Gameplay Footage

Check out some Rise of Legends multiplayer in this exclusive gameplay footage.

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You may have had the chance by now to check out the single-player demo of Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, Microsoft and Big Huge Games' follow-up to 2003's Rise of Nations. (And if you haven't yet, what are you waiting for?) Rise of Legends takes many of the concepts from GameSpot's Best PC Game of 2003 and transfers them to a new and original fantasy setting. You'll command three distinct factions as they battle for supremacy on the world of Aio. Of course, there's more to Rise of Legends than just single-player. Big Huge wants to make a fast-paced, cutthroat multiplayer game as well. We recently had a chance to play Rise of Legends multiplayer against the developers themselves, and while they definitely cut us some slack, they also showed off how intense of a multiplayer game this can be.

First, it's worth mentioning the multiplayer interface. Big Huge took a lot of lumps for the multiplayer gameplay in Rise of Nations, as finding and staying connected in a game was a lot harder than it should have been. The server browser was fairly rudimentary, and the game itself was unstable. That's changed quite a bit in Rise of Legends, as the multiplayer browser is designed to be as user friendly as possible (it's inspired by the Windows XP login screen), and we played a couple of lengthy games with no connection issues at all, which is a good sign. Setting up a game is easy, and we quickly got a two-versus-two game set up (the artificial intelligence was handling one of the player spots) with a few clicks.

The multiplayer in Rise of Legends is even more intense than the single-player game.

In the first game we played as the Cuotl, the mysterious third faction that uses technology so advanced that it appears magical. This was a brave choice, considering we had the least amount of time playing the Cuotl, and Tim Train, executive producer of Rise of Legends, told us that the Cuotl are something of an "expert" race, meaning that they play differently enough from the others that it takes a while to adapt to them. True enough, we quickly discovered the Cuotl may possess some advanced technology, such as shields and beam weapons, but the limitations on them include the fact that you have to generate energy (the other two races don't worry about this), as well as worry about mining timonium, the game's universal resource. The easiest way to generate energy is to build reactor districts onto Cuotl cities, but thanks to the escalating price of adding districts to a city (each additional district you add costs more than the one before it), you have to make some serious strategic decisions early on about how to proceed. You can try and quickly conquer a neighboring city, since it's cheaper to build districts in small cities than in larger cities. If you try this route, that means you can use the Cuotl's unique domination ability to quickly subvert the city (at the cost of timonium), or you can use your armed forces and try to conquer the city militarily.

While most real-time strategy games are easily defined as having two phases (the long build-up phase and then the combat phase), Rise of Legends compresses the build-up phase a considerable amount. You won't have 10 to 15 minutes to build up like you might in traditional real-time strategy games. Instead, you may only have a few minutes before you start rubbing against the enemy's borders and the fun begins. From that point on, it's a race to expand by conquering or assimilating neutral cities, building up military forces and defenses, researching the tech tree, and attacking and defending.

You'll need to churn out units to keep up in the fight.

As with any good real-time strategy game, the gameplay consists of making a constant stream of strategic decisions. Do you spend your limited resources building a lot of weaker units quickly or try and hoard resources until you can build a few powerful units? An enemy attack or raid into your territory may force your hand. Or perhaps you aren't generating resources quickly enough. Then you may need to seize a nearby territory that has a timonium deposit on it so you can mine, but that also means building more districts in your cities to raise your resource-gathering cap, and that's a process that will end up eating away precious resources. Which technologies do you unlock? Rise of Legend's technology tree doesn't let you unlock every technology, which means you have to choose which ones to go for, and that will affect your strategy in the game. You might want faster miners, but that means giving up better combat units.