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Preview Watch some goblins get barbecued in Realms Beyond

Infinitron

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Tags: Ceres Games; Realms Beyond

Realms Beyond, Ceres Games' rightful heir to the Chaos Chronicles throne, was announced back in December. Since then, the game's development blog has received a bunch of updates promising all manner of nostalgic oldschool RPG goodness. Most of them have been a bit on the vague side though, and there have been no new screenshots or footage since the game was announced. That changes today with the release of a short but sweet gameplay video, described as a preview of the first playable iteration of the combat system. It shows a group of goblins being fried by a mage's fireball. Here's the video along with the accompanying development update:



We haven’t posted much lately because we focused all our efforts into developing the first playable iteration of the combat system. This combat prototype (or let’s say Combat Pre-Alpha) will include almost every action and spell of the classes Fighter, Barbarian, Cleric, Wizard, Ranger and Rogue (about 100 actions and spells in total).

Along with animations, character models and visual effects, we already implemented the sound for various weapons, spells and hit effects.

Until we can show you a detailed insight of the combat system, this little preview video will give you a first impression of the Fireball spell at a higher character level. Those poor Goblins never had a chance and died many deaths during the development.

Except for the combat grid, we completely hid the user interface because it’s still work in progress.

Relatedly, one of the more interesting updates from last month describes how Ceres intend to deal with the problems of engaging in turn-based combat against large enemy groups such as these. I quote:

In an earlier post (Combat System #1) that discussed the combat system of Realms Beyond, we wrote that from the beginning, our aim was to make a turn-based game. However, we also mentioned that we carefully evaluated other variants, such as the Real-time-with-Pause (RtwP) combat system of Baldur’s Gate in particular. We are grown-ups that make games in an industry that still focuses mostly on kids as their key demographic and most of us were still teenagers when turn-based RPGs vanished and made room for the new era of real-time games.

Even if the pros and cons of different systems sometimes come down purely to personal taste, we believe that no one would argue that turn-based games tend to be less “action-packed.” It is the nature of the beast. Occasionally, combat can become a drag, as you are forced to wait until every goblin, kobold, and what-not-minion has finished its turn. In large crowds, this can become particularly aggravating. Watching opponents move around the battlefield is kinda boring and it is the reason why some turn-based games have sped up movement, or rather the respective movement animations, to the brink of sheer ugliness.

Players are eager to see their characters’ turns and they are also excited to see whether the main opponent will kill their party during his next turn. And while there is something intensely gratifying in wiping out 12 goblins with a single fireball, no one really cares to watch each of them move and attack, one after the other. In fact, frequently, some of us were tempted to reload and see whether their wizard has a higher initiative this time around, just so he could get rid of the masses of little annoyances in one swoop before combat starts in earnest. So, what to do? It was this particular problem that made us sit down and think about possible solutions to handle crowd movement in combat for less relevant opponents.

The Temple of Elemental Evil attempted to tackle the problem with a menu option that, once activated, allowed enemies within the same initiative group to move simultaneously. It turned out to create cool packs of hobbling and wobbling goblins but, as mentioned above, did not always help. In a battle with a small number of semi-bosses that happened to be in the same initiative group, say, a giant, a werewolf and a demon, you DO want to anticipate their attacks separately. Not to mention that it looks somewhat awkward, if not to say, nonepic, when these individuals go through their moves all at the same time like synchronized swimmers.

Our approach was to properly categorize opponents. Boring minions go in one group, more epic enemies are treated separately. We decided unilaterally, that our level designers would be responsible for choosing which opponents should be grouped together and which ones shouldn’t. Thus, the concept of ‘minion crowds’ was born and we found the idea to provide several, additional advantages.

Rather than rolling the initiative individually for each opponent and then grouping them up accordingly, we reversed the approach and instead group them up beforehand and then roll their initiative only once, as a group. This prevents a group of minions to ‘spread out’ over the initiative list and act individually—a case that the The Temple of Elemental Evil approach didn’t prevent.

