Apex
May 11, 2005, 7:18am
1
Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends is the follow-up to the critically acclaimed and popular real-time strategy game Rise of Nations. But, no, this isn’t Rise of Nations as you remember it. Designer Brian Reynolds is now following the historically themed Rise of Nations with the fantasy-themed Rise of Legends. In Rise of Legends, you’ll take control of one of four fantasy nations vying for supremacy of a fictional world in what Reynolds describes as “a war between magic and technology.” While Rise of Nations shipped with 18 historically accurate nations, there are apparently only four fantasy nations in Rise of Legends. Rise of Legends will feature a turn-based strategy component that’s similar to the conquer the world mode featured in Rise of Nations.
Selected quotes from GameSpot Preview:
Rise of Legends won’t recycle the Rise of Nations graphics engine, though, and this is the first thing you notice. In fact, it’s pretty hard to ignore, because the visuals, even at this stage, look excellent. While the first game had a 2D graphics engine that caused some to complain that it looked too much like the Age of Empires games, Rise of Legends has a brand-new 3D graphics engine that was written from scratch and is stuffed full of eye candy, such as huge clockwork cities powered by giant gears and dreamlike desert cities with glistening onion domes.
In addition to gorgeous graphics, Big Huge Games is licensing the Novadex physics engine. This will translate into realistic physics, of course, but to appreciate what this means to Rise of Legends, all you have to do is watch the chaos erupt when a towering city comes under siege. Towers collapse realistically, knocking down their neighbors, while huge pieces come crashing to Earth, smashing anything below. We even saw a humongous cannon get destroyed, and the heavy barrel fell and began rolling downhill, crushing everything in its path. It’ll also be possible to both destroy bridges and create choke points on the map.
Multiplayer is an area where the original Rise of Nations faltered a bit. It had excellent multiplayer gameplay, but it needed a better interface for matchmaking, which ended up hurting the game because the multiplayer community never took off like it should have. The good news is that Reynolds says they’ve really concentrated on improving multiplayer.
We’ll also have to wait a while for the game itself. Reynolds said they started development on it shortly after Rise of Nations shipped, and they worked on it alongside the Thrones & Patriots expansion. So the game has been in gestation for a while now, but the team is currently aiming to ship it next year. That should give Big Huge Games the time needed to finish, and it also lets publisher Microsoft stagger the release of two of the biggest strategy games on the horizon: Age of Empires III, which should ship later this year, and now Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, which should ship sometime in the first half of 2006.
Read The Complete Preview @ [RANK=“www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/riseofnationsriseoflegends/preview_6123931.html ”]GameSpot[/RANK]
Wow complete new engine, so two startegy warhorses from Microsoft coming.
This and C&C: Generals are the only strategy games that I ever liked!
C & C Genrals seriously !!! One of the worst games I ever played
Apex
May 11, 2005, 1:18pm
5
hehe…same here
Rave
May 11, 2005, 2:29pm
6
am no RON fan, i think the ability to nuke ppl and stuff is a bit too hard to digest and control the temptation, hehehe
so am looking forward to AOE 3
Nope but look at the concept here, fantasy meets science !!! MAn Dragons fighting F-16 now I defintely wanna play that…
Apex
May 12, 2005, 5:38am
8
^^ Yea…“the war between magic and technology” excites me too…
MaxX
May 12, 2005, 7:38am
9
I loved cnc ra2 and yuri’s revenge a lot!
I think its time I tried some newer strategy games
Safin
May 12, 2005, 7:39am
10
none of you guys like the caesar/children of the nile class games.
Ooo looks cool, sounds cool.
Am adding this to my wishlist.
