Winterfall is a sandbox RPG influenced, gameplay-wise, by experiences as diverse as Mount and Blade, Mass Effect, DayZ, The Sims, the Elder Scrolls games and, of course, the latter Ultima games (7, 8 and Online), set in a fictional late antiquity/early dark ages setting. Contrary to most RPGs where the player is in control of a single hero character from beginning to end, the focus of Winterfall is on a House, or Household, which is grown and developed through deeds performed by the player's successive characters.
Traveling through vast, open lands being a core part of the gameplay in Winterfall, it is of particular importance for us to nail a unique visual identity offering expansive environments with great depth of view, considerable detail and high feature density. We want to recreate the feeling of being immersed in actual wilderness, impossible to ever fully explore, while relying on soft, eye-pleasing colors and finishes for the landscape to always feel like more than merely a video game environment and always retain that illustrative quality somewhere between western graphic novel and anime.