Pathfinder Gets A New CRPG...Sort Of

moondrift memory.jpeg


Pathfinder is getting a new computer roleplaying game. Streetlight Studios has announced Moondrift Memory: Prologue, a new video game built using the Pathfinder 2E rules set. The game is a Unity game built with a new Starstone game engine that includes a robust rules builder. According to a Kickstarter preview page, Moondrift Memory is a top-down isometric CRPG that will take players into the valley region of Moondrift. From our cursory glance, Moondrift doesn't appear to be tied to Golarion in any way.

From the looks of things, Streetlight Studios is brand new and the use of "Pathfinder Compatible" in its marketing imagery suggests that it's not actually licensed by Paizo, but relies on the ORC license to use the PF2E ruleset. There's also a Reddit post that claims the studio is tied to an ex-moderator of the site, with a less-than-savory reputation.

You can check out the description of the game below:

Moondrift Memory is a top down isometric CRPG that uses the Pathfinder Second Edition ruleset. In this Prologue chapter, players will take their party of up to four characters, including their own character they create, to complete a quest that they have accepted from Lilywall, a start-up Adventurer's Guild, that finally got their first big break.

The valley region of Moondrift lies at the foot of a great mountain, where it lies covered in snow and constant night, known as the Parasol Days, that the latitude brings. At a site where a dragon has been slain, butchers, leatherworkers, and a myriad of other artisans work tirelessly to fairly distribute the valuable parts of the dragon's body. You and your party have been assigned to help guard the site; however while contingent members are working on the dragon, caravan guards discover the ruins of what was once a dragon's lair. Your party quests into the lair in hopes of salvaging essential resources and perhaps even find rare treasure within. But what dangers lurk in these ruins?
 
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Christian Hoffer
Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer is a veteran tabletop journalist and Forever DM. His non-tabletop hobbies include Pokemon, Ohio sports, and building miniatures.
Dire Bare said:
But . . . I'm still not buying into the idea that Pathfinder is any more or less limiting or restrictive than D&D 5E for CRPG adaptations. Both are good tabletop games, both have already had good CRPG adaptations, both will likely get future CRPGs, both I imagine can be tricky to faithfully adapt the rules to a computer game. But not more or less so than each other, or any other TTRPG. IMO, of course.
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I don't want to sidetrack this thread too much, but any ttrpg? Really? Every TTRPG system is equally difficult to implement in a computer?

Games like Fate and Apocalypse World require a lot of improvisation and on-the-fly decision making by the GM, and that's not really feasible in a computer. In P2E, you have a list of actions you're allowed to take on your turn. That's pretty easy to model in a computer. In PbtA games, you describe what your character does narrative first, and the GM decides if any dice need to be rolled. That's not too hard for a person to do, but it's really hard to model in a compute.

If you think DND 5E is easy to build computer games around, fair enough. I (and the head of the company that actually built a computer game around it) would look at the move towards "rulings not rules" as being less compatible with crpgs. But the idea that every system in the world is equally appropriate to become a crpg is quite a stretch.
 

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Ultimately a video game is going to have to define and codify all possible actions or systems. With 5E, that means creating a lot of pre-fab DM rulings, so the game devs have to be RPG designers on top of being CRPG developers. In practice this means they would probably just cut most non-defined things out.

With PF2E the gaps are mostly filled, so they mostly just need to decide how much of it they want to port into the game, and they won't need to do extra work on top of it.

If you want something as undetermined as 5E without a human you need to use AI, in which case good luck.
 

stonehead said:
Your comment got me curious so I looked it up, and what do you know, it's actually something the head of Larian Studios said
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Dire Bare said:
Thanks for digging up the quote, I'll have to give that to you. It wasn't part of the narrative when Larian first dropped the news they weren't doing more D&D games, but clearly it's come up in later interviews.
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At this point I'm wondering if Mr. Vincke is 'inventing' a new story/reason for every interview. Or if he's trying to roll back those burned bridges... Or the reason why they didn't do BG4 is due to a multitude of reasons and depending on when you ask, what's the most important reason might change... Yeah, I know... Humans! Tsk, tsk! ;)
 

stonehead said:
I don't want to sidetrack this thread too much, but any ttrpg? Really? Every TTRPG system is equally difficult to implement in a computer?

Games like Fate and Apocalypse World require a lot of improvisation and on-the-fly decision making by the GM, and that's not really feasible in a computer. In P2E, you have a list of actions you're allowed to take on your turn. That's pretty easy to model in a computer. In PbtA games, you describe what your character does narrative first, and the GM decides if any dice need to be rolled. That's not too hard for a person to do, but it's really hard to model in a compute.

If you think DND 5E is easy to build computer games around, fair enough. I (and the head of the company that actually built a computer game around it) would look at the move towards "rulings not rules" as being less compatible with crpgs. But the idea that every system in the world is equally appropriate to become a crpg is quite a stretch.
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I actually wouldn't be shocked if it's easier to do PBTA, unless existing "writing AI" development rams headfirst into a wall, they can already generate narrative flow and dialog based on a prompt, or switching between datasets to emulate different characters. The reason crunchy games are harder is because they have more points of contact with the rules, right now that means a lot of hard coding interactions, and then a computer would have to be able to parse multiple variables.

The fewer points of contact there are with rules, or parsing the outcomes of complex math, the closer you are to the default goal of those systems and their existing space for improvement in terms of generating internally consistent outputs.
 

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