![]() ![]() By pressing a single button, players switch to any of the three campaigners whenever they want. The three-character system works surprisingly well. Zhai the rogue pulls off a mind-blowingly fast finisher, darting onto the back of an enemy from behind and sinking her dual short swords into his neck. There is a quick and a fierce attack, a shove and a fatal stab, the last one for when an enemy is stunned and on the ground. You can upgrade spells, armor and weapons, just like in D&D. Epps laughed at how many items there, saying there actually might be too many. Being the Forgotten Realms, Demon Stone is rich with D&D spells for the sorcerer, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of items for all three characters. Deeper into the game, players buy combos expanding their repertoire and building each of their characters with attacks, items, and spells. Players whip off single attacks by pressing face buttons, and the simplest of combos start off with double taps, followed by double taps plus another button, etc. Like Stormfront's Two Towers title, the control system is combo-based. The characters, which join together in a spontaneous fight, hardly know one another, and so as they progress through engagements, they quibble and even fight with one another. There is a story, but it's told primarily in cutscenes between levels and through conversation during the fights themselves (using the in-game engine). The team exemplified this by dropping the trio into a forested environment and instantly letting them hack into a pair of enemies. Stormfront felt strongly the cutscenes should be short and snappy, leading right into gameplay. As you can see from the eight-plus movies we've posted, the animations are rewarding, and the team's artists have created facial movement, lip synching, and smooth-looking body movement. Even at this point in development, the animations are incredibly quick as are the response times, so when you're hacking into a giant serpent, you get the satisfaction that you're indeed hacking through a giant serpent's reptilian neck. Each character - Rannek, the fighter Zhai, the Rogue and Illius, the sorcerer - has his or her own special powers, special attacks, and growth potential. Unlike The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone enables players to switch between any one of three characters freely and at any time during gameplay. Salvatore who helped flesh out a majority of the Forgotten Realms series and who penned most of the early novels based on the license, Stormfront Studios is digging deep into the D&D treasure chest of mythology to flesh out a game based on a three-character system. (You can also see our developer commentary here.) Working with well-known author R.A. Epps and Stormfront Studios' President Don Daglow last week to get a better look at the game's progress and we played through a handful of the missions to give you this full pre-E3 report. This single-player game is due this fall on PS2 (probably September), and we can now officially confirm, it's also on Xbox (most likely November). Of course, the fighter was still the best at melee combat and the sorcerer's projectiles are far more powerful than the other characters'.Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone is the company's newest effort, an action game sprinkled with RPG elements and based on the Dungeons and Dragons third edition offshoot, Forgotten Realms. We made it so the sorcerer could fight using melee combat and the fighter and rogue could throw projectile weapons. From this, we made a move to make the characters share a few more skills. After a bunch of play testing, we found that people responded better to scenarios where they could always play the character they wanted, and weren't being "forced" to switch. However, when we first got switching on the fly into the game using this framework, it wasn't as fun as we hoped. The idea had been that the player would switch often, treating the characters like different weapons each with strengths and weaknesses. ![]() At first, we assumed that making each character only good at their particular skill would be best therefore, the fighter had no projectile weapons, the rogue had no combos, and the sorcerer had no melee attacks, just projectile spells. The sorcerer would be a projectile thrower with both offensive and defensive spells. The rogue could sneak and jump and would be great at killing single enemies using her sneak attack. The fighter would be good at fighting groups of enemies. ![]() Looking carefully at the D&D 3.5 edition rules, we determined that a party made up of a fighter, rogue and sorcerer would offer us great variety of gameplay. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |