Warrior Kings Preview
We visit Microids' office to take a look at the medieval real-time strategy game from Black Cactus.
England-based developer Black Cactus experienced one of the most turbulent development cycles in recent memory. Its current project, Warrior Kings, was originally signed by Sierra, but that company's own problems resulted in cutbacks on funding for Warrior Kings. Sierra eventually dropped the game altogether. Fortunately for Black Cactus, Microids picked up the rights to publish Warrior Kings, and since that time, development on the project has steadily progressed. However, it still remains to be seen if Black Cactus can successfully incorporate some of its rather ambitious plans into the final product.
Warrior Kings is a medieval real-time strategy game that uses full three-dimensional environments and units, and while that's standard for most real-time strategy games today, the sheer scale of these environments is what truly sets the game apart. During a recent demonstration of the game, we were shown what one of the larger cities looks like, and the fact that it took well over 30 seconds to pan the camera through one side of the city to the other gives a good indication of its size. In fact, some cities in Warrior Kings are actually 20 to 25 square miles, which might be a blessing or a curse, depending on your strategy for the game. The large size gives you and enemy forces a wide array of attack points, but whoever controls the city has a number of strategies to choose from, some of which could quickly cripple an enemy's ability to launch a sustained assault.
The single-player campaign in Warrior Kings puts you in the role of a character that wants to reclaim land lost by his father. To accomplish this task, you'll have to battle through nine maps, each of which has a set of approximately 20 objectives that you must complete before moving on to a new map. During the course of completing these objectives, you'll encounter the three different factions in the game--imperial, pagan, or technological. You can evolve into any one of these three factions depending on how you play the game.
One of Black Cactus' main goals for Warrior Kings was to give as much control over the outcome of the game over to you, and the three factions, and three branching paths, are evidence of that. At the beginning of the game, you start with a basic group of units and structures that have no real affiliation with any of the three factions, but as you start to build more structures and produce more units of a particular type, your association with one of the three factions becomes more defined. These factions don't appear to have any distinct advantages over each other in terms of basic units, but any faction can quickly gain the upper hand with the aid of a god.
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