Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard [PC]

Real-time strategy with a Dungeons & Dragons spin? Gelatinous cubes swallowing whole soldiers in one sudden, gloppy distension? Nasty Beholders giving the evil eye (literally) to entire adventurer parties? If any of this gets your polyhedral die rolling, you'll be happy to hear about Atari's forthcoming Dragonshard -- it's looking like one of the most promising things to happen to video game translations of the D&D world.

Set in the world of Eberron (home to many a Forgotten Realms miniatures campaign), Dragonshard will offer three playable factions: the magic-oriented Dark Elf/underground creature alliance, a technology-oriented human/elf/dwarf collective, and an all-new lizard folk race. These scaly guys employ bizarre "siege creatures" consisting of huge battle turtles, war drakes, Pteradon "bombers" and, naturally, dragons. Each faction has basic soldiers, captains, and the obligatory high-fantasy hero leaders (from a selection of four distinct heroes for each side). While only one hero can lead a mission at any given time, each one of them can be individually equipped with newer, better weapons or items as missions are completed.

The presence of heroes on the battlefield provides the troops under their control with two levels of benefits: Firstly, any units that are close to the hero will receive their bonuses. Secondly, specific units that perform a related function will get a bonus regardless of their position relative to the hero; for example, lower-level magic users will find their powers increased under the leadership of a hero sorcerer, or healers serving under the leadership of a priestess hero will heal at an improved rate, etc. The higher a hero's leadership skills, the more soldiers they'll be able to lead into battle.

Dragonshard wouldn't be much of a D&D-faithful game if there weren't experience points to be gained at every turn, would it? Heroes themselves do not gain experience points -- understandable, as they're powerful enough! -- but lower level characters can. By spending a faction's accumulated experience between missions, players can improve the quality of their soldiers and adventurers. As is the case with certain other RTS games, a single "upgrade" results in the continual production of higher-level troops from that point forward.

It also wouldn't be much of a D&D game if the whole affair was solely military maneuvers. Dragonshard will break down to about half real-time strategy and half role-playing game elements (story-based quests, boss-monsters, etc.).

Dragonshard environments are detailed, with ambient weather effects bolstered with a multilayer texturing scheme. In a demo mission we saw, an adventure party was dispatched to hunt down Bugbears that had attacked a village in a snowy pass. Once the creatures had been chased off, they took cover in a series of underground caverns, making for a good segue into another of the game's key features -- multi-level combat and exploration, both above and below ground.

Dragonshard goes a long way toward eliminating the predictable tech-tree/base-building/early-rushing scramble. As players create structures, they automatically gain defensive assets such as walls, archery towers, and the like. These freebie defenses are just durable enough to gut the early offensive rush, and will hopefully put the focus on real strategy (including careful coordination of surface and subterranean level operations).

When a player is obliged to descend into the subterranean depths of dungeons and other assorted catacombs, his army automatically "packs in" with its current leader and re-forms in a scaled-down party for a good old-fashioned underground dungeon-crawl. And there are some really nasty things from the roster of D&D's classic Monster Manual down there, too.

The wickedest and most impressive one we've seen so far was the Beholder -- if you non-geeks out there haven't had the pleasure, it's a big, staring eye with a forest of further, smaller eyestalks on its "head," each throwing its own deadly magical rays. (Just to make things more difficult, each stalk has its own AI routine and field of fire.) A single ugly one of these ungodly Visine-junkies is easily capable of taking on an entire underground adventure party.

We'll say it again: Dragonshard looks like the most promising event on the D&D video game franchise's horizon so far. The game is slated to ship in Spring -- until then we'll keep our, um, eyestalks peeled for dispatches from the Eberron badlands.