Delivering original gameplay was a dominant goal of GSC Game World team when creating the fantasy trilogy 'Heroes of Annihilated Empires'. According to the Project Lead Yevgen Grygorovych, the team behind "Heroes" shunned the traditional path of implementing mere borrowings from various genres into the game:
"We decided to blend two polar gameplays, two genres into one single game - real-rime strategy and role-playing experiences".

As the game's development progressed, that idea found its compelling implementation. Playing Heroes of Annihilated Empires you'll be able to pump up a selected hero in a common RPG manner, as well as build up cities and recruit massive armies, as traditional for RTS games. The know-how though, is that gamers will not only be able to combine these two ways of play, be it single- or multiplayer, but also stick to just one of them entirely.

It will be possible to complete Heroes of Annihilated Empires in two ways. You may either develop your character to a degree as able to confront massive enemy armies, or choose the strategy of numerical superiority to establish your own empire and raise the number of your warriors to thousands.

While the RPG way is represented by heroes, each of the game's four playable races has three heroes to choose from, the RTS line is the way of a military leader with awe-inspiring armies under his command. It is this opposition which determined the genre of Heroes of Annihilated Empires as RTS vs. RPG. This is the way we will refer to the game's genre from now on.