Crave to Announce Battle Realms

In the past Crave Entertainment has strictly been a video-game publisher, but as of tomorrow morning, the company will announce its plans to start publishing games for the PC. The first title planned for release is Liquid Entertainment's Battle Realms, a real-time strategy with stylized Japanese artwork.

As we've revealed before, the game is composed of four primary clans: the Wolf, the Dragon, the Serpent, and the Lotus. Players take on the role of Kenji, the exiled heir to the Serpent Clan. The single-player plot involves your return to the Serpent Clan and focuses on your efforts to restore it to the once-prominent stature it had enjoyed. If you choose to go about doing so in an honorable manner, your faction will begin to evolve into the Dragon Clan. If you decide to employ underhanded tactics, you'll forever remain a member of the Serpent Clan.

Battle Realm's clans are completely varied, yet all the units have some sort of counterpart that balances out their respective powers. For example, the Wolf Clan is made up of barbaric, over-the-top warriors, while the units in the Lotus Clan are much thinner, and they depend on magic as their primary means of attack. Yet, units on both sides are completely capable of holding up against one another in combat. According to Liquid president Ed Del Castillo, this type of balance is one of the critical factors in the development of Battle Realms.

Another critical element is the game's "living environment." A true line-of-sight system will be implemented for all units, meaning that a group of ninjas running through a forest will be much harder to spot than if they were in an open meadow. However, as part of Battle Realms' interactive settings, any movement through the woods will cause the crickets to stop chirping, frogs to cease their croaking, and birds to startle from their tree perches - in essence, alerting the other player(s) to the ninjas' approach.

Battle Realms' engine is completely 3D, and the game will be played from an angle slightly skewed from a standard overhead point of view. Crave will be showing the game to members of the press behind closed doors at E3, at which point we should have more information on this promising game. In the meantime, click on the two news stories linked to the right for concept artwork from the game.