Dev Log: Bridging the Stories of Lost Eidolons and Veil of the Witch
Howdy friends! I'm Brandon, Lead Narrative Designer at Ocean Drive, and a writer/designer on Veil of the Witch. The Communications team, in their infinite wisdom and mercy, have decided to give Jin Sang a reprieve from writing blog posts so he can focus on actually making the game, which means it's ya boy's turn to work a shift in the content mines.
In our last dev log, Jin Sang talked a bit about how the concept for VotW came about, from a studio and business perspective. In this post, I'd like to follow up on that, and talk a bit more about the game’s story — specifically, what relation it has to the previous title, and why we made some of the choices we did when setting out on this project.
Fair warning: if you haven't finished Lost Eidolons yet, this post will contain major spoilers for that game. So read it at your own peril, cuz I’m writing this on a Friday afternoon, feeling pretty spicy, and I’m sick of being coy.
Here we go!
SPOILER STUFF STARTS HERE, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
To talk about the premise of VotW's story, we should start with a quick recap of the first game, and how this one arises from it.
The first Lost Eidolons is, in my view, structurally a tragedy. It's a classic tale about a small-town guy with a good heart, who finds himself drawn into a war that sparks a struggle within his own heart.
In the game's opening hours, the set-up seems pretty straightforward: it's a righteous struggle for freedom between an underdog (the once-great House Feniche of Benerio) and a brutal imperialist regime (the Ludivictan Empire).
But when the bad guys go down unexpectedly early, the game's real conflict comes into focus: a chaotic civil war between former allies, with just a whiff of class struggle. And once ancient gods come into the mix, it becomes a battle for one man’s soul that decides the fate of a continent.
I think it's fair to say that there are a lot of things about Lost Eidolons that the team might do differently today, with the benefit of hindsight. But as a writer who came onto that project a few years into development, this is one of my favorite aspects of the original, and I think one of its most successful elements: it zigs when you expect it to zag, and fully embraces the moral complexities of low fantasy.
So when we decided to embark on Veil of the Witch, one of the first questions we had to settle was: how far after the first game is it set, how connected are the two, and what does the world of Artemesia look like now? Because really, so much of the setting’s future is decided by a single question: Does Eden go on to become a good ruler, or a bad one? Does he break the cycle of morally compromised leaders, and turn Artemesia into a better place? Or does he fall prey to that same cycle, his principles falling by the wayside as he pursues the power to uphold them, in an endless self-destructive spiral?
Tough question! Especially because the original game has multiple endings. It’s no wonder so many RPG series just sidestep the whole issue and time-jump 200 years between games.
I’m a pretty firm believer that every game in a franchise like this needs to be able to stand on its own two legs and tell a satisfying self-contained story, or all that great worldbuilding ceases to be an asset, and instead becomes a weighted blanket that smothers creativity. But you also want to build on previous entries, honoring the experience of existing players, or you run the risk of the world and franchise losing any kind of consistent identity.
This is a bull I expect we’ll have to wrestle for every new game in the series. But for this particular title, we decided to set the story 5 years out from the first: a span of time that lets us play in the same space (and share some characters), while granting enough distance to let us see how the world has changed as a result of Eden and the player's efforts.
Five years on, Artemesia is a land in the midst of healing and rebuilding. In the capital, Eden and his allies have set up a transitional government with two priorities: getting the continent back on its feet after a devastating war, and establishing safeguards against the kind of corruption that led to that war in the first place. The result is that they’re doing a pretty decent job, but they’re slow to respond to threats, because they’ve got their hands full with a million other things.
So that’s the backdrop we’re playing against.
From there, Veil of the Witch’s story kind of emerges naturally.
There’s a slowly growing antagonistic faction, on the edges of the world. Specifically, a neo-fascist Imperial cult secretly amassing on Anareios, a remote island off the coast, where dire developments can be mistaken for distant rumors. The bad guys are dabbling in dark magic and necromancy. People are going missing. The locals are starting to whisper about shambling figures in the misty countryside, and how dangerous it is to travel certain roads alone.
