Fantasy often has a few holes in. Take Mordor's representation at the close of the cinematic Rings jaunt - a dusty, arid surface with a bunch of orcs just standing around shouting at each other. Where was the infrastructure? Where did the greenskins do their shopping? Where were the basic sanitation facilities?
Great as Peter Jackson's vision was, it's doubtful he'd ever get a job as a town planner. The same is true of your average dungeon: who, honestly, leaves a big chest full of treasure just lying around next to a badly concealed pit trap? A bloody idiot, that's who.
"Why has someone left that gold?" continues a concerned Simon Bradbury of Firefly studios. "Why hasn't that spider eaten those goblins? Why are they just standing there waiting for me to kill them? I mean, ours is a dungeon with toilets in..."
Firefly, you see, have a thoroughly British fascination with toilets. I mean, the last time I spoke to Bradbury, we were discussing the intricacies of the people of ancient Rome having toilets in their kitchens for CivCity Rome; the time before that, the importance of the gong-collector in Stronghold. Firefly are big on creating places that work - and places without toilets generally don't.
Dungeon Hero is set to be released several aeons from hence (spring 2009 at the last count), but I stamped my little foot until it got a few pages in this issue of ZONE this month because it's dead-set on remedying exactly what I dislike about seemingly every dungeon crawl ever created - from Dungeon Siege to Diablo.
Not only is there a bizarre Deathtrap Dungeon fantasy set-up that's wholly inconsistent with real life, but also any story feels unnecessary and tacked on. Here, then, an entire living, breathing city with goblins bustling around and going about their daily business is being constructed (somewhat of a Firefly speciality really) - serving as both a foot in reality and as a narrative device.
GAGGLE OF GOBLINS
You play as an interloper from the surface, and you're a bit of a git - hacking here and dismembering there. Goblins treat you as an untrustworthy alien, largely ignoring you striding through the streets of their four city districts and bumping your head on the ceilings, concentrating on their own personal clan war. One of the goblins has dug a little too deep though, and tapped a direct connection into death itself. They'll probably start wanting more help when they find that out...
"Goblins have a religion based on trees, and each city suburb is based on these," explains level designer Andrew Parsons.
"In Birch, a religious area, you'll see shamans gathering together, other guys preaching to groups of goblins. In direct contrast, meanwhile, you've got The Greys, our slum area, where there's a crack in the cavern roof above it, which means that it's constantly raining. It's the place where the dead, the dying, the diseased, the criminal and the poor can be found. What we're going for there is a Blade Runner-type feel."
This city, then, will be the hub of your adventures, changing with the ebbs and flows of the story - should a plague break out, for example, you'll start to see white hand prints on doors, green ooze dripping off walls and goblin doctors scurrying from place to place.
All around you, Firefly want the city to buzz with activity - the industrial Oak area, for example, being the gateway to the front line trenches of the war against the Redeye clan, and as such heaving with weapon smiths, field-hospitals and the walking wounded.
COMBAT AND SLASH
But what of the hack and the slash? That's getting a revamp from the dungeon masters too - with a studied attempt to remove the button-mashing ethos so entrenched within the genre. There'll be melee and ranged attacks, obviously, but with up to 50 critters swarming around you, the emphasis is on close combat.
A right-click will have you block jabs from the more unfriendly people you meet, with the enemy at such proximity you'll have to make yourself space to swing your sword through shield-bashes and head butts before timing your slashes and flurries to the amount of space you grant yourself. It won't all be depressingly console-like combo moves either, with you swapping around different modes of violence role-play fashion - and very much developing a fighting style of your own.
Dungeon Hero is still miles off but (in a similar fashion to the lofty ambitions of Hellgate: London), it's certainly striking in its sheer desire to recreate a tried-and-tested formula in a novel and engaging way.
As someone who's shown lethargic and terminally dull Diablo-clones on what approaches a bi-weekly basis, it's a breath of refreshingly dank and musty dungeon air in a genre that's been bereft of originality for an extremely long time.
