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Preview Realms Beyond Gameplay Footage + Preview at RPGWatch

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Tags: Ceres Games; Peter Ohlmann; Realms Beyond

According to Ceres Games, Realms Beyond was very well received at Gamescom last month. It seems however that it was mostly well received by Germans, since they're the only ones who posted anything about it until today. There were a number of articles and interviews, but only one media outlet by the name of Gadarol has published new gameplay footage. While the developers and the site representative converse in German, the game itself is in English. It looks very cool, and much smoother than the stilted combat alpha video from earlier this year might have suggested.



But I wouldn't have posted this if all we had was a video in German. It's fallen to good old Myrthos over at RPGWatch to write the first English-language preview of Realms Beyond. It's not the most artfully written piece, but it's extraordinarily meticulous. I'm surprised to learn that the game implements Ultima VII-style world interaction, where every item in the environment can be picked up. This is no mere Temple of Elemental Evil clone. An excerpt from the preview:

One of the philosophies the developers have in making the game is that they want to restrict the player as little as possible in their exploration activities in the game. The player needs to make his or her own choices and live with the consequences of those choices, but it is needed to have the right skills in order to explore in a proper way. With the right skill you could, for example, detect herbs and harvest them. If you do not have that skill, the characters in your party will not recognize the herbs, which stops you from harvesting them.

With choices and consequences comes a branching quest system, which they use to have your choices have an impact in the world. Actually, your actions, both inside and outside of quests, can have consequences in the world. If you would destroy a goblin camp somewhere and kill all the goblins, it might be that after some time, humans will claim that spot, because the goblins are no longer there. You can make entire regions safer for humans in this way, but you can also choose not to.

And if you are lost, and like to know what quest you are doing now, you should be aware that the game does not have a quest compass or quest markers hovering over people's had or hovering anywhere else for that matter. Any information you need about quests can be read from the journal, which is automatically filled with information as you go along.

There is also a branching dialog system. Conversations can have different outcomes depending on your choices. In addition, some branches in conversations are based on your race, gender, class, or what you have done up to that point. This can also happen with merchants, who might not want to help you because they don't like humans, dwarves or something like that.

NPCs you encounter in a village will be talking to each other and you can listen to their conversations. The text they use can be just random talk, but can also depend on your previous actions. If you would have cleared that goblin camp, you might hear them talk about a group of heroes who finally killed the goblins. This again, is meant to make the world more real.

Realms Beyond will support alignment, but their their implementation of alignment is different from the D&D version, as they wanted something more intricate. They plan to use a diagram where different character traits are available and each character will align more or less with each of these traits. Like, being greedy, lazy, sneaky, open-minded, etc. As it is still in development, this could not be shown.

The way this works in the game is that if you have a greedy character and you let that character barter with a merchant, it will probably not be a success, as the greedy character will not part from money or items easily and it is very unlikely that they will come to an agreement. So perhaps a greedy person is not the best person to barter with a merchant.

Also the armor class is a bit different from D&D. In D&D you only have armor for the torso. They have changed this and distributed the armor class from D&D over different armor parts for the helmet, body, gloves and boots. If they are all of the same type then together they would give the same armor class as the armor in D&D would.

The game will support a faction system on different levels. One town is a faction, one kingdom is a faction and then there are global factions, such as a merchant gild, or factions based on a race or religion. You can align yourself with factions, but some factions are opposite to each other, so befriending one faction, could mean you become an enemy of another faction. You can for example, align with the orcs, but in order to do that you have to kill humans, who will not think kindly of you because of that. If you make a character angry, because of your actions or conversations, it will spread out to the faction that character belongs to, like the village or camp.
Realms Beyond is in pre-alpha now, and most of its features, systems, graphical assets, etc, are already in place. The main thing missing is content, which is what the Kickstarter in October will be for. Ceres are hoping to reuse the impressive engine they've built. They already have plans to release two major expansions, each one expanding the world with a full game's worth of content. As for the base game, according to head honcho Peter Ohlmann, the plan is to put it on Early Access in late 2019, with a final release in early 2020.
 

Drowed

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Watching the video, I finally figured out what I found off/strange in Realms Beyond. I think it looks beautiful, but something always bothered me a lot, and I realized what it is: shadows. Entities have (simple) shadows, but the surrounding scenery has virtually none at all during daylight scenes - or when it does, it's so subtle that it barely appears. This makes the game looks kinda "flat".

The interesting thing is that during the video, around 18:22, there is a moment when this is very visible:

0xsIkhX.jpg
knwRMP3.jpg

Here, for a fraction of a second, as the game environment changed from day to night, there was a time when the shadows became much more pronounced. For me, it's remarkable how the scene became so much more pleasing to the eye. Of course, making the whole game happen during sunrise or sunset doesn't sound like a plausible option. Maybe raise the intensity of the shadows at noon so you don't get this washed-out tone? I don't really know.
 

