By Jim Rossignol on January 19th, 2011 at 8:23 am.
MMORTS games keeping being talked about by various beardymen, but I can only remember ever playing one, or maybe two? Anyway, they weren’t great, nor memorable, clearly. Reverie World Studios are aiming to change that with Dawn Of Fantasy, which is both beautiful and epic (see trailer below) thanks to judicious use of GRAPHICS. Woo! See how they sparkle.
The game will be released June 3rd 2011, and we’ll play it. You can try to play it now, actually, as there’s a closed beta in progress. Anyway, when I have played it we will say that I have played maybe three MMORTS games, so it’s a real genre now. Okay.
So what’s your character? A city? If it gets taken, do you lose the game? Or do you create an army, which form the cells of your ‘character’?
I didn’t get anything mechanic-wise from this trailer.
EDIT: So reading the site further, it seems there are a few game modes. The first one is basically you build a city and run it. I wonder how well that will work with so many players. Having played Nile Online, it’s location, location, location. I can’t exactly meet up with a friend and do quests or raid if he’s on the other side of the world.
The Risk-alike sounds fun, I enjoyed Rise of Nations, but if it’s an MMO, would be fun to at least have co-op “conquer the world” or a couple players play a nation. And the one that sounds like Starcraft multiplayer sounds a lot like…Warcraft multiplayer.
report
Same sort of question… in MMORPGs, when you log out, your character just up and vanishes from the world while you’re offline.
I don’t quite see that working for whole cities. Seems like any offline-time risks someone else coming and trashing/stealing your work.
report
Mankind had no problem with this, as I recall.
report
Actually, in psychology, there is a whole special field doing nothing but looking at the similarities between single humans and e.g. states. (But this can also be used at other levels like between single cells and whole bodies.)
And in behaviour, there are more similarities than differences. You won’t have any trouble at all looking at a large group of people as if it were a single organism. It behaves the same.
After all, life is just bio-mass fighting over resources. You protect your mass, you try to make it grow and improve its efficiency… and you try to take as much resources as you can hold, including matter, energy, space and time.
So yes, you could act as if you were a city. And it would come quite naturally to you. :)
report
They couldn’t have picked a more generic name. Is Company of Heroes Online not considered an MMORTS? I guess the addition of its persistent career characters makes it more of an MMORPRTSG …
report
Get this: the single-player world is called Mythador.
report
And the King is called Camalon?
report
COHO isn’t really an MMORTS.
It’s just a standard multiplayer RTS with some persistent player skills.
report
Not sure if castle siege in an RTS setting would be very fun for multiplayer.
report
Looks cool until they sweep through the streets and forests you realise everyone is 15 foot tall.
report
looks quite nice, but I wish they didn’t do that glowy over saturated thing everyone copied from fable. it was nice once, but I’ve been outdoors myself, and stuff doesn’t glow everywhere all the time.
Not in wiltshire, anyway.
Also, I am not posting comments too often. This is my first post in weeks. grrrr
report
Good old Shattered Galaxy is still the best MMORTS I have ever played. That game rocked back in the day.
report
I miss Hours of War =(
report
I could see this sort of thing working quite well if it were a DOTA style affair (that genre really needs a proper name/acronym of its own…). So rather than MMORTS, an MMO DOTA-clone. Might lead to interesting things.
report
The reference to DOTA is getting annoying. I especially dislike Valve releasing DOTA 2, and not calling it “Defence of the Ancients 2″. I believe it’s because Valve don’t actually own the trademark for “Defence of…”, but it’s still silly.
Also, I read it as “dotta”. As in “Bring your dotta to the slotta”.
report
“dotta to the slotta.” – Genius!
How about this: Mobile Base/boss Defence -> MBD?
Or perhaps strategy, instead of defence?
report
But “Dawn of Fantasy” doesn’t even mean anything! At least not unless it turns out that the twist is that this is all just the product your fevered imagination because your wife has left you and can’t pay
the mortgage and the rest of the game is a flashback explaining the events that led to this state of affairs.
I mean no one thinks they live in a fantasy world any more than they think they’re a fictional character.
I’m sorry. WIth some people it’s apostrophes, with me it’s crashing impressive sounding words together into meaningless drivel. Rant over.
Having said that it looks like it could be fun. Assuming they can get it to work, which I’m not sure is a safe bet. But best of luck to them despite the horrible name.
report
“Dawn of Fantasy” is largely banal and not very rant inducing to me. Blizzard’s writers, though? Just count the number of times they’ve used the word “shattered” in a trailer because they think it sounds cool. If only I were twelve years old again I could be a writer working for Blizzard.
report
All the names in this make me want to puke. It’s such generic nerd fantasy nonsense.
However, the genre idea is interesting, and yet I cannot image what the game mechanics will be like.
report
I wish my life was composed of continuous fly-by shots.
report
If someone managed to trademark “Dawn of” they’d be rich.
report
World of Dawn?
report
Did anyone else notice on the map @ 0:21 there’s a place named ‘NHOB’RU’?
Just sayin’
report
This thing has been in the works for years – I remember first seeing it back in 2007 or so.
It does have a sense of scale, though, that pretty much nothing since World in Conflict has matched. Something about swinging the camera down to “Lord of the Rings Battle Sequence” perspectives makes the whole thing look bigger. And honestly? If they get it working right, I’ll eagerly play it.
report
This looks cool, there are thousands of tiny wee men attacking castles – what’s not to love? I don’t understand how the MMO aspect will work as clearly a city can’t go and kill 10 boars, but if it plays like Risk with a whole bunch of players making empires at once, that could just be amazing.
Though I am concerned – if the elves disembark from the mouth of the treeman siege tower, where do they embark?
report
I couldn’t pay attention to anything in this trailer because the interlacing hurt my eyes.
Seriously, why release an interlaced video in 2011? What kind of screen do they have at [insert publisher's name] , what kind of video editing software?
For some people it’s apostrophes, for some it’s crashing impressive sounding words together into meaningless drivel, for me it’s wrong screen ratios and interlacing in videos that are not meant to be played on a SD TV…
report
Another article professing no knowledge of the 10 year old genre MMORTS. In fact, if you check out Mankind (released 1998) or Shattered Galaxy(released 2001)and compare it to the games coming forward now, you will notice how the original concept is still being aspired too – ie Online 3d persistent one shard RTS. Compare that to the MMORPG games released at the same time and the resultant redesign with WoW in 2005. And every article the same blather about newness and no previous works etc. MMORTS were about BEFORE MMORPG’ s in their present format. Simples. Educate or google before posting.
Dawn of Fantasy is yet another shinning example of folks with vision going it independant for years to bring thier dream into reality. Good to see the team getting some reward after all this effort .
report