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

Bellwright is a massive open world survival game that combines the city management of Rimworld with the battle against Mount & Blade. The game recently received a huge expansion to the base game, the Maiden Voyage DLC, which transforms what is already an endless gameplay experience into a whole new way to play, with branching faction missions and new replayable content. I chatted with the team at Donkey Crew via email about how they went about bringing 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 replay it,” the team tells me. The goal in mind with Halmare has always been to create a space where players can get away from city management and the task of providing for your citizens, with a new area to “enjoy story beats and interesting new loot rewards.”

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Bellwright's Maiden Voyage Update sets sail for the Halmare Isles

A versatile and engaging survival game makes a new debut.

Unreal Engine 5.6 means the game has received a performance boost

One of the concerns I've had with Bellwright in the past has been performance. Nothing too rough, but the 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 have 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 performance boost.”

The new map is completely separate from the original map, which has allowed the development team to provide players with fun new tools to expand on Bellwright. “But making the maps separate is also a good 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 only good for performance, but it's also good for future development of our game.”

More Lore, more ways to experience Bellwright

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

“They start by looking at each location's histories, deciding what characters are needed and making sure everything feels natural in the world. From there, they outline the story, define key characters, and shape it to match the mood of each region. It's an ongoing process of brainstorming, gathering ideas, and doing research. For example, the Halmare Islands culture is inspired by the Mediterranean. capture a completely different feel than Karvenia, with new types of quests, dialogue, and story structure,” the team explains.

The Halmare Isles presents three different ways to play the end game: there are two separate factions you can align with (Halmayans or Cassians), or decide to be “the main evil guy in the castle”. The team says it “basically wanted this option for players who really want to see how the story will unfold if they don't follow the exact storylines we prepared for them.”

New content… And more in the future

In addition to new narrative content and loot, the update also brings the much-requested crossbow to the game. However, it was no easy task to introduce. “We wanted to make sure the crossbow stood out as its own unique thing, but we had to be careful not to detract from the bow hunting in any way, because of how critical it is to early game development. So we spent quite a bit of time iterating and experimenting to get to the final result.” This makes sense. You wouldn't take a crossbow hunting deer, but you would use it to besiege a castle.

Finally, as a player in Bellwright, I had to ask the team about 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 them. We still want them.” But they're not a simple thing to introduce, as the team also has to think about NPCs. Unlike RPGs, “like The Witcher or any other game where you just have a horse as a companion that appears out of nowhere,” the horses in Bellwright must be functional and used by NPCs to facilitate immersion.

So while the Halmare Isles update doesn't include horses, they could be on the way at some point. “I can't say when we'll have them, but we definitely want some.”

The Maiden Voyage expansion for Bellwright is currently available.