Shadow Realms Previews
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We've rounded up a couple of recent and slightly less recent previews for Shadow Realms, BioWare Austin 4v1 urban fantasy online action-RPG.
Eurogamer:
Shadow Realms was born when James Ohlen, one of BioWare's most decorated talents - a lead designer as far back as Baldur's Gate 2 - was burned out having spent five years on Star Wars: The Old Republic. "I need to get my brain on something else, boss," Hickman remembers Ohlen saying. "I'm going to lose my mind." So they put their heads together and came up with Shadow Realms - a game to rekindle the unpredictable experience of a human Dungeon Master leading a group of friends through a Dungeons & Dragons adventure.
The setting came from a mixture of books, board games and an old high school daydream of suddenly producing magic where others had none. And it felt fresh, like no one else was doing it. "People have said 'I got the impression it's a bit like The Secret World'," Hickman says, "and that's zero where we were going.
"We were more going towards this idea of 'I am a person right now who's discovered magic powers'. The lore is there's this magical world of Embra and this is a fantasy world, it's magic, and they have been fighting the Shadow Legions and they're losing - humanity is dying on that planet. And using magic they've opened a portal to Earth to get help, and opening that portal, the energy of magic has leapt onto Earth, and now the humans who have latent power - now they're coming to life."
The central idea of having four players play against one powerful other came from play-testing, and from a board game Hickman won't name. It was already apparently being tested when the likes of Fable: Legends and Evolve came along. "We're playing and we were watching and it's like, 'Are you kidding me? Are... you... kidding me?' It's not like we talk to the Fable: Legends guys or the Evolve guys - I don't know if I know a single person in either one of those studios. And it's like, 'What?!'
I spent a lot of time escaping melee encounters to let our close combat specialists take the damage. A woman wielding hand-scythes seemed particularly adept at taking out the huge wolf creatures that the Shadowlord summoned. Our tank equivalent was a leather-jacketed punk with a baseball bat and a buckler. The blend of modern fashion and old-school D&D creature encounters is novel. This is a really good chance for Bioware to do something with the ideas that The Secret World squandered.
The Shadowlord graduated from an irritation to a real menace as we progressed through the three-stage dungeon. Like the heroes he's controlled from a close third-person perspective, and his abilities are restricted by cooldowns. He summons bombs and spike traps to scatter the party dodge if you hear the metallic clink cue. If you see a monster surrounded by a dark aura then it's under the Shadowlord's direct control, which means it's stronger, tougher and (hopefully) smarter than its kin. The Shadowlord can pop out of a possessed form at will to cause mischief elsewhere.
There's plenty of room to use these abilities creatively. Drop a trap on a wizard after a few consecutive dodges, and he's unlikely to have the mana to escape. Our team rushed to rescue a downed enemy at the end of a fight, only to flee in the face of a sudden firebomb. In the disarray the Shadow Lord used its scariest ability, and inhabited a summoned doppelgänger of Ms. Sickles to try and slash us up. We quickly took the clone down, but it provided a surprising impromptu mini-boss fight at the end of an encounter we thought we'd ended.
Sometimes it's just fun to be a great, big bastard. That's the main thing I took away from my rather grin-inducing hands-on session with Shadow Realms, BioWare's newly unveiled action-RPG. In it, you play 4 vs 1--good guys versus a single bad. And If you're going to be that single, big bastard, do it with spike traps and oversized, comedy bombs. That shit's just hilarious.
Don't worry: it's fun for the good guys too. Covering six potential classes, and a hell of a lot of (promised) customisation, their 'modern fantasy' blend of magic and real-world weapons makes for a hell of a fighting force. But I'm not one of those guys. I am the Shadowlord, the unseen big-bad, and in-game analogue for a good old-fashioned D&D GameMaster. It is my job to absolutely ruin things for them.
Invisible in my natural, demonic form, I run through the dungeon, just ahead of the heroes, planting booby-trapped floor-spikes in all the places I know those desperate fools will tread. I also learn that a well-placed, quickly detonating bomb is one hell of a deterrent from investigating an otherwise enticing loot drop. Possessing one of the dungeon's mooks, as I am free to do at will, I improve my grunts' effectiveness tenfold, hiding my true identity in the fray and causing all kinds of slam-pit misery by catching the co-op players between multiple demonic attacks.
