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E3 06: Silverfall Impressions

Deep Silver sets out its Diablo-beating ambitions with this lovely looking RPG hack-and-slash.

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LOS ANGELES--Each year at E3 there are a handful of previously unknown games that look to have genuine promise. Some of them get a fair amount of exposure because they're featured in the main press conferences; others are buried deep within the bowels of the LA Convention Center. Silverfall, a hack-and-slash RPG in the same vein as classics such as Diablo, is one of the latter.

It's set in a fantasy universe, with the kind of fare you'd usually expect to see in such games. Goblins, elves, humans, and trolls form the playable races, and magic and crude (by our standards) technology form the bases of power within the game. The world itself has been ruled by magicians for generations, but now the goblin steam inventions are threatening to destabilise the political balance, and the end of the old order is nigh.

When you start the game, once you've chosen the race, gender, and facial customisations, you'll begin your journey in one of the cities governed by the magicians. This brings home immediately the central theme of the game: the conflict of nature versus technology. Throughout the game you'll face a number of decisions, each of them falling on either side of the divide--and depending on your choices you'll edge further towards, or further away from, each one.

But these choices don't just impact on the storyline; they affect the various skills that you'll be able to accumulate throughout the game. There are five skill sets in all, and each can be developed in a number of different ways. The racial skills focus on those abilities innate to each race, including mercantile for goblins and magic for humans.

In addition to those, you can develop fighting (with melee, ranged, and technical ability subsets) and magic (with light, elemental, and dark varieties). If you edge towards nature in your travels, you'll be able to summon creatures and turn yourself into a werewolf, whereas technologists will have the option of using guns and explosives.

You'll have to wisely choose how you spend your skill points, since you can't learn them all, but the game's producer, Jehanne Rousseau, was keen to point out that there will be very few obvious builds to be had. Instead, it's hoped that there will be as many viable skill builds as there are visual customisations, so that it's very difficult to find two characters that are the same.

This idea is doubly important due to the multiplayer aspects of the game, which are capable of accommodating up to eight players at a time. As well as the normal player-versus-player modes you'd expect, where you can pit two or three teams against one another, there's a cooperative mode that lets you play through the main quests in a story mode (although you must maintain the same team throughout).

In terms of statistics, which are always important in these games, here's a rundown of what you can expect from Silverfall: 35 different types of monster, with three or four versions of each; nine different types of external environments, with three different types of urban architecture and 12 different styles of dungeons; a 25-hour main quest; 200 side quests; 150 skills; and innumerable weapons and armour to be had.

The main thrust of the gameplay is of course the fighting, and there's a combination of melee and magic options open to you. As you go through the game, you'll collect companions who will fight alongside you, and your relationship with them will govern just how well they perform. It's even possible to have one special companion as a partner or best friend, and that person will have substantial bonuses as a result. The emphasis is very much on action, and it doesn't look as if there will be a great deal of downtime between fights.

Visually, the game looks as good as anything around at the moment, complete with real-time lighting and reflections, weather effects, and a realistic day/night cycle. The characters have a slight outline to differentiate them from the background, and this gives them the pleasant side effect of looking quite stylish as well. What's more, the environments are very nicely drawn, with some good variety between locations, and the rag-doll physics make it possible to knock enemies down stairs and over ledges.

We'll have more on Silverfall in the coming months, and it's due for release in Europe in October. There is currently no information about a US release.

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