Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising - Hero Camp - Game Play Hands On

[Kodylan]

Last Thursday we got invited out to a special event thrown by Perpetual, dubbed the first of what Chris McKibbin hopes is an annual "Hero Camp."

The Hero Camp is essentially a Hands On for their upcoming game, Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising. I've written up an article on my experience from the play session, that you can find here: G&H: Hero Camp - First Hand Play Test | Curse

This is also a chance to plug our new site design, obviously, as you'll be taken to the public beta page of curse.com for the article. If you check out screenshots or videos, make sure to open them in a new tab/window, as it'll take you to curse-gaming.com instead since the article was written for the live site.

But honestly, I think it looks a hell of a lot better on our new website, which is why I'm showing it off. The formatting alone blows the older site away.

There's not a whole lot of earthshaking info here, but we have the first of what we hope to be a series of video interviews with Perpetual developers coming up soon, so I'll make sure to post about that when it's uploaded.

[QforQ]

So, does the game suck or not? :P

From a podcast I listened to they said it wasn't anything special...just a lot of hype but it's really just another fantasy MMO with a Rome skin. What do you think, Kody?

[Kodylan]

I think it's ok. It's certainly not the next WoW at this point, but it's not Vanguard either. The minion play will basically make or break the game, so depending on how they balance it out will decide how the game fares.

[Dreven]

I think this game is going to do pretty well myself, for a few reasons. First, small guilds and or groups of friends will be able to experience the highest level content in the game without having to worry about finding tens of people to get a group going. Essentially, you get the big group feel without having to put up with 20 other people all the time rolling on loot, and generally annoying you to death. Second, It just looks like it will be fun; from the animations, to the cool looking boss mobs with animated special abilities, to the God specific super abilities, to the chance of getting all the loot from an encounter(I'm assuming minions won't ninja ). The whole idea of mixing and matching minions to find the perfect group setup will also be a nice mini game in itself and or add some strategic challenge.
I think it will be a good diversion from all the other MMOs coming out, plus the ancient Roman mythology setting will likely get them a lot of people who are more into that type of thing.

[Kuriin]

I think the game looks good. First real fighting attacks and such.

[xregg]

Gametrailers.com - Gods & Heroes - Camp Trailer HD

[Kuriin]

God, I want to play that now. I love greek/roman mythology.

[tad10]

That was a pretty sweet trailer. My interest has gone from zero to about five and a half.

Edit:

Is it going to be similar to some of the newer MMOs where most of the game is instanced?
Our stance has always been that we will never "instance for the sake of instancing." This means that while we do have areas of the game where instances are required, the majority of the game is open and encourages player interaction.

Six and a half.

[Miele]

Wasn't this game the one where you could hire tons of minions and just play with a few friends in big raids?

That and the Roman/Greek mithology alone could sell me the product

EDIT: I read the article. One thing is not clear. I have 4 friends, we all hit the level cap, we put our 20 minions and us 5 in the field. Is this the max raid size?

[tad10]

Originally Posted by Miele

Wasn't this game the one where you could hire tons of minions and just play with a few friends in big raids?

That and the Roman/Greek mithology alone could sell me the product

Yeah apparently they have 40 man raids which can consist of either 40 PCs and no minons or 5 PCs each with 8 minons or some combination of PCs+ Minons that adds up to 40 (I gather from the FAQ that there you can control up to 8 minons).

Be interesting to see how it plays out -- not sure if I'll buy at launch but I'll def follow any threads on it to see what the verdict is.

Edit: From the curse writeup

And of course, what is Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising without the highly touted minion system? This was touched on and even experienced by the folks attending the event. Minions are a core feature of the game, and you first gain access to them at level 5. There are more than 121 different minion characters to gather through various means, including myth creatures, so you can think of collecting your minions as a sort of Pokemon mini-game within the overall G&H game itself. What exactly minions offer is hard to describe; if you're RTS savvy, you'll enjoy being able to micro-manage your minions.



These are no pets, my friend; think of them as NPC's fighting for you - all with their own special AI and abilities - so if you don't enjoy the RTS aspect of it, worry not - your minions do have a mind of their own. There will also be NPC's scattered throughout the game that you can visit to purchase better equipment for your minions, so that they aren't fighting in level 1 duds at level 40.

The Key to Single Group "Raids"

Squads introduce an entirely new layer of play into the MMOG genre, and go hand-in-hand with minions. They're made up of multiple minions; there's a cap for the number of minions you can have at a single time in your squad - starting with 1 at level 5, and eventually maxing out at 4 when you reach the level cap of 40.

So I guess max is 4 not 8.

Edit2:
And one minion is available now.
Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising - PC Gamer Promotion

[Kodylan]

A quick comment on minions. The 4 minions per player is the cap right now, but they *did* say they can set it dynamically based on area/instance, so if they wanted to introduce a new zone that allowed you to have 10 minions, they could. The 5 players is group size - they didn't really talk about raids. One of the main goals with the minion system from our talks with Perpetual(both at the camp and at other times - our office is pretty much right across the street from theirs) is that they want to not only add a new layer to solo game play, but this also adds the ability to create some truly epic-feeling single group content beyond what's currently available in other games.

And I'm sad that their blooper reel video from the Hero Camp wasn't on the EPK or anywhere else. It was pretty awesome.

[tad10]

Good to know. Are there any videos of the UI anywhere?

[Venjenz]

Wow...minions.

It's sorta like that whole "hired men at arms" thing I was talking about in the Next Great MMO Open discussion thread.

Not that this was some awesome new idea of mine, but this game has my interest for sure with the concept of solo players controlling minion groups and a group of 5 players being able to field a 25 man raid. Nice to see that developers are thinking of new ways to approach what was becoming a pretty stagnant genre in terms of gameplay.

Definitely keeping my eye on this game.

[Kodylan]

Originally Posted by tad10

Good to know. Are there any videos of the UI anywhere?

We've got some video footage of the Hero Camp we're putting together. I'll have to ask Nimloth what all he captured, but there should definitely be some shots of UI in the video. He basically went around recording a bunch of different people at the Hero Camp while they were playing.

[tad10]

Anyone have an extra beta key for this?