Further, we are adding some additional ‘identity’ to the members of such a group that goes beyond the simple fact that they act simultaneously. This means that we are tweaking their AI to make sure they stay together and all attack the same target whenever possible. Not only does this seem more natural, but we also think that it might add to the strategic depth of our combat system—and even if it won’t, it will still be a great deal more atmospheric. As an additional side effect, it will give the player the opportunity to predict a mob’s behavior to some extent. As far as we’ve implemented this, (grouping and movement already look good, but the accompanying AI is still very basic) our idea feels great and we hope we’re well on our way to make turn-based combat a little more appealing.
It looks like things are starting to come together. JarlFrank tells us that Realms Beyond will be making its way to Kickstarter later this year, so I guess that's when we'll see the game in a big way.
 
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Are you going to make walls disappear when characters are behind them in combat? Fighting in that tunnel without this would be pretty annoying.
 

Deathsquid

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Hopefully animation speed is adjustable. That speed is fine for an encounter or two but overall that is just way too slow.
 

JarlFrank

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Hopefully animation speed is adjustable. That speed is fine for an encounter or two but overall that is just way too slow.

Yes. Press space to speed up all combat animations, both of your own dudes and the enemy!

why is always a fireball?

Because

N_Fireball.jpg
latest


is cooler than

1cb7c60097eb050b55d65ebbb2a7cb61e8e4f259_full.jpg


Always pick the cool wizard spells for the previews!
 

ArchAngel

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Now that you mention cool spells I am still waiting for cool Lightning Bolt spell. BG had it kind of useful with bouncing off walls but you could never really use that to aim it for maximum carnage, more often than not you roasted your own people with it.
I hope we can get a good one from you.
 

JarlFrank

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Are you going to make walls disappear when characters are behind them in combat? Fighting in that tunnel without this would be pretty annoying.

Characters will be transparently rendered through obstacles.

Now that you mention cool spells I am still waiting for cool Lightning Bolt spell. BG had it kind of useful with bouncing off walls but you could never really use that to aim it for maximum carnage, more often than not you roasted your own people with it.
I hope we can get a good one from you.

The fact that we're turn based already makes targeting and not frying your own dudes that much simpler :)

(Seriously, I rarely used area effect spells in the BG games once a combat had started, because it was impossible to aim the things properly)
 

Elex

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Hopefully animation speed is adjustable. That speed is fine for an encounter or two but overall that is just way too slow.

Yes. Press space to speed up all combat animations, both of your own dudes and the enemy!

why is always a fireball?

Because

N_Fireball.jpg
latest


is cooler than

1cb7c60097eb050b55d65ebbb2a7cb61e8e4f259_full.jpg


Always pick the cool wizard spells for the previews!
then don't complain if mage and wizard are only "AOE ranged damage dealer" instead of master of arcane magic, with varied and usefull effects.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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then don't complain if mage and wizard are only "AOE ranged damage dealer" instead of master of arcane magic, with varied and usefull effects.

Don't worry, we've got plenty of varied and useful effects, but spells like shield, sleep, blindness, deafness, detect humanoid/animals/undead, charm, despair, hold person, prayer, displacement, silence, cause fear, exhaustion, barkskin, haste, slow, etc etc just aren't as cool to show off in a short teaser video than a fireball is.
 

Goral

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Why is it in slow motion? Please don't make combat even slower than what was in DOS, make it much faster instead.
 

JarlFrank

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Why is it in slow motion? Please don't make combat even slower than what was in DOS, make it much faster instead.

Read a few posts up, I already said "Pressing space speeds up the combat animations". You can toggle them to be slow or fast, the video is slow for the sake of being showy, actual in-game you can decide the speed yourself.
 

Goral

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the video is slow for the sake of being showy
Don't see how the slow-mo makes it "showy" besides the fact that the video lasts 23 seconds instead of 5 s. In the next video you should show the audience that the combat can be faster.
 
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Just wanted to point out that there are four BG-clones coming out this year (or next):

1- PoE 2
2- Black Geyser
3- Pathfinder
4- Realms Beyond

Dats a spicy meat-a-ballah.
 

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