Dragonshard Updated Impressions - New Playable Faction, New Gameplay Details

Traditional real-time strategy games used to seem like they were stuck in a rut of harvesting resources with peon units, building a base, churning out an army, and crushing the enemy as fast as possible. Fortunately, real-time strategy games are breaking with tradition and introducing lots of new features that make that whole crushing the enemy thing seem worthwhile again. This definitely seems to be true of Dragonshard, the Dungeons & Dragons-based game from Liquid Entertainment, which will include above- and below-ground gameplay, no restrictions on technology research, varying kinds of combat, and many more unusual options. The developer has also revealed the third and final playable faction in the game: the lizardfolk.

Since Dragonshard takes place in the fantastic realm of Dungeons & Dragons (more specifically, in the all-new world of Eberron), it would make sense for the game's three playable factions to consist of high-fantasy creatures. For example, the Order of the Silver Flame includes an alliance between humans, dwarves, elves, and technology, while the evil dark elves rely on their subterranean allies and sorcery in battle. The third new faction, the lizardfolk, instead consists of a wide array of scaly-skinned critters, from upright-walking lizard people to flying drakes (on which lizard people may ride into battle) to giant war turtles all the way up to dragons.

Each of the three factions will command three different types of military units in battle: heroes, adventurers (also known as captains), and soldiers (also known as henchmen). Each of the three sides will have four unique hero characters, and only one hero from each side may be brought into any single mission adventure. Heroes won't be able to gain experience levels, but they will be able to outfit themselves with better equipment as you successfully complete missions. These exceptionally powerful characters will provide both "local" and "global" bonuses to your armies. For instance, players who lead their armies with the priestess Marryn will have units that recover more quickly from casting magic spells when standing near this hero, and they will also find that all healer units in the army, near Marryn or not, will receive a bonus to their healing abilities.

Adventurers will actually be able to gain experience levels and new abilities by winning battles and spending accumulated experience after the fact. And once you've used experience to purchase second-level fighter adventurers, you'll always be able to go back and commission more at the same level. Soldiers will follow adventurers into battle (exactly how many can be assigned to a commanding officer depends on that adventurer's leadership rating).

We had a chance to observe a very early version of one of the game's first single-player missions, which puts you in control of a small company tasked with liberating a snowy village from marauding bugbears. This quest, and presumably the others in the game, was given by a neutral peasant character marked with a glowing yellow exclamation point over his head (not unlike the quest-giving characters of Blizzard's recent online game World of Warcraft). The game uses a layered texture system that allows for subtle environmental details, like tracks that stay in snow, so these monsters seemed easy to track. They also didn't pose much of a threat before they fled into an abandoned mine.

The party gave chase through a tunnel where it switched to the underground view, which, unlike the more-strategic, larger-scale operations of the aboveground missions, focused instead on small parties of adventurers and heroes. The party seemed to do all right until one of its members was swallowed by a gelatinous cube (a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster that has a nasty habit of engulfing, then slowly digesting its victims). Unfortunately, there will be worse things underground, like beholders, which are huge floating eyeballs topped with eyestalks, and each one possesses different and deadly magical attacks. Beholders, like several other monsters and units in the game, will actually have separate artificial intelligence and lines of sight for their different attack points. So, if you're trying to surround a beholder, you'll soon learn that your entire army can be vaporized by the creature's multidirectional attacks.

From the sound of things, Liquid is attempting to use these and other minor and major innovations to make a very different strategy game. Even though it's still got a ways to go in development, Dragonshard will be a very distinctive strategy game with a lot of new ideas, if the team can follow through on everything it plans to. The game is scheduled for release next spring.