Largest ‘Blade & Sorcery: Nomad’ Update Ever Now Live on Meta Quest, Exclusive Interview with Developer
Blade & Sorcery: Nomad from Warpfrog is one of the biggest and most immersive games available on the Meta Quest platform. With incredibly detailed physics-based combat, tons of enemies to battle, and a plethora of weapons to choose from, melee-based medieval combat doesn’t get a whole lot better than this. And now today, the game is finally in its final form with the biggest update yet as it leaves early access status.
The new Crystal Hunt game mode is like a whole second game being added on top of the existing experience complete with an all-new progression-focused story mode that has skill trees, actual lore, and new areas to explore and enemies to fight.
To learn more about what’s in store for players with this massive update to Blade & Sorcery: Nomad, as well as what it was like working on the game for so many years, we were lucky enough to score an exclusive interview with the man behind the magic, Kospy, as well as longtime PR manager and community champion at Warpfrog, The Baron.
If you missed our previous interview with The Baron, you can read it here. Or if you’d rather watch and listen to the full, unedited interview with Kospy and The Baron, you can see that filmed inside Meta Horizon Worlds below:
KospY: I originally worked on Blade & Sorcery alone. I was like a solo dev. I didn’t come from the video game industry. Seven years ago, I was working in the IT field, but after more than 10 years of a corporate job, I just quit and decided to move on. I was not coming from nothing, though, as I’ve been a modder since my childhood. I did some mods on Fallout, Skyrim. Working on video games has always been a passion. So, I was very excited to work in VR at some point. I wanted to realize a childhood dream in creating a virtual world where we can do whatever we want. That’s where Blade & Sorcery came from.
I’m working on that for maybe two years by myself. Eventually, lots of people showed interest in the game. That’s where things begin with The Baron. I think it’s interesting to have then two actors because, at this moment, he was doing the pre-beta of Blade & Sorcery. We started to have a lot of YouTubers interested in the game. Baron came to me and started to help me on a few things, managing the community and everything and it was really great for me because social media is not really my thing. It was really great to have him come and help me with that.
The Baron: Those were crazy times, I remember it so well. It was nuts. I was floating around as a YouTuber at the time. I was huge into VR, but I was on a quest for something. I didn’t know what it was. My thing was like anti-hyperbole, or anti sensationalism and looking for those little indie gems and I remember, man, when I met you, it was on Reddit and it was that thread, someone bemoaning melee games in VR—the Wiggle Sword they called it, that wiggle sword effect. I remember you in that thread and being like, ‘I have a little game’ and you were saying to the guy, ‘Do you want a key to try this game?’ And I slid in there. I remember trying it and the first thing I remember seeing if any fans of the game remembered, the old days looking straight inside mirror and seeing my hands, seeing my full body and moving a sword. I was obsessed with it. I was really obsessed and it was like a real kind of eureka moment. I remember running back to you and shooting you a DM, ‘Dude! You have something here!’
It wasn’t even about YouTube for me. I was just obsessed with it, like as a fan of the game. I just thought it was brilliant and I remember bugging you for months being like, ‘Yeah, let’s put this out there. People are going to love this. People are going to want to see this and talk about it’ and KospY being like, ‘It’s not ready yet.’ He was worried about what people might suggest the game is because it wasn’t ready yet and he didn’t want to overhype it or misrepresent. It was like the perfect stars aligning. I thought, let me cover this, and I’ll do it like no other coverage of it.
You show the problems of the game. But you say, we’re working on it. Like this is the game. We’re not going to BS anyone about it and that was -- oh man, that was exactly I think what the community were wanting. That really resonated with the community. That was the history of it because it’s like the studio was born. It was a grassroots kind of studio creation and we always kind of kept those ideals of anti-hyperbole and stuff like that.
K: It was really a different kind of game. I wanted to hide because I’m not sure that the direction I was going is going to please everyone, but it seems it was pretty good. We gave to the community what they wanted. We tried to add monsters, more features, and wanted to add more magic in that so, too, because that feels it was really medieval, more medieval and more melee combat. I added more magic and to make the game a bit more fantasy. Yeah, actually, at first it was in PC VR. Yeah, it was like no even if it was already big for us, a smaller community. We knew that at some point it was going to be on Quest, but the Quest is going to be under-powered.
The idea was to keep the PC version separate, obviously with graphics a bit different -- so different graphic with suites for the Quest 2. That’s what we did and we have to compromise a bit on a few things like the physics, but I will say in the hand, it worked pretty well and I think we are pretty happy with the results because, to be honest, the Quest was daunting at first because we were not expecting the game to run at all. The issue was not even the physics, it was more like the graphical part of Blade & Sorcery.
We tried to optimize even more the graphic side, too. We optimized a bit of physics, obviously. I think both platform benefits from that because it got some performance improvement on PC VR too. At the time, it was Quest 2 and the Quest 1, but we had to drop the Quest 1 because it was too complicated to continue supporting and so was not enough memory for the game to work. I did a lot of this myself and, yeah, I think I don’t see much of this today at this time when they were doing the release of the Quest. It was crazy.
