Dragonshard Designer Diary #2 - Role-Playing and Strategy

Real-time strategy games now mean more than simply collecting resources, building up a base, churning out an army of military units, and rushing your opponent. Recent games have gone beyond this formula, and Dragonshard, from developer Liquid Entertainment and publisher Atari, will try to add even more unique features, like the traditional dungeon-hacking you might expect from a role-playing game and many unique strategic features, like different types of companies for your armies. Warning: as you might expect from a game based on the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy license, there will also be at least one elf in the game. In this designer diary, creative director Ed Del Castillo shares non-elf-related details on how the new game will incorporate elements of role-playing and strategy.

Dungeons & Dragons Meets Real-Time Strategy

By Ed Del Castillo
President/Creative Director, Liquid Entertainment

Hi there. Welcome to episode two of our ongoing series of designer diaries for Dragonshard, a real-time strategy game set in the new Dungeons & Dragons campaign world of Eberron. In the previous diary, I went over our dual-layer play feature. This time around, we'll discuss how D&D works with real-time strategy. This is going to be a more philosophical discussion than last time, but hopefully we'll make it interesting.

Dungeons and Dragons was originally a role-playing game that was played with paper and dice. When it came time to translate that into a computer game experience, the most salient points of the game experience were replicated, meaning that players spent most of their time running around fighting monsters, collecting loot, and gaining experience in order to "level up" their characters and improve their abilities. Although that experience has been refined over the years, the core experience remains the same.

On the other hand, real-time strategy games have been around for quite a while too, and they have their own set of conventions. In real-time strategy games, you typically gather resources, build an economic center, build up an army, and go out conquering your enemy. They're typically fast paced with a good deal of "on-the-fly" strategy born of the many different types of soldiers you could build. This has also undergone years of refinement and even some reinvention.

With Dragonshard, we're trying to make a bold effort to combine the exploration and character growth of the D&D universe with the fast-paced multisoldier manipulation of a real-time strategy experience. When Atari first approached us about doing this game, we knew it was going be a challenge. But we also knew that if we rose to that challenge, the reward would be a gameplay experience that no one had ever had before.

So, we sat down and made two lists. The first list was the D&D list. It had all the features that we love and/or expect from a D&D experience. Because D&D has, up until now, been considered an RPG experience, sometimes the list read more like a list of what we liked or expected from an RPG, but that was OK. It differed in other areas, like "classic D&D monsters such as gelatinous cubes, bugbears, and so on." That was something that not every RPG had. Only D&D games had that. The list also included gaining experience, improving your characters, "dungeons" and other treasure-rich areas to explore, exploration of the world, the telling of a story, and so on. When we finished that list, yep, you guessed it--the real-time strategy list began.

Created the same way as the D&D list, the real-time strategy list produced very different results: fast pace of play, an economic aspect and a military aspect, larger numbers or soldiers fighting at once, specific roles for soldiers that would create strategy through soldier combinations and win/lose matchups, and the ability to change or improve your combination of forces over time. Several other great real-time strategy points also came out of there, and that's when the magic really began.

Gaining a Level

Looking at both lists, a new style of gameplay began to emerge for Dragonshard, a game that had a fast pace, with several characters to control. They would gather resources and experience, and they could be improved in a "level up" kind of way. The game would let you establish an economic base on the map and then use it to explore the world with your armies. The game would let you fight other players, but also gelatinous cubes and bugbears. It would allow for the gathering of loot and going underground to find the most heinous of monsters and coolest of treasures. Lastly, it would move through with a story that players could experience, or not, as they chose. It was something we had never seen before.

We took many of the races and classes that the D&D player would expect from a D&D game and gave them a centralized focus that would allow them to function well in a real-time strategy environment. We flattened the traditional tech tree and gave players the D&D-like freedom to build soldiers in whatever order they wished. We created cities for players to have an economic base of operations, but we gave them walls for free so that they would be able to spend time exploring the map without worrying about being attacked in the early part of the game by their opponents.

It was great! What we thought was going to be a really tough job turned into the most fun we'd ever had. Thinking about a real-time strategy game through D&D-tinted glasses created all sorts of new possibilities and opportunities for new ways to play the game. In almost every case, we came up with features that felt newer and fresher than anything we'd seen before. All-new ideas bubbled to the surface. We felt empowered to do things that had never been seen before. It was great. Let me give you an example.

We wanted to include the concept of gaining experience into the game. It's a core part of the D&D experience so it needed to be there. The problem was that in previous real-time strategy games that have tried to incorporate the concept, experience gets lost or just isn't fun. This is mainly because the life span of a real-time strategy character is much shorter than a D&D character. As a result, players feel that worrying about leveling their characters is pointless because they die too quickly, and if by some twist of fate they are to get to high levels, the enemy will just concentrate fire on those high-level characters to kill them first. Not a very satisfying experience.

Still, we wanted experience in the game, so after much debate and hours of brainstorming and later refinement, we came up with our current system. Rather than allotting experience individually, we created global experience. Every character/soldier that players fight with or do anything with accumulates experience that goes to the global pool. Players can then allocate that experience however they wish.

Since we had created centralized classes of soldiers that players can build (dwarf barbarian, human paladin, and so on), when players bought a level for a class, all members of that class would go up, and even if they all die, all soldiers of that class would henceforth be trained at that level. So when players buy "level two" for their barbarians, all their barbarians will come out at level two from there on out. The concept brings together "leveling" and experience concepts from D&D while making it rewarding for a real-time strategy player and enabling a faster pace of play.

Marching forward in this newly empowered state, we're putting together a game that we feel is the first true blend of real-time strategy and RPG. The D&D world is rich with stuff that has never been done before in a real-time strategy game. Not only does the D&D world bring richness of character, environment, and experience to the table, but it has let us bring all-new features to real-time strategy.