Expeditions: Viking

**Expeditions: Viking** is the second game in the Expeditions series, which was released in 2017. In this game, the player controls a young chieftain from the Denmark village Skjern in 789 A.D. at the start of the Viking Age, which was a period in which Vikings started exploring, plundering and trading in Europe and beyond, making their name as reputated explorers and pirates from Scandinavia.

The game starts at the moment that you are appointed to the role of chieftain at your father's funeral, but you quickly find out that a rival is looking to dispose you and take your lands for his own. As there is little to gain in Denmark, the player must find fortune and allies across the North Sea in Britannia.

See Portal: Expeditions: Viking for more links about this game.

## Gameplay

### Combat

Like its predecessor Expeditions: Conquistador, Viking features hexagonal grid battlefield lay-outs with six player-controlled units and sometimes more, but instead of loading the battlefield, now the battlefield is the actual area the group is exploring. Only camp battles and battles as random travel events need to be loaded before battles ensues. The game has eight featured hirdmen and the player has a few or many bare-boned mercenaries designed by the player at his command, depending on choices made by the player.

Unlike its predecessor, there is no class system, but is able to distribute Stats liberal, which then gives access to skills and makes them more powerful when the player distributes more points than the minimum requirement. The game then gives a certain class to the character depending on the Skill points distribution, but that is more to give an impression of the skills they have when encountering enemies. There can still be a great difference in skills, despite being labeled as the same class. The experience points is replaced by a skill points system. These points can be earned by doing quests, finding Cairns and sometimes by completing battles.

Equipment is completely different from a standardised item in its predessor. They are now unique items with properties, such as melee and ranged damage reduction, movement and accuracy maluses for armour, and damage, critical damage modifier and armour piercing for weapons, along with one or two other properties. Shields are also have their properties and there is a talisman slot as well. The player can also craft item themselves, or a party member is being able to do so.

The Experience points system is traded in for a Skill points systems, which gives all party members the same amount of skill points at any time in the game. Skill points are earned by doing quests, combat and knocking over cairns encountered in areas.

## Acts

The game consists of three acts, with acts I and II being responsible for 90% of the time spent on a full game. Act III consists of the Althing and in case of winning it, wrapping up the policital consequences related to it.

Act I is played on Denmark and the amount of time available is slightly more than a month. The second is played out on Britannia and the player has 146 days to complete all quests. The third acts brings the player character back to Denmark, but there only a few events, which are set a pre-determined time.

## Exploration

### Skills

Basically, all skills from its precedessor and a lot of new skills have been added. They are assigned in five groups of different skills types which are:

* Weapon skills, which are the skills for a type of weapon.
* Offensive skills, which provides many different skills for combat for ranged and melee units and Dual-wielding skills.
* Support skills, such as Healing, witchcraft, Leadership and other stat-boosting skills.
* Utility skills, which are needed for performing tasks when Camping; and
* Passive skills, which adds many different stat boosts during combat and most them are available for lot of units.

### Camping

Like its predessor, the player must make a camp from time to time to rest the hirdmen and fill their belly, but must do so at a few selected spots determined by the game, but the player character can decide when camp is made. The tasks party member can perform depend their Utility skills and and a few support skills, such as Healing and Witchcraft.

#### Many skills in short

* Diplomacy is now a player character bound skill, which only adds new dialogue when developed by the player character.
* Leadership, which depending on the rank, also adds skills usable in battle. But it does no longer determine critical hit chance for the whole group.
* Healing is now a skill usable in battle and camp, with a lot more character builds having acess to it.
* Crafting is skills which allows the player to craft weapons and armour. The crafting of utility items is still done with the tinkering skill.
* Speech checkes are now a combination of Stats, the diplomacy and leadership skill and sometimes a few specific skills.
* Dual-wielding is now being able in combat and developing this skills increases damage with the off-hand weapon and adds skills for both weapons. The main hand weapon determines the weapon skills being available.

## Downloadable content

The only downloadable content that was introduced is the weapon Blood-Ice, which is located in a chest inside the thegn's longhall. This is given freely to every buyer of the game.