SpellForce - The Order of Dawn Wrap Report

Major Challenges Joining two genres without losing both target groups To succeed here, we had to make sure we really captured everything that makes an RTS an RTS and that makes an RPG an RPG. Just taking some elements would not have been enough. There were tons of problems arising where the standard interfaces of these genres are different or the typical feeling of a game differs. But we were able to find solutions for every one of these problems.

Freedom + Persistency + Continuity Each of these three points is a challenge in itself. But combining all three often turned into a nightmare.

Freedom to leave a map and return later, to abandon a quest for now and go for another poses tons of questions.

Persistency when returning to points visited earlier is something not even all the RPGs out there ensure, resulting in mostly linear gameplay, where you can't choose to go back to a location whenever you want to. All the quest states and NPC behaviours still have to match...

Continuity in terms of the player never having to save, never reaching a dead end and never having to reload is something almost never found in a complex game. It is just too hard to achieve. Yet it gives immersion a real boost never having to think about saving or reloading.

If you combine these three points, you have to come up with answers to tons of ugly questions. As one example, what happens if you run out of resources on a map? It still has to be possible to win it, after all. For another, what happens if the player abandons an important battle and leaves the map to pursue another quest first?

Creating an international look. As I already said in the changes and enhancements section, this was a major issue for us. You might already have noted that lots of games from Europe simply look different. Art is... well, art - something that is connected very closely to culture. Different countries have different aesthetics. Where the Japanese tend to use cartoony eye-watering colors, the Europeans often go for a realistic but boring palette full of grey and brown. Somewhere in between is the American taste, which has become something like an international standard. The same holds true for faces, proportions and the symbolic use of shapes and colors.

To step away from your personal preferences and go for the international standard is something that is not very easy for any artist. Only after going through research and analysis and quite a number of complete design overhauls did we finally achieve the result we have today.

Best Decisions Being innovative in terms of gameplay This is a huge risk that many publishers and developers fear. Innovation means technical risks in development, like the risk that the design simply isn't fun, or the risk that players will dislike it because it does not suit their habits. But both the RPG and the RTS genres were in desperate need of innovation at the time, and that worked out nicely for us.

Growing slowly As stated earlier, in the beginning of the project, Phenomic consisted of only four people. We did not rush growth, but made sure that we only hired people that every lead on our team felt comfortable with. All in all, we had very little fluctuation and ended up with a strong and unified team with little internal tension and a good communication flow.

Not compromising when it came to visual quality As stated above, we spent a lot of time and effort in getting the style right - and ultimately, it was worth it. SpellForce is one of the very few German games that have graphics on a par with international standards.

Key Strengths Game design Here, Volker Wertich's experience paid off handsomely. The game truly opens new directions in the RTS and RPG genres. There are so many innovations in this game that it could easily have failed completely. But in the end, SpellForce manages to innovate massively without alienating, and that is quite an achievement.

Art After some troubles at the beginning of the project when our internal art department was still awfully understaffed, this aspect of the game slowly turned into one of the game's greatest assets. SpellForce offers quite a few sights that you have never seen in any game with RTS elements, and yet the magic could be gone if just one texture, just one object or character did not match the overall quality.

For RTS players, player rewards In an RTS, you hardly ever get rewards. A cutscene now and then, but you are hardly ever rewarded with new gameplay. SpellForce is different. For fulfilling quests, you get new buildings, new units, new races and of course, new spells and items. All this is a motivation that you hardly find in any other RTS.

For RPG players, taking part in huge battles It is not just you, a five-headed party and five to10 creeps. SpellForce puts you right in the middle of battles with more than 100 units. You'll hardly ever find that in any other RPG.