align yourself with (Halmayans or Cassians), or decide to be “the main bad guy in the castle”. The team says that it's “essentially an option for players who really want to see how the story develops if they don't follow the exact storylines we've laid out for them.”

New content… and more in the future

As well as new story content and loot, the update also brings the much-requested crossbow to the game. It was not a straightforward task to introduce, however. “We wanted to make sure the crossbows stood out as something unique in their own right, but we had to be careful not to detract from bow hunting in any way because of how important it was to the early progression of the game. So we spent a lot of time iterating and experimenting to get to the final result.” It makes sense. You wouldn't take a crossbow to hunt deer, but you would use it to lay siege to a castle.

Finally, as a Bellwright player, I had to ask the team about the horses. This has been a highly requested feature, and the team is well aware of everyone's feelings about it. “So horses are actually a hot topic, on Discord, on our Slack, because we've always wanted to have them. We still want to have them.” But they're not a simple thing to introduce, because the team has to think about NPCs as well. Unlike RPG games, “like The Witcher or any other game where you have a horse as a companion that appears out of nowhere,” Bellwright's horses need to be functional, and used by NPCs to aid immersion.

So while the Halmare Isles update doesn't include horses, they may be on the way at some point. “I can't say when we will have it, but we definitely want to have something.”

Maiden Journey Extensions for Bellwright are currently available.