The Bellwright team talks about expanding Massive Survival with new content

Bellwright is a massive open world survival game that combines Rimworld city management with Mount & Blade combat. The game recently received an enormous expansion to the base game, the Maiden Voyage DLC, which transforms the already endless gameplay into a whole new way to play with branching quest lines and new replayable content. I spoke to the team at Donkey Crew via email about how they brought the Halmare Islands to life.

This new area plays more like an exploration or raid map compared to the original Karvenia map. “Halmare Isles, which is a new map and additional content for Bellwright, is not small because you can actually play it,” the team tells me. Halmare's goal has always been to create a space where players can get away from city management and the task of caring for your citizens, with a new area to “enjoy stories and interesting new loot rewards.”

Bellwright's Maiden Voyage update set sail for the Halmare Islands

The diverse and engaging survival game has a flashy new debut.

Unreal Engine 5.6 means that the game has received a performance boost

One concern I had with Bellwright in the past was performance. Nothing too flashy, but the sheer scale of the game can sometimes cause problems when you have very large cities full of citizens. I was curious if the new map would cause problems for players with existing saves full of moving figures, but the team assured me that they made changes to improve performance. “Our main map, Karvenia, is quite heavy for players, although we updated to the newer version of Unreal Engine 5.6, which gave us a boost in performance.”

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

More Lore, more ways to experience Bellwright

More content means more lore. The tradition of Bellwright goes beyond many survival games, especially games of this scale. The story follows you, the main character, who is a simple peasant falsely accused of murdering a prince. You lead a rebellion in Karvenia, overthrow the crown, and eventually build such a reputation that you basically rule the region. Any new content in Halmare Isles had to “fit into the main gameplay loop and progression” and was a task for the narrative team.

“They start by looking at the lore of each location, deciding which characters are needed, and making sure everything in the world feels natural. From there, they outline the story, define key characters, and shape the lore to fit the mood of each region. It's a constant process of brainstorming, gathering ideas, and doing research. For example, the Halmare Islands are inspired by Mediterranean myths and capture very different types of culture and Karvenia culture. quests, dialogues and story structure,” the team explains.

The Halmare Islands present three different ways to play the endgame: there are two separate factions you can ally with (Halmayans or Cassians), or choose to be the “main bad guy in the castle”. The team says they “basically wanted to have this option for players who really want to see how the story unfolds if they're not following exactly the stories we've laid out for them.”

New content… and more to come

In addition to new narrative content and loot, the update also brings the much-wanted crossbow to the game. However, presenting it was not an easy task. “We wanted to make the crossbows stand out as their own unique thing, but we had to be careful not to degrade bowhunting in any way, as it's critical to early game development. So we spent quite a bit of time iterating and experimenting to get to the final result.” That makes sense. You wouldn't take a crossbow to hunt deer, but use it to besiege a castle.

Finally, as a Bellwright player, I had to ask the team about the horses. This feature has been highly requested and the team is well aware of how everyone feels 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 introducing them is not easy, because the team also has to think about NPCs. Unlike RPGs, “like The Witcher or some other game where you have a horse as a companion that appears out of nowhere”, the horses in Bellwright must be functional and the NPCs must use them for 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'll have them, but we definitely want to have some.”

The Maiden Voyage expansion for Bellwright is currently available.