Our new protagonist (whose name and gender are customizable, but we call Ashe by default) is an unlucky outsider traveling to Anareios on a personal quest. Then their ship hits the rocks, and suddenly they’re stranded on a zombie-infested island where the only way out is through. They’re joined by fellow survivors, some of whom are new faces, and some of whom are returning characters from Lost Eidolons. (And for those who enjoyed the first game, we take some of these characters in wildly new directions that I think you’ll really, really enjoy.)
Most of the game’s plot is still shifting ice, but here’s the stuff I can tell you that’s not likely to change.
The hero isn’t quite so earnest this time around. Eden’s sort of a typical fantasy hero; Ashe is more of a cunning antihero, here to do a job, and doing it for their own reasons.
The Eidolons are, let us say, not so lost anymore. As in, you will meet one in the game’s first few hours.
While the setting is still generally low fantasy, we’re playing with the boundaries of that, and infusing a hefty dose of dark fantasy (one of my favorite genres). Lost Eidolons will probably never be the kind of world where heroes teleport between nations or ride dragons into battle. But it might be a world where a traveler willing to venture far enough off the map’s edge can find strange entities in shadowy places to cut fell pacts with. (If you’re a fan of Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, or Ursula Le Guin, I think you’ll feel right at home here.)
It’s a roguelite where you die and restart a lot, and those things aren’t just hand-waved as gameplay contrivances; they’re incorporated directly into the story.
Because of this, the narrative structure borrows from games like Hades, and incorporates a lot of looping elements. Much of the story is told through unlockable flashbacks, random events, and repeating encounters that iteratively offer new dialogue.
We’ve said in a few previous posts that this game won’t be as story-heavy as the first. But I’d like to clarify that point, for bookish dorks like me whose hackles go up when they hear stuff like that.
Veil of the Witch is NOT a story-free zone. It will have plenty of story. Our goal is just to tell that story with a lighter touch, more modern narrative design, and a core loop that’s a little more organically gameplay-driven. Instead of an hour-long battle followed by an hour of cutscenes, now it’s ten minutes of combat followed by a few minutes of talking.
Brisk. Exciting. Dark. Mysterious. Doing more with less.
These are the story and narrative design goals for Veil of the Witch.
At least, if it all works out as planned. But who knows? We’re still pretty early-days on this project, so it could still turn out disastrously! Game development is hard.
In this dev log, I’d like to discuss the story behind how Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch came to be. (Please note, this post will contain some spoilers for the first game.)
Fans of Lost Eidolons may recall a mission about halfway through the game. Eden and his friends are nearing the end of their fight against the Empire, and attack the capital city, Leroyaure. But when they arrive, they’re attacked by a strange undead knight, Gustave, under the command of the Prime Minister, Maurin – who later reveals to Eden that the Emperor is deathly ill, and secretly searching for a way to achieve immortality. But we don’t really come back to that in the first game, and there’s a reason why. Before we began development of the first game, we put together a pretty ambitious history of the entire continent where the story takes place. This included everything from ancient lore, to what’s happening around the time of the game, to what might happen in the future, with lots of little plot-hooks for other games to explore. One of those stories was about the Emperor’s true fate, and a secret research facility on an island off the coast.
While development on Lost Eidolons was going on, we actually had another project set in the same world. Internally, we called it Project UR: a crafting/survival game set on a zombie-infested island, which would pick up where some of these threads in Lost Eidolons left off. Project UR was ultimately canceled to focus our resources on the main game, but the concept for the setting stuck around, as did a lot of big questions about the world that we knew we wanted to explore in some way. Questions like: What happened to the Emperor? What’s going on with all the zombie stuff? And even more broadly, what exactly are the Eidolons, and how are they shaping the fate of this world?
Eventually, these ideas and questions formed into a concept for a new game, which became Veil of the Witch. It’s a dark fantasy story about a new customizable protagonist, Ashe, who journeys to Anareios and becomes caught up in a conspiracy surrounding the remnants of the empire, the Emperor’s search for immortality, and the secrets of the Eidolons (which we get into a bit more directly this time around).
Like the first game, Veil of the Witch is a strategy RPG, but with even more focus on combat and gameplay. Hades and Slay the Spire were among our inspirations as we outlined the project. Slay the Spire because a few of us played it to hear Clark Aboud’s music, and fell in love with the looping structure and deckbuilding elements. And Hades because we loved the addictive experience of a hack-and-slash roguelite whose story is designed to unfold over time.
