Bear in mind the crappy little beginning city in Diablo 2? It is an encampment (opens in new tab), technically: A number of tents and wagons with a wall to maintain out skeletons. Now think about that as a substitute of a hero passing via on their option to combat the satan, you are the mayor of that terrible place. That is the state of affairs in upcoming technique sport Gord (opens in new tab), roughly.
Managing a Slavic folklore-inspired darkish fantasy city does not look easy or simple, thoughts you. From the look of the brand new Gord gameplay video embedded above, it is as thankless a job as operating an ice age metropolis in Frostpunk, and there is a lot to it: useful resource gathering, city design, citizen administration, and on high of all that, a little bit of RPG adventuring and fight.
We principally see the adventuring a part of Gord within the new 16-minute gameplay video, during which Stan Simply, a former Witcher 3 producer who’s now CEO of Gord developer Covenant, walks us via a primary quest. His city’s topics are mad about poisoned eggs within the swamp, which prompts him to take a celebration into the muck to kill “foulspawn.”
The generic-feeling quest is a little bit of a letdown, however maybe the attention-grabbing a part of Gord isn’t the monsters however the individuals. Your topics have strengths (“preventing aptitude,” “furiosity”) and weaknesses (“exploring incapability,” “boiling blood”), in addition to various expertise in duties corresponding to mining, preventing, and meals preparation. They are often gathered into events, organized in tactical formation, and clicked out into the wilds past the city to search out treasure and combat monsters. Other than bodily harm and dying, your topics can expertise psychological harm on account of all of the darkish fantasy violence they need to put up with, particularly when a relative is concerned in no matter gooey beast encounter induced the trauma. Preserving your townsfolk each alive and a minimum of considerably rational could possibly be tough.
The pausable realtime fight, then again, is “very simple,” Simply says. Characters assault routinely, and all the time use one of the best of their two assaults for the scenario. Your primary job, it seems to be like, is to find out one of the simplest ways to place your topics, though you do have direct management over spellcasting.
There are 18 spells in Gord, and so they are available in utility, assist, and offensive flavors. Help spells embrace “Focus,” “Haste,” “Rejuvenate,” whereas Offensive spells embrace “Sap,” “Entangle,” “Infest,” and different insect and disease-themed incantations—it is familiar-looking fantasy RPG stuff.
Gord will embrace a marketing campaign with “hand-crafted” maps that inform a narrative, in addition to a customized state of affairs mode, the place the world’s dimension and useful resource richness are customizable. The brand new video does not spend a lot time in town constructing side of Gord, and I am considerably extra considering that than the adventuring—perhaps it will be the topic of the following commentary video.
Covenant plans to launch Gord subsequent yr. Again when Gord was introduced, the studio additionally mentioned that it has one other venture within the works, however we have not heard extra about it. (It is referred to as “Mission Perun,” in accordance with the studio’s web site.)