Source - http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=170760&skip=yes
Sounds like it could be a good game, thought I'd share it with you guys.
Great as Peter Jackson's vision was, it's doubtful he'd ever get a job as a town planner. The same is true of your average dungeon: who, honestly, leaves a big chest full of treasure just lying around next to a badly concealed pit trap? A bloody idiot, that's who.
"Why has someone left that gold?" continues a concerned Simon Bradbury of Firefly studios. "Why hasn't that spider eaten those goblins? Why are they just standing there waiting for me to kill them? I mean, ours is a dungeon with toilets in..."
Firefly, you see, have a thoroughly British fascination with toilets. I mean, the last time I spoke to Bradbury, we were discussing the intricacies of the people of ancient Rome having toilets in their kitchens for CivCity Rome; the time before that, the importance of the gong-collector in Stronghold. Firefly are big on creating places that work - and places without toilets generally don't.
Dungeon Hero is set to be released several aeons from hence (spring 2009 at the last count), but I stamped my little foot until it got a few pages in this issue of ZONE this month because it's dead-set on remedying exactly what I dislike about seemingly every dungeon crawl ever created - from Dungeon Siege to Diablo.
Not only is there a bizarre Deathtrap Dungeon fantasy set-up that's wholly inconsistent with real life, but also any story feels unnecessary and tacked on. Here, then, an entire living, breathing city with goblins bustling around and going about their daily business is being constructed (somewhat of a Firefly speciality really) - serving as both a foot in reality and as a narrative device.
GAGGLE OF GOBLINS
You play as an interloper from the surface, and you're a bit of a git - hacking here and dismembering there. Goblins treat you as an untrustworthy alien, largely ignoring you striding through the streets of their four city districts and bumping your head on the ceilings, concentrating on their own personal clan war. One of the goblins has dug a little too deep though, and tapped a direct connection into death itself. They'll probably start wanting more help when they find that out...
"Goblins have a religion based on trees, and each city suburb is based on these," explains level designer Andrew Parsons.
"In Birch, a religious area, you'll see shamans gathering together, other guys preaching to groups of goblins. In direct contrast, meanwhile, you've got The Greys, our slum area, where there's a crack in the cavern roof above it, which means that it's constantly raining. It's the place where the dead, the dying, the diseased, the criminal and the poor can be found. What we're going for there is a Blade Runner-type feel."
This city, then, will be the hub of your adventures, changing with the ebbs and flows of the story - should a plague break out, for example, you'll start to see white hand prints on doors, green ooze dripping off walls and goblin doctors scurrying from place to place.
All around you, Firefly want the city to buzz with activity - the industrial Oak area, for example, being the gateway to the front line trenches of the war against the Redeye clan, and as such heaving with weapon smiths, field-hospitals and the walking wounded.
COMBAT AND SLASH
But what of the hack and the slash? That's getting a revamp from the dungeon masters too - with a studied attempt to remove the button-mashing ethos so entrenched within the genre. There'll be melee and ranged attacks, obviously, but with up to 50 critters swarming around you, the emphasis is on close combat.
A right-click will have you block jabs from the more unfriendly people you meet, with the enemy at such proximity you'll have to make yourself space to swing your sword through shield-bashes and head butts before timing your slashes and flurries to the amount of space you grant yourself. It won't all be depressingly console-like combo moves either, with you swapping around different modes of violence role-play fashion - and very much developing a fighting style of your own.
Dungeon Hero is still miles off but (in a similar fashion to the lofty ambitions of Hellgate: London), it's certainly striking in its sheer desire to recreate a tried-and-tested formula in a novel and engaging way.
As someone who's shown lethargic and terminally dull Diablo-clones on what approaches a bi-weekly basis, it's a breath of refreshingly dank and musty dungeon air in a genre that's been bereft of originality for an extremely long time.
Source - http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=170760&skip=yes
Sounds like it could be a good game, thought I'd share it with you guys.
