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Republic is the first game from London-based developer Elixir Studios, which is headed by the young programmer who had worked with famous game designer Peter Molyneux on projects such as Theme Park and, more recently, Black & White. Republic is an atypical real-time strategy game set in the former Soviet Union, and it puts you in the role of a leader looking to take control of a fictional newly disassociated country. You can rise to power using politics, business, religion, crime, and military might, but in order to succeed, you'll need help. As such, you'll establish a network of individuals - advisors, confidants, journalists, and more - who'll help put you in touch with the proletariat. Republic features a fully 3D cityscape that's as ambitious in scope as the rest of the project. It's scheduled for release in the spring of 2001.
The most prominent feature of Sigma, the upcoming real-time strategy game from Relic, is the ability to create unique units. You collect ordinary animals and bring them back to the base, where they can then be combined into new animals, with new abilities. Groups of altered animals can then be sent out to do battle with enemy units. Some examples of animals seen in the demonstration include hyenachimps, cheetahlizards, and gorillawolves. Each animal has a specific ability tied to a particular part of its body, so the appearance of the animal will be an indication of its abilities.
Shiny has designed Sacrifice to play much like a real-time strategy game, emphasizing tactical combat and the careful use of 65 spells at your wizard's disposal. Sacrifice eschews a standard resource model, so you must increase your wizard's experience through combat and expand your mana pool by sacrificing enemy creatures at your altar. The victory condition for multiplayer games also follows the theme: Drag one of your units to an opponent's altar and sacrifice it, which will contaminate the opposing player's mana stream and destroy his connection with his god. Shiny hopes to create a faster-paced game by promoting constant combat between players and eliminating the static build up period common among real-time strategy games.
Sacrifice's graphics were some of the most impressive at the show, incorporating level of detail techniques similar to Messiah that let Sacrifice run complex scenes at high resolutions without dropping the frame rate. More than 50 creatures can fill the screen simultaneously, and far-off areas of the map can be seen off on the horizon, since there's no need to artificially fog the map for performance reasons. Beyond the technical features, we liked the consistent zany and organic look to the game's art, and we were wowed by the dramatic spell effects, which include tornadoes that twist and stretch up to a suddenly stormy sky and a volcano spell that deforms the terrain and rains fiery death down on the enemy.
In development since well before Homeworld's release last year, Homeworld: Cataclysm adds a host of enhancements and gameplay tweaks that promise to make Cataclysm both more accessible to new players and more varied for Homeworld veterans. Cataclysm also introduces dozens of new ships with new weapons and technologies, including mimic ships that can disguise themselves as a similar sized-object, multi-ion beam frigates, and an awe-inspiring long-range mega cannon that can be added to your mothership. Technolgies can also now be used to upgrade individual ships and ships now feature multiple special abilities, meaning that each unit can play a more varied strategic role.
Among the biggest surprises at the show was Liquid Entertainment's Battle Realms, a real-time strategy game whose 3D engine and smaller tactical battles resemble those of Warcraft III. The game has a Japanese setting and four sides: the Lotus, Wolf, Serpent, and Dragon Clans. All of them have their own retinue of units, such as the Lotus' diseased spellcasters or the Wolf's werewolves. Although the core game - such as full-on combat and unit balance - has yet to be shown, Battle Realms already boasts many cool features, such as fires that spread, water as a resource for both stopping fires and watering crops, boulders that can be rolled down mountains to crush troops or destroy houses, and horses that you can steal from under the saddle of enemy units.
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