TB: This update, it scared me, man. It scared me when we were doing it. I was scared talking to the guys about it and many nights I was tossed and turned and thinking that this should have been a different game, not an update because we spent so much time. This was a huge update. It was a huge deal and not just in sheer amount of content that we added, but also was like an entirely new game dropped on the old game. The reason we did this was because this was the last update of the development cycle, so five years PC VR for us and this was the final big love letter update.
The number one thing people always asked for was a progression mode, some kind of story element to the game where you could start and finish the experience. We always kind of dragged our feet because it’s such a huge ask. This was a simulation sandbox in a trench coat disguised as an action game. So, we had all these mechanics and we’re just, ‘How do you make it work?’ Now, the Crystal Hunt update, we have progression mode which the game has a start, has a finish, and has a definitive ending. We’ve got deep lore, an actually crazy amount of deep lore that if you want, you could just play the game as a surface level action game, but if you really, really want to go into it, you can get right into like we have this fake language we made for the game for example. You could crack that language with a cipher and even get into the depth of like reading inscriptions on pillars and stuff.
TB: I am not fluent. No, and in fact, I suck at ciphers and things like that, too. So, we actually included an option for people like me who are challenged in this way and just the way you can like automatically translate it if you just want to play the game at that kind of level.
K: Yeah, but we have some people that are fluent in the new language. I the one who created the language is, of course. He deciphered it without help. He worked so much on that that I think he’s pretty good now.
TB: In terms of new content, we have 78 skills just like magic spells and stuff, and nothing is a number crunch. They’re all stuff you can do. Plus, there are 76 weapons. That’s not including arrows, quivers, etc.—these are actual weapons. There are 90 individual armor pieces that comprised 10 full armor sets. And then, we have an entirely new dungeon biome coming, our semi-procedurally generated dungeon. We have a new golden boss that went down really well with PC community. This is a big massive enemy with unique behaviors. You can even climb all over them. And then, we have reworks to all the sandbox maps and all new kinds of graphic tweaks and stuff. It was like maybe three or four of our other updates in one update.
K: Starting with Update 7, it was maybe like 10 people on the team. After that, it was even more. So, each update was more and more on the content. I think the last one is what is the biggest one up until now—the thing is the game was really as you said it was just a sandbox. So, we have to work in reverse to create this new mode inside of an existing game. It was really a strange way of development I think because it was not the pre-production phase and stuff like that. It was more like making the train while it was running, but it was really interesting.
To me it was huge and it was like another game on top of the existing game. But I think it turned out pretty well and we are always worried and I’m always worried that maybe we could have done much more. But in reality, when we took over the five years of insane work, I think we did pretty good. But you know you always never be happy with what you do. You always want to improve and do better. But yeah, it was crazy time. I think it was worth it, yeah.
TB: We had to do it, though, didn’t we, KospY? It was like we had to go out this way like the -- because we have some players following us for five years. This is like a storyline for some people following the studio. It was like we were going to do one last update, one last major update I should say, because we’re still updating the game but in terms of major content. One last major content update, let’s do it big. And now, like I’m high for Nomad players because, I mean, Nomad players are playing the game for years. They think they know what Blade & Sorcery is for years and years and players enjoy that game. For those guys it’s like you have no idea, like this juicy content is coming your way and I know they’re excited. From my inbox, it’s flooded every day with Nomad players. “Any news? Any news?” It’s like, I promise you when there’s news, I’ll post, I promise.
TB: Dude, that’s the beauty part. I’m really satisfied that we are as close to one-to-one feature parity as possible. Right now I believe we’re actually at one-to-one. We’re working on some dungeon rooms that have optimization problems on Quest 2, so that’s always a concern, but as of this moment we are extremely on track I think.
K: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think the biggest thing is the addition of Citadel. Citadel was a map that was on PC VR and didn’t work on the Quest. But the art team did a really good job on optimization. We also learned a lot about how to optimize on the Quest, so we managed to make it work on the Quest 2 and Quest 3.
We maybe have one or two rooms still that still need to be optimized for Quest. But we have all the weapons, all the skills, everything is the same. Other than a few rooms in the dungeons that may not appear because you need to optimize them, I think it’s pretty much a one-to-one conversion. And I think it’s not going to change a lot of things from the player, except obviously the graphics. But it’s a tradeoff if you want to have the liberty to play as you want, especially if you want to play standalone without PC VR.
TB: About Citadel, that was that classic map that we never had on Nomad and players used to always ask, do you think it could come to Nomad? We were always saying, no, because we weren’t sure. We just couldn’t optimize it. And now we have it, I think that’s a classic example of Warpfrog at work there, cooking in secret. We didn’t reveal this, because we wanted it to be a surprise, because we wanted to make sure it worked.
TB: Kospy and I are gamers from the 90s and 2000s, early 2000s, like we were PC gamers in early 2000s. And I think we look back I’m sure with rose-tinted glasses. However, with those rose-tinted glasses it felt different back then. It felt different being a gamer in the early 2000s. The whole industry was different. And I just think it was just the way marketing done was different, and we went backwards to that marketing style, game design style, like studio philosophy style and stuff like that. And that has really resonated with people.
