Swords & Sorcery (formerly known as Deep Six) will allow you to control a party of six adventurers chosen from ten available races and 15 different character classes. As with Baldur's Gate, each party member can also be controlled by another player, allowing you to play Swords & Sorcery cooperatively with up to five other players over the Internet or through a modem or LAN. Virgin Interactive has promised to provide a special Internet server for Swords & Sorcery to allow gamers to conveniently meet other players and form parties. Since this title was just announced, details of the plot are still sketchy, but it will revolve around the ominous revival of Cet Ude D'ua Khan, the Lord of Death. With his return, evil forces begin to thrive and multiply, threatening to overwhelm lands of the Gael-Serran. In typical noble quest fashion, your characters are called upon to stomp the Lord of Death once and for all.

The developers of Swords & Sorcery are promising a nonlinear exploration system that gives your party the freedom to explore a 3D medieval fantasy world, discovering a large variety of creatures, non-player characters, and magic items. Like Might and Magic VI, Swords & Sorcery will give you a choice between turn-based or real-time combat. Swords & Sorcery will utilize a proprietary authoring and rendering engine that the development team is confident will enable them to display high-resolution characters with very high polygon counts. You'll be able to view your characters either from a first- or third-person perspective. Since Bradley and other members of the Swords & Sorcery development team worked on the past three Wizardry games, you can expect to see the complexity and attention to detail that role-playing gamers love. Scheduled for release this October, additional details on this game should be available soon. Even with this little information available, thanks to the support of veteran creator D.W. Bradley, Swords & Sorcery is worthy of mention as one of 1998's hottest role-playing game prospects.

Next: The Hybrids