The team behind upcoming indie RPG No Truce With the Furies believes that the disconnection between story and combat in many RPGs needs to be rectified for the genre to move forward.

Speaking to OnlySP recently, the writers behind the title said that the studio has been looking at battle sequences in a new light, leading to the creation of a “story combat” system. Rather than engaging in fisticuffs, set piece moments take place within the dialogue system, utilising the chance, equipment, and health mechanics normally found in physical battles.

The writers went on to suggest that this approach “may be one way forward for games—if we want to address the disconnect between combat and story, where, for example, characters can only die in cut scenes.” The separate mechanics for combat and story is “a hurdle” that needs to be overcome if RPGs and other games are to ever achieve “psychological realism and a deeper connection to the characters,” the team says.

As such, No Truce With the Furies will omit a battle grid of any kind, with story and combat occurring on the same mechanical level. Traditional combat is present, and the team is “putting a huge amount of care into the moments where you do get to shoot people,” but it will not be the only means of interaction with the world and NPCs. “Dancing and using conceptual thought, lying, having imaginary conversations with dead people, inventing the future of dance music,” are all alternative methods of engaging with the world of Elysium in which the game takes place, and are important to the story and world-state as physical conflict.

More details about No Truce With the Furies, and further comments from the developers are available in OnlySP’s most recent Indie Highlight Reel.

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