Inspired by these games, the core concept of Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch solidified into a strategy RPG with extremely fast battles, streamlined skilltree-style progression, and various elements borrowed from the roguelite/roguelike genre. (I want to be careful throwing that word around too much, as people tend to have a lot of different ideas and expectations when it comes to that genre. But we can get into details about that another time.)
As we got deeper into planning the game, a lot of other ideas have crept in – some from things we wanted to include in Lost Eidolons, others from different projects we’ve had ideas for. It’s been a lot of fun, and we’re very excited about how the game is shaping up.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this peek behind the scenes! We’ll be back in couple of weeks to talk a little more about the story and the world.
Today, we bring version GM1.5.4.R29, to apply fixes and improvements.
Patch Schedule
3 PM PDT, October 11, 2023
6 PM EDT, October 11, 2023
12 AM CEST, October 12, 2023
7 AM KST, October 12, 2023
Please note that if you are playing at this time, your game will not be interrupted. You will be prompted to download the patch the next time you open Lost Eidolons.
Changes/Improvements
Added Japanese language support
Bug Fixes
Fixed the text cutoff issue where the character level numbers were not showing properly in the training list
Fixed localization/text bugs
Thank you for your continued support for Lost Eidolons. It is thanks to you that we get to celebrate console launch and first anniversary!
- ODS Team
One Year Anniversary Stream
Greetings Tacticians,
Come join us as we celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the release of Lost Eidolons! It’s been a long time coming but we’re so happy to have met many of you along the way.
Mama Kangaroo will be watching over her baby Pumba while she plays the game. Come join us as we nag and bicker at each other about the best way to manage Eden and his crew.
To celebrate with everyone, we will be having a small giveaway for our viewers! We will be giving away one LE game key, one soundtrack key, and one art book key, so we’ll have three winners overall! Please note that we’ll be choosing our winners from our Twitch channel chat, so make sure to join us there.
PDT: October 11th 2 PM EDT: October 11th 5 PM CEST: October 11th 11 PM ICT: October 12th 4 AM KST: October 12th 6 AM
It’s hard to believe that Lost Eidolons is about to celebrate a full year after launch!
The game has seen many changes within the past year. To list just a few: we released on console platforms (Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation5), got verified for the Steam Deck, added New Game + mode, made improvements to various parts of the gameplay including cutscenes and endings, and brought other various changes to the game. This was possible through everyone’s feedback and support, so we would like to share our sincere gratitude to our community.
To celebrate our launch anniversary, Lost Eidolons will go on a whooping 60% discount for a week–and this applies to our amazing OST and beautiful artbook as well! If you’ve been waiting for a time to snag any of them, now is your chance. If you already own them all, it can be a prime time to convert a friend of yours into a loyal SRPG fan. Just a thought.
If you enjoyed the game, make sure you check out and wishlist the spinoff, Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch, on Steam to be the first to hear the latest news on Artemesia.
PAX West is near and dear to our hearts because it’s where we announced Lost Eidolons’ release date, our studio’s second title Blackout Protocol. So it was only fitting that we unveil “Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch” at PAX West 2023.
This year, we were in the new Summit building with plenty of daylight showering down on us. We were grateful the Seattle weather was accommodating and held its raindrops until after we were done hauling in our boxes on move-in day.
Our Ocean Drive Studio booth was divided into three sections. 6 demo stations for Veil of the Witch, 6 stations for Blackout Protocol, and a dedicated media area. And when the PAX gates opened, all the stations kicked into high gear.
Dropkick Navvy, another new title we announced at PAX>
Jin Sang, our Creative Director, was also on hand to answer questions and gather feedback from brand new players, fans of Lost Eidolons, and the media.
It's been a while since our last major Lost Eidolons update, when we added New Game+ mode to the PC edition.
Since the game's release, we've spent a lot of time collecting feedback and having internal discussions about the game's future. As promised, we delivered LE on Xbox and Playstation this month, with the help of our porting partner, PID Games.
Now it's time to decide where the world of Artemesia goes next. There were a lot of paths available to us in making this decision. Should we do DLC? Big or small? Or should we just jump straight into Lost Eidolons 2?
