Keep in mind the crappy little beginning city in Diablo 2? It is an encampment (opens in new tab), technically: Just a few 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 struggle 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), kind of.
Managing a Slavic folklore-inspired darkish fantasy city would not look easy or straightforward, thoughts you. From the look of the brand new Gord gameplay video embedded above, it is as thankless a job as working an ice age metropolis in Frostpunk, and there is a lot to it: useful resource gathering, city design, citizen administration, and on prime 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, through 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 fascinating a part of Gord just isn’t the monsters however the folks. Your topics have strengths (“preventing aptitude,” “furiosity”) and weaknesses (“exploring incapability,” “boiling blood”), in addition to various expertise in duties equivalent 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 struggle monsters. Apart from bodily injury and demise, your topics can expertise psychological injury 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 brought about the trauma. Preserving your townsfolk each alive and at the least considerably rational may very well be tough.
The pausable realtime fight, however, is “very easy,” Simply says. Characters assault robotically, and all the time use the perfect of their two assaults for the scenario. Your primary job, it appears like, is to find out one of the best ways to place your topics, though you do have direct management over spellcasting.
There are 18 spells in Gord, and so they are available utility, help, and offensive flavors. Help spells embody “Focus,” “Haste,” “Rejuvenate,” whereas Offensive spells embody “Sap,” “Entangle,” “Infest,” and different insect and disease-themed incantations—it is familiar-looking fantasy RPG stuff.
Gord will embody 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 would not spend a lot time in town constructing facet of Gord, and I am considerably extra involved in that than the adventuring—possibly it will be the topic of the following commentary video.
Covenant plans to launch Gord subsequent 12 months. Again when Gord was introduced, the studio additionally mentioned that it has one other undertaking within the works, however we’ve not heard extra about it. (It is referred to as “Challenge Perun,” in line with the studio’s web site.)
