King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame II Preview

The editors at PC Gamer have put online a new preview for Paradox Interactive and Neocore Games’ RPG/RTS hybrid King Arthur: The Role-playing Wargame II and, judging by the tone, they seem pretty pleased with how the game’s shaping up.

The original King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame took us all by surprise, wowing Tim Stone to the tune of 86% with a mixture of roleplaying and wargaming. Just like King Arthur, you wandered the British isles, getting into text-driven Choose Your Own Adventures. Also just like Arthur, you gained XP to clamber through a skill tree, and then hopped into battles where you were able to control your troops from a floating position in the sky. Think something along the lines of Fantasyland: Total War.

King Arthur II, confusingly, deals with the same King Arthur. The mechanics haven’t changed much, either its closest relation is still Total War. There’s even a campaign map: a beautiful, expansive thing, picked out with intricate brushwork that gives it more character than Total War’s functional views. Wander around on the campaign map, and you’ll find quests. In any other strategy game, these would be basic battles, but the collision of RPG and RTS has turned them into little choose-your-own-adventure vignettes. The example the developer gave was familiar to any RPG player: Arthur rolls up, army in tow, to a village under demonic assault. Via text options, he can either choose to engage with the forces in the name of justice, engage with the forces in the name of getting paid by the surviving villagers, or sneak on by and leave the peons to their unearthly fate. But the game’s focus on text-heavy RPG quests doesn’t mean the giant, braintaxing battles of the first game are gone. They’re very much still the focus.

In King Arthur II, those battles are now twice the size, with 3-4000 units able to take to the battlefield at once. You’ll order your little medieval men to fight against cephalopodic giants, fire-breathing dragons and mountain-sized beasts. Just like Arthur did. And they’ll keep coming. Arthur’s pain has torn a hole in Britannia and the monsters that spill forth need to be quenched at the source. Smaller monsters make up enemy units to counter your own archers, infantry and cavalry in the field, but the larger creatures are bosses. You need a huge force and repeat assaults to bring them down.