Ever since the advent of Ultima Online and EverQuest, thousands of people from around the world have spent their evenings engaged in high adventure, creating colorful virtual personas, seeking out and battling fearsome monsters, earning fame and fortune, and chatting with other players along the way. Since then, EverQuest and its competitors, like Dark Age of Camelot and Asheron's Call, have collectively evolved online role-playing games to the point that they're not just time-consuming hack-and-slash games, but rather communities of friends who chat, travel, and adventure together online. Developer Artifact Entertainment will attempt to build on this idea by making its upcoming game Horizons feature not only hack-and-slash combat, but also in-depth trade skills, player-owned housing and businesses, and plenty of customizable features.

Will you be the lord of this castle?

The last time we saw Horizons was at this year's E3, and even then, it was clear that it will be a colorful game that features lots of different environments, including forested hills, jungles, arid deserts, and snowy mountain peaks. And just like other online role-playing games, Horizons will let you explore its many areas in search of treasure and danger in the form of fierce monsters. But in other online RPGs, when players and monsters fight, they swing their weapons in the air near each other and occasionally grunt in pain, while Horizons will actually show players and monsters scoring hits on each other and dodging and parrying attacks. It will also allows players to choose from one of five hotkeyed combat skills that will let them take different actions depending on how the battle is going. And one of Horizons' most intriguing features is its inclusion of powerful dragons with the ability to fly as players characters--though even these mythical beasts will be carefully balanced when it comes to fighting battles. For instance, though dragon characters will be able to attack their enemies from overhead, they'll have access only to their breath weapons while in the air, and not their formidable biting and clawing attacks, while their enemies on the ground will be able to use any tactics they wish.

Explore the wilderness in search of precious resources.

But if what we've seen recently is any indication, Horizons will have more to it than just fighting. A lot more. For starters, the game will have player-created housing that will not only let players build online homes for their characters, but will also let wealthy player guilds construct castles for themselves and their friends. Once a castle is constructed on a major plot of land, new subsidiary plots will be unlocked that players can then use to build ancillary homes and storefronts around the castle, basically creating a new city. Artifact Entertainment hopes that these cities will go a long way toward helping players feel like they're part of a community, especially when they have their very own base of operations in the game.

In order to travel across the huge world, from starting cities to player settlements to the wilderness, players will be able to use magical travel gates that, like the portals in Asheron's Call, will let them quickly jump from place to place in the huge world of Istaria. But these gates will only work for destinations that have already been visited. In other words, the more often you travel in Horizons, the easier it gets, since you can use all the travel gates that lead to places you've already been to. And if you happen to belong to a wealthy and powerful player guild that has enough in the way of finances and resources, you'll even be able to build your own personal travel gates to travel quickly to and from your estates.