I have been telling anyone who will listen pretty much since this game launched that its greatest strengths are immersion (Eo is a rich and vibrant world, despite the unoriginal source material) and how well it actually succeeds in fusing role-playing and strategy. I mostly just like wandering around the towns I build up, looking at my subjects as they scramble to do my bidding. I've always liked this feature, although I personally only use it for the occasional dip into immersion. Your camera perspective is a matter of choice Spellforce allows you to shift from top-down isometric to third-person view at will. The irony is delicious a freed slave immediately begins looking for slaves. Micro-managers rejoice! As a final nod to diversity, your hero also gets to collect other Rune warriors to summon and use as fodder. Worker slaves come in gem form too, and the key to success in Spellforce comes from claiming the monuments of each race that let you summon these slaves in order to sculpt your towns and fighting forces. Runes aren't limited to shining fighters and magic users. However, you also get to build up micro-civilizations and field massive armies, which is where the RTS elements come into play. You level up, you customize your spells and equipment, you tweak your attributes, and you climb the ladder to make your little character the coolest-looking little virtual "you" possible – everything all good RPGs require.
What a perfect setup to become a legendary hero! This avatar is where the majority of the "RPG" elements come into the game. Such a case is yours you are bound to no one else's tyranny and cannot truly be killed. In rare cases, one of these powerful beings is granted his or her own rune. Eo and its incredible species diversity is a land ripe with drama and power-plays, and you get to shape the outcome of these tales.Īs the player, you are in control of a Rune Warrior, a being whose soul is bound to a stone that provides the dual gift/curse of immortality and slavery to whoever possesses the rune. The surviving inhabitants of these islands include such illustrious races as elves (in both woodelf and darkelf flavors), dwarves, orcs, trolls, and humans. These are now connected only by a chain of teleportation portals, conveniently set up by the few remaining Convocation wizards left over from the war.
Some time ago, a massive war referred to as the "Convocation War" split the planet into a series of isolated islands. The basic breakdown is roughly like this: Spellforce takes place in a "traditional" (some might say cliché) fantasy world known as Eo. I will say that you travel to hell and back (literally), fight off armies of animated black-bladed armor, and get into some tussles with huge ancient dragons, amongst other adventures. I won't go too much into detail regarding the story arc(s) in this bundle, primarily because it would take far too long to cover it all. Neither of these saw much shelf space at domestic retailers, but this may soon change due to a recent release of all three efforts bundled together in the Spellforce Platinum edition.
Undaunted, Phenomic crafted two full expansions for the game: Breath of Winter was first, followed by Shadow of the Phoenix.
While the early 2004 release did well in Europe, the hybrid strategy/role-playing title failed to grab much attention in North America. Luckily those two audiences are fairly completely merged.It seems like only yesterday that JoWooD and Phenomic released the criminally underrated Spellforce: The Order of Dawn. Any player who has not played Age of Empires or any of its clones may be at a bit of a loss for a while just as anyone who's played RTS exclusively and never heard of Lord of the Rings may be a bit at-sea with the RPG aspect.
The strategic game design innovation here is that at some pre-designated spots in the story, when you reach a particular area, you launch into a RTS situation, where you gather resources to build the army needed to get you through the local sub-quest. Luckily none of the speeches encountered in the early going were too long and the hack-and-slash was allowed to recommence quickly. The cut scenes and decision dialogues contain some extra-stilted lines (even by the high stiltiness standards of this genre) to add flavor (or stiffening) to the campaign. You can follow the linear story line campaign via your avatar, your in-game character, through a somewhat familiar mix of the usual Tolkien conventions (orcs, elves, shadows over the land, gather allies to fight the evil invaders.
You have here a lush series of maps with large areas to explore three modes of play.