Battle Realms Profile: Dragon Clan
We've got exclusive screenshots and detailed info on the game's noble Dragon Clan.
One of the most surprising games to grace the halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center at this year's E3 was Liquid Entertainment's Battle Realms. This freshman attempt by the relatively new Liquid wasn't on display for the public, but the few members of the gaming press who were lucky enough to attend the company's private demonstrations all walked away impressed with the game's promise of not only reinvigorating the real-time strategy genre but redefining it altogether. Certainly this is quite a claim from a company working on its very first game. But when you consider that Liquid Entertainment is made up of designers, programmers, and artists who've worked on games like Starcraft, Command & Conquer, and Red Alert, Battle Realms' potential to become the new milestone by which similar strategy games are measured becomes quite believable.
From the outset of the game's development, the goal of Liquid has always been to create a gameworld teeming with life. Forests provide cover for your troops' movement, but frightened birds might give away their location; fire will spread from house to house if left unchecked; water can be used to grow crops, build structures, and put out fires; clouds will thicken and cast their shadows on the ground as they pass overhead; and hills provide your units with a height advantage, allowing them to see farther than usual. This "living world" is designed to give Battle Realms a level of depth not seen in an RTS game before.
But as any die-hard RTS fan will tell you, the true measure of a real-time strategy game is its ability to perfectly balance its units and factions. In his fourth Designer Diary entry, Battle Realms' executive producer Ed Del Castillo stressed the importance and immense difficulty involved in achieving such a balance. "If the smallest thing is wrong," explains Del Castillo, "then players will notice and exploit the flaw." To make the balancing process easier, the entire game is driven by a massive database that contains crucial statistical information for all the units. If a spearman appears to be a bit too powerful, for instance, the designers at Liquid can easily tweak its specific characteristic without touching a single line of code. This balancing act is one of the biggest priorities for the designers at Liquid, and as such, the most important element of Battle Realms is the units. To that end, we recently spent two days at Liquid Entertainment's Southern California offices to get a firsthand look at Battle Realms and, more specifically, to examine the game's units and clans. And even though you won't be able to play this game until well into 2001, you will be able to read up on each of Battle Realms' distinct clans exclusively at GameSpot. Every month, we'll showcase a single clan, taking a look at its specific qualities, units, and structures. We kick off this recurring feature with the noble Dragon Clan. But first, a little background history on the world of Battle Realms.
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