LootSeeker

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Two planned expansions, eh? It would be nice if those get included in one of the Kickstarter reward tiers.
 

BEvers

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Guido Henkel is answering questions about the game on RPGWatch right now! Is he back onboard for the Kickstarter?
 

Rinslin Merwind

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Looks interesting and I like most of what I saw in video, but I agree with Drowed that lack of shadows looks slightly disturbing.
Seems like another game quite directly aimed to capitalize on BG nostalgia, and while the assets seem quite good it also shows the typical roughness of most German games.
Game have a turn based combat, so I don't think it was aimed on people who have nostalgic thoughts about BG.
 

Van-d-all

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Looks interesting and I like most of what I saw in video, but I agree with Drowed that lack of shadows looks slightly disturbing.
Seems like another game quite directly aimed to capitalize on BG nostalgia, and while the assets seem quite good it also shows the typical roughness of most German games.
Game have a turn based combat, so I don't think it was aimed on people who have nostalgic thoughts about BG.
Yeah, that dialog system looks so genuinely unique. BG nostalgia doesn't equal combatfagia, honestly I'd refer to IWD nostalgia if I considered combat the key feature here.
 

Grunker

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Looks great on paper of course and I'm hoping against hope, but stuff like "You have been ambushed by hostile subjects" (???) etc. hints at a certain eurotrashyness which is of course the biggest threats against these kinds of small RPG projects.

If they do succeed with a KotC/ToEE-like combat engine coupled with interesting systems and rewards, this could be brilliant.

EDIT: ALSO WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT SHADOWS IT THIS FUCKING BIOWARE'S REDDIT OR WHAT THE FUCK
 

Roguey

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the game implements Ultima VII-style world interaction, where every item in the environment can be picked up

Enjoy your vaporware.

Additionally, it's funny how with Bubbles gone and JarlFrank preoccupied, the Watch is thoroughly beating the Codex when it comes to gamescom coverage. :negative:
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
We could probably find somebody willing to go to Gamescom if we wanted to. But with Bubbles we reached a certain high standard and it'd be sad to have to settle for...inartful writing.

If there's anybody here from Germany or the vicinity who wants to go to Gamescom every year and has good/excellent English skills (good enough that I won't have to proofread your shit) then feel free to volunteer. Best way of proving you have what it takes is submitting a review of a game or some other writing sample. That's how Bubbles got started.
 

Jrpgfan

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On paper it looks fucking sweet. It ticks all the boxes(Juicy TB combat, Skill-based exploration with survival/camping a la RoA, C&C with branching dialogues and multi-level faction system, reactive world...). I simply cannot not back this.
 
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Watching the video, I finally figured out what I found off/strange in Realms Beyond. I think it looks beautiful, but something always bothered me a lot, and I realized what it is: shadows. Entities have (simple) shadows, but the surrounding scenery has virtually none at all during daylight scenes - or when it does, it's so subtle that it barely appears. This makes the game looks kinda "flat".

The interesting thing is that during the video, around 18:22, there is a moment when this is very visible:

0xsIkhX.jpg
knwRMP3.jpg

Here, for a fraction of a second, as the game environment changed from day to night, there was a time when the shadows became much more pronounced. For me, it's remarkable how the scene became so much more pleasing to the eye. Of course, making the whole game happen during sunrise or sunset doesn't sound like a plausible option. Maybe raise the intensity of the shadows at noon so you don't get this washed-out tone? I don't really know.

Agree. Lack of proper shadows is what makes prerenreded graphics looks way worse than it should even if the assets are good. Look at this Russian sholeware screenshot

Metalheart-Replicants-Rampage%20181915,2.JPG

There are some shadows here but they are so unpronounced that you barely see them. So this high quality, beautiful asset in the middle stand out from the the rest of the screen and as a results the whole thing looks worse than it should. Shadows add depth, which helps maintain pseudo 3d look.
 

tindrli

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Dragodol
Watching the video, I finally figured out what I found off/strange in Realms Beyond. I think it looks beautiful, but something always bothered me a lot, and I realized what it is: shadows. Entities have (simple) shadows, but the surrounding scenery has virtually none at all during daylight scenes - or when it does, it's so subtle that it barely appears. This makes the game looks kinda "flat".

The interesting thing is that during the video, around 18:22, there is a moment when this is very visible:

0xsIkhX.jpg
knwRMP3.jpg

Here, for a fraction of a second, as the game environment changed from day to night, there was a time when the shadows became much more pronounced. For me, it's remarkable how the scene became so much more pleasing to the eye. Of course, making the whole game happen during sunrise or sunset doesn't sound like a plausible option. Maybe raise the intensity of the shadows at noon so you don't get this washed-out tone? I don't really know.

i must be honest with one thing.

I dont give a fuck about Shadows
 

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