The Three Kingdoms: Fate of the Dragon Preview

China seems to be a frequent inspiration for computer game developers. The mysterious and exotic orient, and its history reaching to the first days oh human civilization, which linger between truth and legends, as well as the politics of the region which have always been quite hostile towards the western lands, served as a background for many an adventure game, arcade, flight sim, and beat-em-up. Lara used to jump from one stone of the Great Wall to the other, J.C. Denton (Deus Ex) got to know all about the nightlife in Hong Kong (we even found out how much a hooker charges), and Chun Li (Street Fighter) defended her countries colors on a Chinese market. In spite of this multitude of games that take place in China, it is hard to find a game that would deal with the history of this country in a somewhat more serious way. Every home-made historian and geographer who got most of his knowledge from Age Of Empires' briefings or from studying the map of the Caribbean in search of some buried treasure or missing family members would probably be able to answer immediately any question concerning Alexander the Great, but is far less likely to know anything of Chinese dynasties.

Overmax Studios and Eidos will try to introduce us to a vivid period in the history of the imperial China through their new real-time strategy called The Three Kingdoms: Fate of the Dragon. The game plot is based on the popular novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" (a turn-based strategy of the same name was published over half a decade ago) written by Luo Guanzhong in the fourteenth century. The novel deals with the fall of East Han Dynasty (second and third century AD), forming of the three kingdoms and their fight for supremacy.

Assuming the role of Sun Quan, Liu Bei or Cao Cao, you'll have to try to turn one of the kingdoms Wu, Shu or Wei into an empire. The gameplay is in 2D, but the programmers introduced several novelties that might place this game right next to Blizzard and Microsoft's blockbusters. In contrast to the adrenalin pumping titles of the aforementioned publishers Fate of the Dragon insists on careful planning and organizing. You will have to gather seven resources (gold, grain, meat, metal, wood, food, wine), which means you'll first have to establish stabile economy before even thinking about conquering your foes. The good AI should take care of the arduous micromanaging instead of you - it will be up to you to issue orders, but the smart little peasants will do the job to their best capabilities. Free peasants will strive to help builders, and the farmers will keep rebuilding their farms until you command otherwise.

Military units are appropriate for the time, so you'll have to combine your longbow-men with your close-range warriors. All units and structures have the becoming oriental look, yet each kingdom will have specific units, technologies and buildings. The gameplay will also introduce new features: You will have to equip your army with a certain quantity of food before they start off on their quest. Hungry soldiers are poor fighters, so you'll have to be good at predicting how long a siege may last, and create supply lines for your camps.

The authors refreshed the genre by introducing some turn-based strategy features. The entire region on which the game takes place is presented on a single map showing independent village and enemy towns. Each town has a map of its own, which will be accessible only when you enter it. Conquering towns will always begin with a siege around the fortifications, and if you don't manage to break through the gates, you can only try to tear the walls down using the stone-launching wagon (1800 year old siege engine), or try to use the "siege" ladders to enter the fort. The walls are wide enough for the combat to take place on them. Neutral villages make thing a bit more complicated, but they present a great resource for collecting taxes if you leave a couple of units to maintain stability in the region.

Overmax Studios took this job seriously and implemented all the best features from other games of this genre. We all got used to researching the tech-tree, using spells, upgrading units and watching those brilliant cut-scenes, and we won't miss any of that in the Fate of the Dragon either. The generals will influence unit performance, and the authors announced over 350 generals, heroes, and other unique characters.

The unusual aspect of this game is the fact that you will be able to win the game not only using brute force, but also by employing trade and diplomacy.

Apart from the classic campaign, you'll be able to practice your skills in some 50 skirmish missions, in order to prepare yourselves for some good multiplayer death matches. Up to eight players will be able to participate in Internet or LAN games in both cooperative and head to head modes.

The game should hit the stores in about one month's time. The development is practically finished, which can be seen in the 57MB demo, which is available for download since December. Many of the announced novelties introduced by the Fate of the Dragon have successfully been implemented, and we can only wait and see how the final product would look like. Even if most of us "westerners" decide that it would be impossible to identify with weird Chinese traditions and characters, this project still won't go to waste, as at least some sixth part of entire human population might decide that they're interested in their own history.

As we're quite close to the game release date, we already know the required system configuration:

Minimum Spec:
Windows® 95/98/Me
Pentium® II 200Mhz or equivalent processor
32MB RAM
320MB available hard drive space
4x CD-ROM Drive

Recommended System:
Pentium® II 300Mhz or equivalent processor
64MB RAM
510 MB available hard drive space
8x CD-ROM Drive

Network Specifications:
Pentium® II 300Mhz or equivalent processor
64MB RAM (Minimum), 128MB (Highly Recommended)