GDC 2002Realm Wars impressions

GarageGames demonstrated Realm Wars, its recently announced community-built team-based action game, at the Intel booth at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California, today. The game is built on GarageGames' Torque engine, the technology used in Sierra's team-based shooter Tribes 2, which was developed by Dynamix.

Realm Wars is inspired by massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as Dark Age of Camelot, but instead of requiring players to spend a significant amount of time building up their characters, the game will focus exclusively on combat. Players will be able to create their own persistent character and then join team-based battles set in a medieval fantasy world. The game will include ranged weapons and spells, as well as hand-to-hand combat.

While the game's fantasy setting may appeal to action-game fans looking for something different, GarageGames' development plan for the game is particularly interesting. The developer intends for the project to be developed by the community; while GarageGames will coordinate the development and set milestones for the project, the developers are too busy supporting the Torque engine to develop the game internally.

The early demo version of the game being shown was created in order to jump-start the game's development process. It only has one character so far, and it looks fairly similar to Tribes 2. The next development milestone for the game is to add a spellcasting character. According to GarageGames founder Tim Gift, the developer hopes to eventually release the game as a retail product and share the profits with the artists, programmers, and other community members who contributed to the game.

For more information about GarageGames and the Realm Wars project, visit the official GarageGames Web site.