Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard First Impressions

Liquid Entertainment's Ed Del Castillo discusses this upcoming strategy game. Double-click on the video window for a full-screen view.

At a recent Atari press event, we took a look at Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard, the upcoming real-time strategy game from Liquid Entertainment. Like other real-time strategy games, Dragonshard will let you build a base of operations, gather resources, and amass an army, but it will let you do these things in an entirely new way. This new style of gameplay is perhaps fitting, since Dragonshard will also be the first real-time strategy game to make use of the all-new Eberron fantasy setting from Dungeons & Dragons. (Eberron is a planet ringed by a rotating halo of magical crystals that occasionally fall to Earth and bestow great power on whoever discovers them.)

Dragonshard will feature four primary factions (three of which will be playable in the game) that will do battle both aboveground and belowground. Liquid's Ed Del Castillo explains that aboveground, players will build their bases and fight large-scale battles with large squads of soldiers, while belowground, players will lead small adventuring parties consisting of individual characters with distinct abilities. Topside, players will be able to build their own base of operations--not using stockpiles of wood chopped by peasants or being limited to a specific order determined by a "technology tree," but as they like. That is, Dragonshard's two major resources will simply be gold and magic power harvested from crystals; crystals can be found at random on the battlefield, and gold is most commonly gained from taxes automatically earned from buildings.

You'll start out the game with enough resources on hand to build at least a few buildings, but you can do so in any order you like. That means you don't have to build a barracks in order to build a blacksmith in order to build a horse stable--but the order in which you build will still contribute to your strategy. That's because any building you place will give bonus effects to any other nearby buildings; for instance, any structure near a blacksmith building will produce units that will gain an automatic armor bonus thanks to the proximity of the smithy. In the meantime, you'll automatically gain more and more gold as you build more and more buildings, and, interestingly enough, it'll be easy to defend your built-up base of operations throughout most of the early to mid-game.

Attacking your enemy's town won't be possible with an early-game "rush" attack--it'll usually become possible only after you've clashed with your enemy's armies, which is the focus of the game. According to Del Castillo, in Dragonshard, destroying your enemy's base won't be a mid-game tactic used to cripple your enemy (as it so often is in other real-time strategy games); rather, it will be the finale to a battle: a large-scale, late-game siege.

You'll even have different kinds of forces above and below the surface. Aboveground, you'll have armies composed of champions (extremely powerful and rare superunits), captains (essentially "hero" units that gain experience levels and radiate various bonuses to nearby allies), and soldiers, the lowest level of unit. All aboveground units can be joined into squads that will form distinct lines of battle and will diffuse "focus fire"--the common real-time strategy tactic of surrounding one important enemy unit and killing it off while ignoring the rest. You won't be able to do this to a company--damage will be distributed evenly, but extremely damaged companies will see their battle lines crumble, giving a very distinct visual cue.

Below the surface, you'll have a small adventuring party that will take on quests, disarm traps, and unlock chests full of treasure. The single-player campaigns will likely be somewhat forgiving--you'll have ample time to concentrate either on your stronghold on the surface or your party below it, though multiplayer will be much more free-form. And rather than featuring separate multiplayer modes, Dragonshard will instead focus on head-to-head or team-based competitive play on maps with randomly spawning events and choke points that will need to be held for strategic advantages. The game's colorful 3D graphics engine (built all-new, from the ground up) will allow for numerous kinds of distinctive environments, and even though the game is still fairly early, its units and structures already look detailed and crisp. If it can accomplish everything it's setting out to do, Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard will be a highly innovative fantasy game that will break just about every rule of real-time strategy. The game is scheduled for release next year.