Trench Crusade is only getting bigger.Mordheimcreator Tuomas Pirinen and Diablo artist Mike Franchina’s niche creation has snowballed into a violent religious sensation. After being quietly passed around hobby circles in hushed whispers for months, the Kickstarter raised over $3 million and players across the world are printing and assembling their forces, intent on either assaulting or defending the gates of Hell.
Pirinen recently hinted thatTrench Crusade will get plastic kitsbefore too long, bringing the tabletop game even closer to the ravenous masses. It’s not going to rivalWarhammerany time soon, but the game has already made its mark on the industry and is here to stay. It’s only natural, then, that fans are getting carried away.
Trench Crusade: The Video Game
Fans have discussed the notion of aTrench Crusadevideo game ever since the miniatures range was announced, but the idea grows stronger with every step it takes towards the mainstream.
Recently, fans took tosocial mediato discuss exactly what kind of a game they’d like this – thus far, entirely hypothetical – Trench Crusade adaptation to be. A few in particular caught my eye, but you’ll have to read on to find my idea, which is better than any of theirs.
There are a lot of shouts for an XCOM-like tactical turn-based game, as well as the inevitable Dawn of War comparisons. For adapting a tabletop game, these are no-brainers, easy ways to translate the mechanics of dice rolling to the virtual medium.
Others look to other tabletop adaptations like Battletech. “Turn based like how they did the battletech video game [sic],” writes one player. “Not a 1 to 1 recreation but very close and mostly designed to shorten or eliminate the tedious stuff.”
The Battletech video game is okay, but I think we could look further outside the box.
“[An] RTS would go hard but also a cover shooter like Gear of War or a Battlefield 1 style multiplayer shooter would also be a good fit,” writes another player. I’m inclined to agree with them. If I were to play a video game adaptation of Trench Crusade, I’d want it to be exactly that – an adaptation; an extension. Utilise the lore, world-building, and gritty symbolism of accursed religious warfare, but send us in from a first-person perspective. Let us live through the atrocities of war, let us come face to face with a Lion of Jabir, let us understand the horrors that are left to the imagination when moving toy soldiers across a board.
A Better Idea For A Trench Crusade Video Game
However, may I pitch to you a better plan for a Trench Crusade video game? Just make itConscriptDLC. Last year’s World War 1 pixel art survival horror game was vastly overlooked despite some marketing buzz ahead of release. It showcased the mundane terror of early 20th-century warfare in a beautiful, melancholic, terrifying manner. It would be the perfect fit for Trench Crusade.
On my first Conscript run, I died in some incredibly banal way. I think I was bitten by a rat or suffocated in an underground shelter or something. I just remember thinking, “Oh, it’sthatsort of game.” I went on to spend hours fighting my way through the trenches with pistol and shovel, only pausing to write home and save my progress.
A brutal slog, Conscript is effectively punishing and sufficiently grim. All it needs is some demons from the depths of the Earth and it’s Trench Crusade already. That’s why I proffer the idea of Conscript DLC or, more likely, hiring the small team at Catchweight Studio to make a similar-but-original game in the Trench Crusade setting. It’s a match made in Hell.
There’s only one idea from social media that comes close to this:an Owlcat CRPG. After cutting its teeth on the Warhammer IP and sticking to spacefaring with the forthcoming Expanse game, it’s high time Owlcat veered away from science-fiction. What weighty choices await us in the trenches of New Antioch? And, more importantly, will we be able to romance the War Wolf?
