Strategy Gaming Online - Previews : Braveheart

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PREVIEWS

Braveheart

DEVELOPER : Red Lemon
PUBLISHER : Eidos
RELEASE DATE : Aug. 1999

And, in theme with the re-opening of the Scottish Parliament for the first time in almost 300 years, we offer our Braveheart preview!

Summary: This game has exciting potential!

It’s a dark, moonlit night. The highland peaks gleam ghostly in the distance. In the shadows lurk a half-dozen desperate men, eager to begin the night’s business. They breathe heavily, knowing that before the night is over, good men will probably be dead. A sleeping highland hamlet lies before them, villagers sleeping peaceful and unaware. Its storehouse of valuable weapons is the prize. A whispered burst of orders from their leader Stephen Feherty and the raiders are off.

Moving stealthily through the darkness, one of the raiders moves off to the left while the rest move in a wide circle to the right toward the storehouse. The guards, huddling behind buildings in the town, don’t see the shadows slipping silently around them.

Off on the left, a flicker of light briefly illuminates a raider scout as thatch catches slowly, then bursts into open flame, smoke columning toward the sky. But he doesn’t see it – he’s lighting the next hut, and the next, and the next. The guards, finally noticing something amiss, charge toward the disturbance. Five huts are roaring blazes as they reach the scene, but the culprit has moved on, and the now-telltale flicker shines from another part of the town. The guards sense a long chase this night.

Meanwhile, the main body runs quietly to the now-unguarded stronghouse. Breaking in, they quickly ransack the building. (The town’s name is Glenlivet – sure they’re searching for weapons….) As they come out of the half-timber building, they are surprised by the returning guards. The blood of the arsonist, caught and chopped down like the dirty dog he was, drips from bared blades. The raiders have no way out – they’re trapped like rats in the storehouse they so carefully contrived to enter.

In moments, it’s over. The overwhelming number of guards seals their fate. Feherty and his raiders die where they stand.

And that’s just the demo, folks.

Braveheart is a game based on – of course – the movie "Braveheart" starring Mel Gibson, in which you can lead any of 16 different Scots clans in a novel melange of strategy and RTS combat for control and dominance of the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands. At its heart, BH is a basic 4x-strategy game – build an empire, conquer your friends. However, it immediately departs from this pat formula by resolving the combat as not only a RTS system, but with a 3d-accelerated, oblique view, down & dirty combat engine. These aren’t sprites moving across the screen to bravely do battle – these are fully 3d-modeled, skeletally animated figures that swing swords, spray blood, and die like heroes.

Before now, there was a practically tangible wall between the players of (commonly) cerebral, turn-based strategic games (The Old Guard) and the typically younger players of the more visceral, action oriented Real-Time Strategy (RTS) titles. Grognards would almost apologize to their peers when uttering any sort of compliment to a RTS game. The RTS players similarly sneered at the stodgy, boring, reflex-impaired turn-based players. Red Lemon is attempting the impossible: in a single game, to wed the complex, detailed political strategic simulation available in a turn-based game with the engaging action and heart-pounding excitement of a RTS.

It may sound impossible, but from the preview they are clearly well on their way. There are so many novel and just plain interesting features of this game, it’s hard to list them all. For example, the strategic game is played on an Imperialism-like irregular zone map, showing clan strongholds, caravan paths and areas of dominance. It’s at this scale that supplies are managed, strategic movement planned, caravans dispatched, and the clan laborers assigned to their jobs.

But dispatch a caravan, and other players with spies in the area are able to see you’ve just sent several wagons without guards and may decide to intercept this vulnerable plunder. If he sends troops, when they intersect the caravan, they do so on a beautiful and detailed 3d-accelerated world. And this is NOT some fractally-generated random terrain. Nope – they’ve digitized contour and terrain information for ALL OF SCOTLAND from satellite data and every scene is an accurate representation of the geography of the real world! For example, the demo mission takes place in Glenlivet – and from the pictures I could find on the web, it sure SEEMED like the mountains were in the right place. (I think the demo is actually a little east of Glenlivet - from Coryhabbie Hill on the left, to Car an t-Suidhe on the right, possibly.) Want to see what the terrain is like from Loch Ness to Edinburgh? Walk from one to the other. (Although you may want to look around first, as the developers tantalizingly suggest that there be odd reports coming from around the Loch!*) Of course, do this without proper protection and the Campbells (the dogs!) (or the Camerons, or the Scotts, or, well, you get the idea) will likely cut you up and leave you to the wolves.

