Dungeons Preview

Another hands-on preview of Realmforge’s Dungeons comes to us via GameRevolution, where we hear a bit more about the game’s RPG elements. A generous snippet:

You need to drop gold and treasure to lure the greedy heroes in, but if your monsters don’t kill them before they escape, you’ll lose the goods. The heroes themselves have different preferences (some like money, some like learning, some like fighting), so you have to drop money, books, and monsters appropriately to keep them happy and growing.

(But wait!) you cry, (Why should I keep my enemies happy?) Therein lies the most important balancing act of all: happy heroes leave their happiness behind when you kill them, which happens to be your most valuable resource of all. If you don’t help them grow by, say, giving them items or weaker monsters to grind, you won’t steal enough mojo when they die to expand enough to finish that particular level’s goals. If you get those heroes too beefy, though, they will become too strong to keep them from killing your dungeon’s heart (in other words: you lose). Basically you want to fatten them up as much as you can before the slaughter, without inadvertently allowing your cattle to trample you.

You can also take direct control of your dungeon master to help out the troops and, when the time comes, take on bosses. This is where Dungeons turns a little more action RPG, giving you third-person control and the familiar hack-‘n’-slash and spellcasting of other dungeon crawlers. There’s also a WoW-esque skill advancement system, with three skill specialization trees to develop your villain as he levels up.