Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising Impressions - First Look

We recently had a chance to take a look at Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising, the upcoming online game from Perpetual Entertainment. The game is set in a fantasy version of ancient Rome, circa 300 BC, where mythological creatures like furies, medusas, and minotaurs walk the earth. You'll play as a character born of immortal blood who will eventually gain godlike powers as the result of completing quests and your own character's advancement through the game's 50 character levels. The game will also put each character on a "destiny-fulfilling epic quest" that will span the entire character's life and may be tied to your character's allegiance to the game's 12 gods. The game's Roman pantheon will include 12 deities arranged into four specific "triads," to whom your character will owe allegiance. This allegiance will affect your character's quests and which godlike powers your character will receive, so it should serve as a means of differentiating characters of the same profession (the game will let you play as one of six classes: warrior, gladiator, rogue, scout, priest, and healer).

Gods & Heroes will have a very heavy focus on quests that would make sense in an ancient Roman setting, considering that Rome's primary political enemies were Gauls, Samnites, and Visigoths, and that its goals include expansion into new territory as well as protecting its borders. The game is expected to feature some 1,250 quests at launch. Many of these quests will require you to seek out specific characters in order to initiate them, and all of them will be given context; rather than simply tasking a player with killing a bunch of monsters for the sake of it. Gods & Heroes' quests will also involve your character's creation of a retinue; you'll be able to hire on a squad of up to eight different characters (who themselves may be archers, swordmen, or belong to other character classes) that can be given strategic orders and even placed into formation before sending them off to battle. You'll even be able to customize their colors and standards.

These military companies should make solo play a very viable prospect (a mission to defeat a small clan of barbarians is much more approachable with eight stout soldiers behind you, after all), and will make group play take on a completely new dynamic of large-scale company-versus-company battles that may involves as many as 200 characters onscreen at once. These battles will be made manageable thanks to the game's heavy reliance on "dynamic content"--that is, instanced areas where individual players (and their invited friends) can stage their own battles. In fact, the game will actually have "replayable arenas"--instanced areas that will be less like a static role-playing quest and more like a first-person shooter level, where you'll be able to do battle again and again.

We were able to watch as lead designer Stieg Hedlund (whose previous design credits include Diablo II) took us on a brief introductory quest, starting outside a small Roman town. Hedlund demonstrated that the game's character models will let you customize your character's facial features and physical build, and even customize clothing colors. Once our character was created, we set out to a nearby villa to undertake a fairly straightforward-sounding quest: retrieving a ring, which was stolen by Samnite thugs, for an olive merchant. On running the mission, we headed off to the olive groves and used a number of different combat abilities that showcased the game's "action-combat animation system," which seems to already do a good job of modeling monster animations and some very vicious-looking combat animations, like a maneuver in which your character can impale your enemy on your sword, then kick your foe off of your weapon down to the ground. The game will have a branching network of skills (over 1,000 combat abilities) and god powers (over 1,000 of these too) not unlike that of Diablo II--a system that Hedlund explained was "approachable, but depth."

After fighting off the thugs and retrieving the ring, we returned to find that the olive merchant wasn't a merchant at all, but rather, the towering god of war, Mars, who tasked us with a longer-term quest: seeking out and destroying the medusa and delivering her head to a temple. We skipped through a few areas, quickly visiting the temple for a briefing before jumping in a boat to the medusa's crocodile-infested island. This and other adventure areas will also be instanced to allow for scripted events that resemble those you might find in a story-heavy single-player game, such as a whispering woman's voice (try to guess whose) who hisses "leave this place" as you make your way to the medusa's lair. On confronting the medusa, whose stony lair was bordered by hovering furies, we found ourselves in for a tough fight, especially since the huge snake-creature had a tendency to grab us up and bit us repeatedly with the serpents in her hair before tossing us to the ground. Through the narrowest of margins, we succeeded and claimed the medusa's head.

After the game launches, the developer plans to add in regular content updates and even retail expansion packs that will add new adventure areas and high-level content, and even has plans to add in additional nations from the ancient world, which could include Carthage, Egypt, and even the Chinese. These post-launch plans also include "nation v. nation" combat--country-based battles which will take place over contested territory. For now, the final game will launch with some 35 "areas," each of which should be something in the neighborhood of two to three square kilometers in size. If Perpetual can pull off everything it's aiming for, then Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising will be a very promising game of mythology, divine intervention, and huge strategic battles. The game has been in development for some 18 months and is scheduled to launch this October.