Mage Knight: Apocalypse Pre-E3 Previews

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Written by BuckGB on May 3rd, 2006

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The team has also been working on a better combat experience by creating smarter monsters that will not only charge at you, but will also call for help and flee when outnumbered. Fortunately, the better artificial intelligence also extends to your companions (you'll be able to recruit a maximum of four from the different character classes), who will be preset characters your first time through, though if you decide to play through a second or third time, you'll be able to specialize your followers' skills as you like. You'll be able to quickly and easily give your followers basic commands by clicking on their iconic portraits and giving them orders. Either way, Namco Bandai definitely hopes players will play through the game multiple times, especially with friends, since the game's difficulty (and the relative strength of the fantastic monsters you'll encounter) will automatically scale up with your characters' level.

A couple of the new features that were pointed out to us play more of a support role to the combat and action. For instance, the cauldron is now up and running so that players can use reagents to make potions much like Oblivion's alchemy system. The shopping system is also in place so that bodies can be looted and sold at merchants around the world.

At Namco Bandai's pre-E3 demo, we were also surprised to learn that Mage Knight: Apocalypse will have a rudimentary crafting system in place. In a nutshell, you'll be able to acquire components from enemies that you can use to create potions with a variety of effects. You do this at cauldrons that are scattered throughout the game's cities. Some enemies will also drop "Mage Stones," which will work much like the socket system in Diablo 2 -- you pop them into a weapon, and its performance will somehow improve. Once you get bored of a particular stone, you can yank it out, thereby losing it forever.

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