* a little aside – my computer has apparently gotten ‘into’ this Scottish thing; it autocorrected the phrase "there are odd reports" to "there be odd reports" – no kidding!

Further, the bump mapped texture of the ground gives a good "feel" for real grass. The scattered trees add a lot to the reality, by breaking up the "infinite sightlines" common to most 3d outdoor-based games. Finally, EIDOS features pages advise that the full suite of weather (what would Scotland be without crappy weather, really?) will also be in play AND have an effect on the luckless Scots outside to suffer it: rain will demoralize troops, snow will be slippery and harm them, etc. As the game progresses, seasons will change as well. Buildings (from rude huts to 7000-poly castles) have also received the detail treatment – they will accurately display their states of repair and disrepair over the course of the game, and are likewise beautifully textured. Hundreds of towns are represented in the game – enough to keep the most aggressive raider busy for at least a short while…

Your men, hardy and strong, receive no less attention. Each figure is a multilayer entity, with muscles on a skeletal structure, and skin on the muscles for ultra realistic appearance AND movement animations. A look at one of the concept-art pages for the skinning artists shows that a lot of effort has gone into presenting an authentic "ragtag" appearance to Scottish troops. The English – the hated English – are noteworthy for their historically accurate uniform appearance. Even the horses for the cavalry – yes, there’s cavalry in this game – are skinned really well. Figures have multiple levels of detail depending on distance, with up to 700 polys per figure. (This is cutting edge – Quake 3 Arena’s figures are arguably the bleeding edge of 3d representation, and are max 1000.)

Certainly, terrain and accurate figures like these have been done as beautifully (in Myth 2, for example) but what’s interesting to me is the scale in Braveheart. Red Lemon is in effect taking the combat from Myth2 but scaling it up to hundreds of figures. Yes, I did say hundreds. Any RTS veteran will quickly acknowledge that managing such numbers requires a deft hand at the controls, a great situational awareness, and most importantly a deep and effective understanding of the various formations and groupings. If this pans out to the scales they are talking about, this will be the first (AFAIK, anyway) realistic representation of true medieval combats ever. No more "this figure represents ten guys" – this is reality, baby. I think LOTR2 and others have done it with sprites to some degree, but in every case I can recall of they’ve got maximum figure limits after which scaling occurs where 1 figure represents more than one individual. BH will of course have to have SOME sort of practical limit on the number of figures in an engagement, but with the numbers quoted – and shown in screen shots – we could be simulating realistically sized battles. Other game designers look to me working on similar products in different contexts like Japan, but it appears that BH will be the first out of the gate. That’s pretty exciting.

The gameplay (this taken from the literature, as the demo only allowed a single town raid) is to be open ended. You are not pinned to a single strategic goal (uniting Scotland or something) but can basically do whatever you want. Want to try to create successful clan based on trade? Well, you can certainly try (although the guys wandering around the place with claymores might get in your way). If you think Scotland’s a drag, invade Northern England! The game will support 12 player multiplay (according one fan site, it says only 8, that may be outdated), so brace yourself for some interesting multi-directional intrigue.

If Red Lemon can make the rest of the game work as smoothly and immersively as the narrow experience of the demo, this could be one of the hottest games of the summer.

Note: I do have an issue or two with the demo however, that I hope EIDOS can work out before release. First, the 102 meg download is bullshit. I’m with an ADSL connection at work, but the damn D/L is too big even to put on a Zip driveblessed! This is not to mention the poor sods that have to D/L this on a 56k connection – you haven’t known frustration until you’ve spent a night bringing down a 60 meg file and having either the connection crap out at 99% or the zip be corrupted when run.

Please – I understand that the market is moving to the game CD that comes with most gaming magazines. But when offering a demo for download, offer it in reasonable chunks. What a pain in the ass it was to get this one.

Previewed by Steve Lieb