Warlock: Master of the Arcane preview
4X. Not just an Aussie beer, 4X is a genre named, or so Wikipedia tells me, by Alan Emrich in 1993. 4X, or “explore, expand, exploit and exterminate”, is the genre of Civilisation and Master of Orion, Galactic Civilisations and Sword of the Stars. It’s a genre well served by sci-fi and historic settings, but has received scant few fantasy proponents – until now. Or, well, soon.
Warlock – Master of the Arcane may seem eerily familiar on first viewing. It opens by having you define a map size and type – from a tiny archipelago to a massive single land-mass. Then it has you pick a leader – a leader who will bestow a set of benefits depending on their personality and duties. That done, you find yourself thrust into a land of darkness; a shrouded map with only a glimmer of knowledge available to you which is of the area immediately around your starting city. You send out scouts and settlers, expanding your territory and perhaps conquering nearby civilisations, your cities gradually expanding with their population and filling up with new buildings. New buildings that improve your productivity, your research and allow you to recruit new types of unit.
Clearly, Warlock’s developers are more than a little familiar with the Civilisation games, and fans of that series will feel at home here. However, while the game’s broad strokes may owe much to Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, it isn’t afraid to diverge in the details. The lack of any non-warlike approaches is perhaps the most disappointing difference, with no opportunities for cultural takeovers of neighbouring cities, and no diplomatic options whatsoever. The latter seems a particular shame to overlook given the subject matter – everybody loves a good fragile alliance in their war stories, from George R.R. Martin’s twisting, turning Song of Ice and Fire novels, all the way back to the Iliad and its squabbling Achaeans. Denying the player the opportunity to delve into the murky depths of diplomacy means losing the tension and character such options lend to the proceedings.
Meanwhile, nations have been replaced by races, each of which can be further divided amongst its leaders. So it is that the player can take on the role of a leader of men, of Greenskins, Ratmen or Undead… Each possesses a different set of soldiers to recruit, often with very different skills and abilities. Interestingly, conquering an enemy city does not transform it to suit your race. Instead, it continues to produce units of its founding species, only under your command, allowing you to put together a particularly diverse army should you so wish.
Fantasy races also mean fantasy monsters – and a lot of them. Unlike Civilisation and its ilk, the major threat in Warlock does not appear to be other civilisations so much as it is the assorted horrors roaming the land. Giant elemental beings, vampires, flying rats – all pack a devastating punch, making any encounters with them extremely dangerous. Fortunate then, that you are able to directly influence events on the ground through the casting of spells: you are, after all, a Warlock!
This is where the research in the game is directed: all buildings are available from the off (assuming prerequisite buildings have been built, and suitable terrain is under the influence of your cities to build them on), but your spell book starts out bare and must be filled over the course of the game. Unfortunately, while developing a new spell can be useful, progressing through your list of spells feels somewhat less exciting than the research games like Civilisation offer – it has the feeling of adding another weapon to your arsenal, not drastically changing your civilisation or the opportunities available to it.
Still, it is thanks to the inclusion of magic that resource management is more involved than most 4X titles, with a total of four resources to manage. This leads to a fine balancing act: food must be generated to sustain your troops and your cities; mana to fuel your spells; research points to populate your spell book and gold to hire new soldiers. Further confusing things is the fact that certain buildings make use of these resources – so a building which generates mana might consume food. And as cities can only construct a new building once per ‘level’ (as with Civilisation, cities gradually expand over time), you have to plan ahead if you don’t want your economy to come crashing down.
The game also makes use of an interesting system of interlocked planes; that is to say, the game allows you to fight through multiple maps at once linked by portals. So it is that you might be expanding your civilisation on the surface realm, while also sending war parties to raid a hellish underground landscape filled with dangerous monsters. It’s nice to see the developers taking advantage of some of the possibilities offered them by the fantasy setting.
So, what to make of Warlock? It’s early days yet, and it’s possible that certain missing elements – not least diplomacy – may make it into the final version. Even without that however, the game has promise. A Civ-lite, if you will, its use and abuse of fantasy troops gives it a distinct flavour. There’s something deeply cathartic about being able to hurl a monstrous fireball at a troublesome enemy, and the use of multiple dimensions to fight on at once adds another, well, dimension to the proceedings. And with King Arthur, Paradox have shown that they are more than capable of producing games which at first glance look like simple derivatives, but in fact offer something excitingly divergent through generous application of a theme. With luck, Warlock may be another such game; only time will tell.
-
http://www.joyofthedigital.wordpress.com/ Jeremy Thackray
