14 DAY TRIAL // Video game developer Stardock announces that it is working on a new title called Sorcerer King, which is designed to give players a classic turn-based 4X experience while introducing a number of new ideas for gamers to explore.
The idea is that, when starting a new game, the player will not have to compete with a range of other factions and try to get ahead of them all, but will only have to contend with a single and powerful enemy, who represents a powerful empire that managed to basically win the previous game.
Sorcerer King aims to create asymmetrical gameplay, with the player and a number of small outposts of freedom having to find weak spots in his defenses in order to grow their own power and gradually extend their ability to fight him on equal basis.
The powerful enemy needs to destroy a series of shards and thereby the world, while the player will only try to take out the Sorcerer himself.
The company states, “The Sorcerer King doesn’t play by the same rules – he operates on a completely different level than your scarce resources allow you to. A sophisticated Game Master AI controls his forces and other events in the world, managing pacing and generating threats to ensure an engaging game from start to finish.”
At the moment, Stardock is offering the title via Early Access on Steam and the aim is to fully launch it on the PC in the early part of 2015.
Classic mechanics and new ideas
Sorcerer King will allow gamers to create new cities, develop their abilities, create armies and explore a map, as most traditional titles in the turn-based strategy genre do.
At the same time, Stardock says that gamers will have to win the allegiance of smaller independent kingdoms, each of them with unique skills, leaders and units, in order to take down their powerful enemy.
The game also includes hundreds of quests, each with its own narrative, and champions need to be recruited and then developed in order to deal with the most powerful forces created by the Sorcerer King himself.
The developers are also introducing a crafting system for the title.
The new game sounds similar to the older Elemental, which was a failure when it first appeared, but Stardock claims that the experience with its development and the launch of the expansion associated to it have helped the studio avoid big mistakes for its new projects.