In the end, we've decided to take a different path, and try something a bit unexpected.
Today I'm happy to share what we've been working on: an exciting new spin-off game, titled "LOST EIDOLONS: VEIL OF THE WITCH"!
We refer to the game as a "spin-off" (rather than a true sequel), as it shares a lot of Lost Eidolons' core identity, and even a few characters. But the gameplay and general presentation is a major departure. Now let's dive into some questions you may be curious about.
What kind of game is "Veil of the Witch"?
Veil of the Witch is a turn-based tactical RPG with rogue-lite elements. It takes place in the same world as Lost Eidolons, and is set shortly after the events of the first game. But it's an entirely standalone experience you don't need any prior knowledge to play.
Fans of the first game will find Veil of the Witch to be a tighter, more focused game, that offers more of what they love with less friction in between.
New players will find a rich world and characters, a fast and gritty combat system, and an addictive, looping structure that sets the game apart from the rest of the genre.
I'm confident the game will speak for itself.
What's changed since Lost Eidolons?
In one word: speed. Lost Eidolons was a linear, story-driven RPG that unfolds gradually. Veil of the Witch, on the other hand, is fast, gameplay-driven, and hits the ground running immediately. One of the most immediate changes is that we've done away with sprawling class trees that take 30 hours to get to the cool stuff.
In Veil of the Witch, things are much more stripped-down. Each character has a single class, with fixed weapons and armor, and a very specific playstyle. There's still progression and choices to be made (skills to unlock, gear to be upgraded, and so on) but generally it's all a lot tighter and more focused now.
We've also made a number of changes to the combat system itself, and the game's overall structure is radically different from Lost Eidolons. I'll save the details for another day, but for now I'll simply say that I'm a huge fan of games like Hades and Slay the Spire, and they've had a huge influence on Veil of the Witch.
The result of all this is a leaner, meaner game with more excitement, greater strategic depth, and the freedom to approach battles how you decide.
But this doesn't mean the story experience isn't important to us. Like much of the rest of the game, our approach to narrative this time around is: "Less is more". We've got a great setting, a tight cast of characters people will love, and a new approach to story presentation that (while sparse) we're hoping will be a lot more effective.
Oh, and we've taken the art direction for characters and UI in a completely new direction. I personally love how this game looks, and I can't wait to hear your thoughts on it soon.
Why make a spin-off instead of Lost Eidolons 2?
While it took a lot of internal discussion to reach this decision, in the end, our reasons are pretty simple. It won't surprise anyone to say that, while we're proud of Lost Eidolons, there are some elements that didn't quite come together as well as we would have hoped, and many of you felt the same. When we dove into player feedback for the game, two big points came up over and over again.
First, players said they liked Lost Eidolons' story and characters, but found the actual execution to be sometimes lacking, and often inconsistent.
Second, most players loved the combat system, but felt progression lacked meaningful choices, and encounter design could be rigid and unforgiving.
After weighing this feedback and discussing it internally, we decided to try something new that would let us build on the engine we've created already, but take a big swing in a new direction, with a storytelling approach that was lighter and simpler.
Also: I've just always wanted to make a game that brought rogue-lite stuff into the turn-based tactical genre! So we decided that before jumping into a sequel, we'd try a spin-off, and see what happens.
But I want to be very clear: this isn't some little pilot project or cash-grab pseudo-DLC. We're very serious about making Veil of the Witch an excellent RPG that stands entirely on its own two feet, and offers a ton of depth and replayability.
So when can I play it?
This time around, we're going to be pursuing an Early Access model, and do actual open game development with ongoing community involvement.
One of my biggest regrets about Lost Eidolons was that we didn't do public playtests until after much of the game's design had already been locked-in, and was difficult (or in some cases impossible) to change.
One of the main reasons we did that was because it was a linear, story-driven game, and we consistently got feedback that players didn't want to play an incomplete version of that kind of game. After all, no one wants to read a messy first draft of a novel that spoils the plot.
But as Veil of the Witch is a more gameplay-driven title, I feel a lot more confident sharing early builds, so we can gather and integrate community feedback. If everything goes well, I'd like to launch in Early Access sometime in 2024, but it's likely we'll run some beta tests before then.
