Buzzin Games

Last night I was invited to attend a UK PR event to show some games community bloggers and reviewers EA’s latest online RTS title Battleforge, which is currently in an open beta stage. Over the course of the evening I got to chat with the lead developer of the title, as well as its marketing manager and ask them some questions over how it’s shaping up.

For those who don’t know (which would have included me until roughly 24 hours ago), Battleforge is online RTS that is doing some interesting things in the genre. Taking inspiration from MMOs as well as other fantasy, RPG and RTS titles, the game is not going to have a monthly subscription of any kind, but will support micro transactions to give you more variety in the units you can deploy. There are to be 200 ‘digital cards’ that can be played, and users can purchase additional packs, as well as buy and sell unwanted ones on the built in auction site.

Concerned that this would lead to some balancing issues, I was quickly informed that EA would not sell individual cards, and that no matter how many you have available, you will only be able to take 20 into any given battle. The extensive open beta has allowed for some fine tuning with regard to making sure that there aren’t any over-powered creatures, and it should present a fairly balanced experience.

Another area it seems to be innovating in is the pacing. Because there’s very little resource management, and you don’t have to build up bases before deploying your cards, matches are pretty action packed and over quite quickly. Depending on who I asked, I got different answers over the standard length of game with the marketing guy claiming that if matches are longer than 3-15 minutes then “someone’s doing something wrong”, while the lead developer was keen to stress that for well matched players, the game would present a significantly longer playtime, which should be a relief to old school strategy fans.

And those are exactly the types who they should be targeting. The game does not look like its aiming at the casual demographic at all, with a typically ‘dungeons and dragons’ vibe to the fantasy setting, which unfortunately borders on clichéd judging from some of the folklore created for the universe. It’s also going to be PC only because, like many serious gamers, the developers believe that consoles are not at a stage where they can do the genre justice.

Graphically, it’s looking rather nice as these screenshots attest. Apparently it will work on a pretty wide range of PCs, as well as being optimised for the newest version of Direct X. The PCs we were using weren’t the fastest around, but it played smoothly and looked nice enough, with some especially nice effects on the spells and bigger monsters.

Now, for full disclosure’s sake I should point out that I’m not a hardcore strategy gamer, so some of these potential pitfalls may be completely irrelevant to you. Nonetheless, I do have a couple of concerns about the game. Firstly its hardcore fantasy setting doesn’t feel particularly welcoming to an outsider of the genre, and despite the new gameplay dynamics the whole thing doesn’t feel particularly far removed from genre mates such as Warcraft 3 and the Age of Empires series. There’s clearly some very clever unit balancing at work (and a very neat training area where you can test your newly acquired cards against any range of enemies for tactical fine-tuning), but for the casual player it’s likely to be just too much effort to get a good experience out of it.

For the hardcore, despite the designer’s comments, I’m concerned that reducing so much of the build up play that’s always been so important to the genre might cause a little frustration. It seems entirely possible that by trying to appease both the opposing hardcore and casual markets, Battleforge may end up appealing to neither and ending up as a limited niche title.

But from my brief playtime (the former World Champion Red Alert player was there – I didn’t want to embarrass myself!), it’s clearly too early to say whether or not these concerns are founded or not.

It’s out in the UK in 8 days time and I’ve been promised a review copy, so assuming it works on my slightly-long-in-the-tooth PC, I should have my more considered thoughts on the title at a later date.