The Dwarves Kickstarter Launched

The Dwarves, a role-playing game based on the fantasy novel series from German author Markus Heitz, was announced back at the end of July and demoed at Gamescom. Now, the developers at King Art Games, who are already familiar with Kickstarter thanks to their successful campaigns for Battle World: Kronos and The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, have launched another one for this promising title.

The game is poised to be a story-driven RPG, with real-time party-based combat, a set protagonist and a large number of unique companions, a vast game world, and plenty of side-quests and tough decisions. None of this sounds particularly unconventional, but there are a few unique wrinkles to the combat and story:

Our Crowd Combat System uses physical parameters like mass, dimension and momentum of individual characters to calculate a realistic flocking behavior. If an enemy in the front is hurled into an ally behind him, the information instantaneously travels across the entire group and causes them to react accordingly – everyone is affected.

That results in a very natural and cool-looking behaviour for the whole enemy crowd. Everybody pushes and shoves, squeezes and stumbles all at the same time.

You can, and have to, make use of this (physical chaos) to hold your own against huge enemy hordes. Additionally each hero has a range of individual attacks available that you can combine into powerful combos.

But how does combat feel besides all the physics-based havoc? Think about an RTS like Warcraft 3. In some missions you play only one (or a couple) of powerful heroes. These heroes fight against enemy minions without your help (auto-attacks), but you are the one who moves the characters and who chooses when to use which of their powerful special abilities. These abilities have a cool down, so you have to switch between your heroes to make the most out of them.

Add combos and the environment into the mix and you get an idea of what the combat feels like. You’re in control of an elite group of fighters that can fight for themselves if you’re not around, but who need you to close the deal.

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You play as Tungdil, a dwarf who was raised among humans and gained his knowledge of the five Dwarven Kingdoms primarily from books. He sets out on a grand journey across (Girdlegard) – a conglomeration of kingdoms that’s now more dangerous than ever.

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It is important for us to stay true to the books whenever possible. But at the same time Markus gave us the freedom to change things if necessary and the game offers a range of new adventures and side quests a few of them written by Markus Heitz himself.

The developers have already secured most of the budget for the game and are at the point where they can show gameplay footage, so the $260,000 funding goal for the Kickstarter serves mostly to finish development with the game’s intended scope and presumably also get additional feedback from the backers that pledge for the beta and alpha versions of the game.

That said, they have also said that they’d be happy to implement additional features and increase the scope if the Kickstarter campaign surpasses the funding goal:

We’ve been able to acquire a large portion of the development budget ourselves. But we need your support to secure funding and get all planned features into the game.

If we surpass our funding goal we would be happy to implement additional features and content.

I’ve heard some very good things about The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, KING Art Games already has gameplay, a clear vision and two successful Kickstarter campaigns, the game is based on a proven property, and nothing that’s been said seems overly ambitious. I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is a safe bet because no Kickstarter campaign is, but everything seems in order and I’m personally interested to see how The Dwarves will shape up.