E3 '07: Rise of the Argonauts First Look

It's always good to be pleasantly surprised by a game that you haven't seen before, and our E3 got off to a very good start this morning when we were among the first people to get a look at Liquid Entertainment's Rise of the Argonauts. Currently in development for the PC, the Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3, Rise of the Argonauts is an action-oriented role-playing game in which you'll assume the role of Jason. Loosely based on Greek mythology, the game will task you with locating and retrieving the magical "golden fleece"--an item with the power to undo the death of Jason's bride-to-be, who was murdered in the middle of their wedding ceremony.

Rise of the Argonauts will be set on an undisclosed number of islands that you'll initially travel between in a quite linear fashion, but can later revisit at any time. In an attempt to make the game more friendly for those of you who prefer not to let role-playing games take over your lives, each of the islands will purportedly take approximately two hours to play through the first time, giving you plenty of opportunities to take breaks. Today's presentation showed off one of the earliest islands in the game, that belonging to Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Your main goal on this particular island is to retrieve a magical item known as Orion's Belt, but you'll have plenty of other things to do before you get your hands on it.

The good news is that you won't be starting your adventure as a lowly, sack-wearing village idiot armed with a stick, and you definitely won't need to level up your skills by killing rats for hours on end before you can move on to something more interesting. Jason is already the king of his own island when you take the controls, and so you'll already be equipped with nice weapons and armor, and you'll already be quite proficient in their use. Furthermore, you won't have to concern yourself with selling trashy loot drops to accumulate copper coins. Every item in the game, we're told, will be useful, and when picking items up you won't even need to worry about how much space you have in your backpack, you'll either choose to equip it or it'll be sent back to the Argo (that's your ship) automatically. During our presentation, for example, Jason happened upon the body of a driad with a spear through it and, after picking up the spear and deciding to equip it, his old weapon went back to the ship rather than being left behind.

Weapons in the game will include swords, spears, and maces, and it appears that you'll be able to carry at least one of each at all times. This is important because, as we saw during our presentation, they all have their uses in different situations. Lethality is the name of the game where Rise of the Argonauts' combat is concerned--the weapons are sharp, and when you hit enemies with them those enemies will die or, at the very least, will visibly take damage. We've no idea how the combat controls work at this point, but what's clear is that you'll need to be smart about how you approach certain enemies. Soldiers carrying shields might be easier to attack with a sword from one side than they are from the other, for example, or you might decide to take a more direct approach and just destroy their shield with several well-placed mace attacks. Regardless of which approach you decide to take (throwing a spear that would then need to be retrieved is also an option, incidentally), you'll notice that the dynamic animation system employed in the game makes character movements look more realistic and varied than in the majority of games, simply because the animations have the potential to be different every time you use them, not only because they're context-sensitive according to what kind of enemy you're facing, but also because they vary according to your position and stance in relation to them.

Perhaps every bit as important as your choice of weapon will be your choice of colleagues. Five Argonaut companions will appear in the game, and you can choose to have any two of them join you simultaneously. For the duration of our presentation Jason was accompanied by the huntress Atalanta and the abnormally strong Hercules. Impressively, you won't have any direct control over the actions of your colleagues, but their tactics in the middle of a battle will vary according to their proximity to you, and in some cases, to each other. If left to his own devices, Hercules will throw smaller enemies around and ultimately kill them with his bare hands, for example, but if you get close to him he'll simply pick them up and hold them in such a way that you can easily finish them off.

If combat is one of the more obvious ways in which you level up and improve Jason's attributes and abilities, conversation certainly isn't. Frustrated by games that give the illusion of choice during conversations in which one of your optional responses is obviously the "right" one, the team at Liquid has come up with a system where you'll be rewarded with experience no matter which option you choose. Those experience points will only be usable on the skill tree of the god whose favor you earned with your conversational choices, though, and while you might wish to specialize in a particular skill and please one god so much that you're granted a miracle, you'll want to keep all of the gods on your side lest they decide to torment you.

Less powerful and seemingly less useful characters will also be worth looking after on occasion, such as the numerous hunters whose lives you'll have the opportunity to save as you explore the island that we were afforded a brief tour of. When you save someone's life they don't forget you, and so without wishing to give too much away, hunters whose lives you've saved might feel obligated to help you if you were to do battle with a giant boar boss, for example.

We left today's meeting with the feeling that we'd really only scratched the surface of what Rise of the Argonauts has to offer, and we're very much looking forward to bringing you more information as soon as it becomes available. For now, the only other information we have for you is that the game is scheduled for release sometime in 2008, and that Rise of the Argonauts is definitely envisioned as the first game in what will hopefully become a long-running series.