Entropy RPG brings brutal permadeath from 1 tabletop classic
“F—, Jeff’s dead.” That is the feeling James Wragg wanted to bottle in Entropy, a turn-based RPG from studio Lovely Hellplace that is now in early access on Steam. In an interview published by PC Gamer on Thursday, Oct. 1, the lead developer explained how the Entropy RPG fits permanent death into a party-based game.
His answer: give players an endless supply of hired mercenaries, so any one of them can be lost for good.
Why does the Entropy RPG need permadeath?
Wragg said permadeath was the starting point for the game’s random mercenary system. He loves the older “Final Fantasy” games, he told PC Gamer, but playing them as an adult who knows how the systems work, “you’re breezing through the game so easily.”
“I wanted to really ramp up the challenge and the stakes,” he said.
PC Gamer described the Entropy RPG as a nod to “Final Fantasy X” and “Lost Odyssey,” with Wragg also naming the original “Fallout” and Games Workshop’s tabletop game “Mordheim” as major influences.
What does a tabletop game have to do with it?
In “Mordheim,” players build a warband of miniatures, name them, paint them and fill out their profiles. Then a single bad roll can take one out permanently. Wragg described exactly that moment of losing a fighter to “a mace in the face,” which ends in the line quoted at the top of this story.
A standard JRPG party of fixed heroes cannot work that way, he said, and he “couldn’t really think of a fun way to do it like that.” So Lovely Hellplace built randomly generated recruits who “seem like they have their own little personalities.”
“We needed a potentially infinite resource of party members so that we could then kill them, so that you could get attached to them, and then we could kill them,” Wragg said.
How often do mercenaries die?
Less often than that quote suggests. Like “Mordheim,” the Entropy RPG usually punishes a knocked-out fighter with a lost limb or another lasting injury rather than death, according to Wragg. “The chance of them actually dying isn’t that high,” he said.
Wragg also told PC Gamer that careful players can finish the game without losing anyone. The risk never fully goes away, though, and he said that “creates a really palpable sense of intensity to the game.”
PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield compared the setup to this year’s “Star Wars Zero Company,” which also mixes written squadmates with procedurally generated soldiers who can die.
How can you play Entropy now?
The early access version of the Entropy RPG costs $12 on Steam, and a free demo is available, PC Gamer reported. The game also has authored companions alongside its mercenaries.
For more squad games with expendable troops, see our look at mercenary tactics game Warhounds, how permadeath came to “Resident Evil” and more in our gaming genres coverage.