K: I think VR is a bit like the beginning of a new gaming era. I think we really want to surf on that because it’s really worthy. I really feel like VR is uniting us. I think the best practices are still not something we really know in VR. I still think VR is in its infancy and we can do much better than that right now.
TB: It’s the Wild West right now and there’s no rules. I think you’re completely right about the nostalgia factor, because it’s like, it reminds me of being young and get my first PC and playing PC games back then. It’s like you just -- you felt like a hacker or something like that.
When VR came along, it was this brand new technology, there’s no big players, there’s no big studios dominating this industry. So it’s just all these little indie devs just carving little spheres of influence, and no one knew the rules, no one knew the protocols. We get to decide the rules and there’s no big studios. We can be that studio, and it’s real exciting because of that.
TB: You know what, as well as that, like another one of the lessons we kind of carried was baking in game design. I always drive our game designer nuts, because I’m always wrecking his head. But one thing we carried was games of old and they didn’t like patronize you. They were hard sometimes like to get into, because it didn’t hold your hand at every step. There wasn’t a quest arrow and a million pop-ups in the UI and stuff like that.
K: Exactly, yeah. I’m more pushing the game, like it’s a simulation. With VR you can be a medieval fighter or the fantasy mage simulator. So I think exactly what I want to do is creating a simulation more than game.
I mean obviously we are going to have the game in that because we still want to have the same fun. Focusing only on simulation is going to be a bit boring. But the idea is more like simulate like you are in the movie and stuff like that. You are a fighter, you are going to wreak havoc with your sword or you are going to wreak havoc with your spear and stuff like that. So it’s really an empowerment of the player. and I think it’s really that about that. If I poke something, it should fall over in the room. It’s like in reality if I touch the wall, my hand is not going to go through the wall or something like that.
TB: The biggest secret of Blade & Sorcery is that it’s not primarily an action game, it’s primarily a simulation game. Like that throws people off all the time. It’s a simulator pretending to be an action game. I always think of it like it’s a ‘Do-It-Yourself’ role playing game. Like, you have all these tools to be the guy, but you do whatever way you want to do. We’re not telling you how to play the game. We don’t have like a kind of way in our minds how you’re going to play that game. And I think that really throws people off sometimes.
K: I understand now why game designers don’t go with that type of system because it’s also a nightmare. Designers like to have some kind of progression system or common ground that is really involved with number crunching. You have, I don’t know, 20% more damage on your weapon for progression, that kind of stuff. But we don’t have anything like that in Blade & Sorcery. And that’s a difficulty, because how do we do a progression system with that? And I think the game designer really banged his head on that.
TB: I always hear this from creators especially, they’re always saying things like, I wish I could jump on the boat and sail into the horizon and just see what’s over there, see like other things over there and like what adventure is there. That’s exactly the point. We want to make it feel like you’re in this world, that you really could jump on the boat and sail and there will be some other islands out there and you want it, you really want it, you know? Obviously we don’t have anything like that in the game, but that’s the sensation you want to create.
K: I like to call that a physical presence in VR game. So you know that when you put your hand on stuff, you’re going to touch things, you are going to have an impact on the physical world by moving stuff around. There is really a lot of emergent gameplay. Everyone has a different approach to combat. It’s not going to be driven by the game, it’s driven by the player, and I think it’s something that is really important.
TB: You never really know where the edge of the game is at. You can wonder if you can do something and then you try it and to your great surprise it works. And you never really know where the edge of this video game exists. And that’s the beauty of it. That’s the beauty of simulation and that’s the beauty of Blade & Sorcery in particular.
K: When I first did Blade & Sorcery, it was a little combat simulator game in the arena and I didn’t expect to have so many people jumping on the project. So the frameworks that we call Thunderbird here internally was not really made for basic teamwork. So we are losing a lot of time on the iteration right now because we put up a lot of different system on top of each other. We have to get rid of a bit of spaghetti code and scale that. We have to basically rework from scratch on something new for a new engine. We started to work on a new framework that’s going to be much faster with a new game. And the idea this time is to have a framework that is made for the team, so it will be the first time that we now are working from A to Z on the game with a full team.
I think it’s really important for us because it’s a key moment, where we can maybe be a bit more ambitious about the game. I can’t say too much right now because it’s still too soon. But I think a lot of players will like it.
TB: One thing I just want to say before we go is, I know a lot of people wish we could develop Blade & Sorcery forever. And it’s like, I get that. I have that nostalgia too about the game, but this isn’t the end of Warpfrog; this is just the beginning of Warpfrog. This is a grassroots studio that was built by the community. We’re built now. I mean you had Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and then finally Skyrim, you know what I mean? Like you had this progression of games and it’s going to be true for Warpfrog too. We’re going to go on to bigger and better things with each game.
Blade & Sorcery: Nomad is now fully launched and available in its completed 1.0 edition on Meta Quest. You can check out the game for yourself right now on the Meta Horizon store and dive into battle!