Also, as I'm really hoping to release the game on Switch, our team has put a lot of effort into lowering the overall hardware requirements. By the time we hit full release, we're hoping to make the game available on all consoles. (No promises on simultaneous launch, though.)
I'm very excited to finally share our second Lost Eidolons project! We're planning to share more details in regular dev blogs down the line (starting with this one).
I hope you'll join our player community on Discord, where you can chat with us about the game. And don’t forget to wishlist Veil of the Witch on Steam!
See you soon, Jin Sang Kim Creative Director, Lost Eidolons
Last year’s PAX West was our studio’s first convention experience, and here we come again this year! We’ll be at booth #2124, Level 0 in the Summit building, so make sure you stop by if you’re in Seattle for PAX!
Jin Sang Kim, the Creative Director of Lost Eidolons, will be with us as always. While he will be available to answer any questions you have about what’s the latest and greatest in Artemesia, we’ve also heard that he’s got some surprises for all the Tacticians who enjoyed Lost Eidolons!
[You get to talk to this cool guy, who is full of awesome ideas!]
If you’re interested but won’t be making it to this year’s PAX West, make sure you join our community, like Discord or Twitter to get the latest updates from Ocean Drive Studio.
Today, we bring a minor patch, version GM1.5.3.R23, to apply the following fixes and improvements.
The patch will be live at:
4 PM PDT, April 25, 2023
7 PM EDT, April 25, 2023
1 AM CEST, April 26, 2023
8 AM KST, April 26, 2023
Please note that if you are playing at this time, your game will not be interrupted. You will be prompted to download the patch the next time you open Lost Eidolons.
Fixed the issue where, if the Tactician reaches/exceeds the max Leadership point cap, the notification would display incorrect values
Fixed the issue where incorrect location was noted in the text during a Ch. 18 cutscene
Fixed the issue where speech bubbles obstructed character models in a Ch. 3 cutscene
Fixed the issue where character models were overlapping during Appointment Ceremony
Fixed the issue where the Ballista’s attack range display would disappear if the Tactician’s unit moved or took an action
Fixed the issue where, despite the Tactician successfully completing the stealth objective in Ch. 18 battle, reaching a certain tile would also display the in-battle event dialogue for failing stealth
Fixed the issue where some characters did not have the proper class attire reflected in some cutscenes
Fixed the issue where the speech bubble did not show for Eden in a cutscene
Known Issue
Abyssal Whisper has text issues in Brazilian Portuguese localization; it will be fixed in the next patch
Thank you for your patience as we continue to fix issues and provide more improvements per your suggestions.
- The ODS Team
Wrapping Up PAX East 2023
Tacticians,
Time sure flies, doesn’t it? It was only a few short months ago when Lost Eidolons announced the official release date at PAX West 2022. Since then, we shipped the game into your hands, our PC players, had a major patch to introduce New Game+, and had numerous smaller patches to bring quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes. But we have not yet closed the books on Lost Eidolons as we want to tell Eden’s tale to the Xbox and PlayStation players as well. So we thought PAX East 2023 would be the perfect place to take the working Xbox version and show off how it looks right next to the finished PC and Steam Deck game.
As the main spotlight of our Ocean Drive Studio booth was cast on the upcoming beta of our second title Blackout Protocol, we really didn’t know what to expect in terms of turnout for Lost Eidolons. Will people come and play? Will there be anyone who recognizes Lost Eidolons? Is our TV too small to show off Xbox demo? (This one is a resounding yes)
Well, once again, PAX attendees showed us much love by not only visiting our booth, they stood in a long line to give us a go.
We were honored to have some of our favorite friends stop by, like Brittany Cox (voice of Marchelle), Chel0ra, and Platinum Queen (whom we met at PAX West)!
We also met Kickstarter backers who dropped in to ask questions about Xbox release date (the answer? Soon. I know…I know…) and even had a peer from another booth come by just to tell us how much he loved Lost Eidolons.
At the end of PAX East, we were physically exhausted but mentally re-energized thanks to meeting old and new friends that love Lost Eidolons as much as we do. We are motivated more than ever to introduce the game to new console friends we haven’t met yet for an even bigger reunion at future cons. We will make it happen within the year of 2023!
Follow our social channels to keep up with us until we see you again in person.
