Summoner Preview

As you walk through the halls of game developer Volition, there's nothing that suggests the company is busily developing one hot title and is on the verge of shipping another one. One half of the low-key office complex houses the team that's working on Red Faction, the first-person shooter that uses the revolutionary Geo-Mod engine, while the other half is putting the finishing touches on the PC version of Volition's new role-playing game, Summoner. We've been lucky enough to see the game firsthand during several stages of development - now, as production gets close to the homestretch and everything is almost in place, assistant producer Anoop Shekar has been kind enough to give us a guided tour.

Click for full size image

Summoner is going to be an RPG with an expansive story and a lot of combat. The story of Joseph, the rings of summoning, and his quest to retrieve them and put an end to the suffering of the world of Medeva is truly an epic one. At the beginning of the game, there are four rings of summoning, but as you progress through the story, you'll find that things are not that simple. During your travels, you'll eventually put together a party that is composed of four characters: Joseph; Flece, a thief who is the first to join; Jekhar, a fighter and a descendant of an ancient warrior race; and Rosalind, the daughter of Joseph's mentor, Yago, and an accomplished spellcaster. Each of these characters will have unique motivations that drive them through the story (Rosalind, for example, is jealous of Joseph's ability to summon and of the attention that her father pays to him), and, as it unfolds, you'll find them pursuing their own ends even as they journey with Joseph to recover the rings. Because of the individual nature of the characters and their reasons for being in the party, some characters will leave and rejoin at various times, and you'll go through several levels with different combinations of characters - Flece and Joseph or only Flece - depending on what has happened in the game up until that point. The story is divided into chapters with cutscenes that tell the larger tale, and events that happen between levels (like Joseph's capture by the emperor) will set the stage for further adventuring.

Click for full size image

A major element of the game is the summoning of creatures in connection with the magic rings of summoning, and Volition has spent a lot of time creating detailed summoning spells, as well as interesting creatures for Joseph to bring forth when he casts them. The graphics for these are elaborate, and each summoned creature appears in an impressive spell sequence. Creatures vary in toughness based not only on the creature type but also on the level of experience acquired by the casting ring. Joseph can wear two rings at a time, and as the rings gain experience, the summoned creatures become more powerful.

Summoner was developed simultaneously for the PC and the PlayStation 2, but after completing the game for the console platform, the development team found that there was still plenty of work to do on the PC version. "Multiplayer is something that takes a lot of time to do," explains Shekar. "Plus, we had to change the lighting on some levels since NTSC and computer monitors don't necessarily display things the same way." The game is now very close to being shipped, and as we toured the offices, we got a look at the game being actively tested.