Dragon Empires Preview

The dragons will guide you, and that road can lead to glory or ruin. It really is up to you and the kind of player you are.

The foray into the foreign land is done covertly – there is much at stake. The bar holding the Pending XP is loaded, and you must safely return to your home town if you hope to convert it from pending to solid experience points.

Dragon Empires is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game published by Codemasters. The game is set for a winter 2004 release and should be moving into the first open beta stage in the coming months. This is a game that is about clans, political and diplomatic intrigue, economic strategy and combat. There are three playable races: the humans, dragonblood and shadow. There are five mystical empires and nine diverse elements that are spread over 580 square miles of maps.

The game also has a progressive crafting system and players can buy and sell items anonymously. If you form a clan and grow in stature as a clan, then the dragon that controls the region may ask you to challenge for control of a city. Should you control that city, you can set the trade specialty and tax rate.

For the combat, the game does rely on the same standard as most games; you will be tasked to use tactics, but there are no evades. You will not be able to sidestep a targeted missile attack.

Graphically Dragon Empires looks exquisite. The game uses a graphics engine developed in-house and dynamic shadows and lighting brings the scenery and game to life. The animation is very good and the control elements are seemingly simple to use. But the main draw of this game, in addition to the pending xp system, is that the world is player-driven. Even a solo player can affect what happens in the land.

The game has an undercurrent of diplomatic and political intrigue. A ruling clan may become complacent and the dragon may order another clan to challenge for control of the land. A solo player may be adventuring and do something that sparks a chain of events that leads to a shift in the way the world runs.

Dragon Empires is certainly a game that will have a strong appeal to those MMPers looking for a world they can shape. The first glance given of this game at the E3 in Los Angeles is a tantalizing taste of a game worth checking out.

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