Realms Beyond: Ashes of the Fallen, Ceres Games

Realms Beyond: Ashes of the Fallen

Imagine Temple of Elemental Evil bundled with an Aurora-like toolset. That pretty much sums it up for my readership who are familiar with ToEE and Neverwiner Nights. But basically, Realms Beyond is a classic turn-based tactical cRPG with a fixed (but zoomable) isometric perspective, a viewpoint that will be familiar to those who weren't born yesterday. Rotation of the cam has been omitted in order to focus on area design that flaunts atmospheric, theatric and - above all - tactical scenarios.

tl;dr: Isometric + turn-based + hexgrid + OGL 3.5 + FPC of 6 + toolset + OLM = Win.

Realms Beyond employs the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 SRD ruleset, features full control and creation of a party of six, hexagonal tile-based/height-mapped terrain, and a dynamic world map to explore with strategic survival considerations in addition to roaming patrols and monster aggro, as seen in Storm of Zehir.

The difference is that some roaming patrols and aggro spawn from a lair or base of operations. At intervals, they will continue to respawn after being slain in skirmishes. However, once their actual base is taken out by the party they will logically cease to respawn, but aggro from another faction may end up occupying the base (again, after an interval).

The Realms Beyond engine is developed completely in-house, doesn't rely on 3D middleware, and its renderer is specialized for hybrid 2D/3D visualization. Thus, load-times should be quick and framerates should be high because Realms Beyond is not cut out of the same cloth as most other Kickstarter-funded titles (Unity has god-awful performance and optimization).

Some of the art assets are lifted from the devs' own Chaos Chronicles; I speak of the character models and animations. The perspective, gritty aesthetic and interactivity of in-area placeables remind me of Divine Divinity (another beautiful game).

Note how its isometric perspective looks down at a higher angle than most isometric cRPGs:

Music/OST is clearly "old school" (I like what I heard - it didn't sound like typical current gen play-every-instrument-in-the-orchestra nonsense), the sound effects are impactful/meaty, and the ambience is serviceable. But this sort of thing is usually expanded upon, post-funding (voicesets, multiple themes etc.).

The hiring of writers is also a goal of the funding. However, the story will not be the focus. Exploration, questing and combat is the focus of Realms Beyond.

Crafting? Unlike ToEE and NWN2, there won't be player crafting based on feats, skills and spells. You can make basic stuff like food, potions and ammo, but you will need to seek out a blacksmith in order to have weapons and armor forged.

Prepared/spontaneous casting instead of Vancian memorization system:

[...] we believe that this modification (introduced by Dark Sun and Knights of Chalice originally) works better in computer games. It’s more flexible and player will use more different spells. We can use spells for spontaneous environmental actions like burning some barriers because spellcasters can now immediately react to the current situation.

- Peter.

UrWelt Toolset

Now, one of the most important things is the toolset. ToEE does not have a toolset. Even the coder of Temple+ said that its various tools are difficult to get to grips with and not for the faint-hearted. So much so, that in the 16-year history of ToEE only one user-made module has been completed (Keep on the Borderlands).

In Realms Beyond, creation of user-made content is facilitated by UrWelt (tr. Primeval World) "RPG Engine Framework" along with dialogue editor and AngelScript scripting language, an object-oriented language based on the syntax of C++. This is the dialogue editor. As with NWN, you can assign stat checks to branching dialogues and script all kinds of things.

In addition to tilesetting (NWN is also tile-based for easy area-creation), buildings can be constructed modularly and placeables, light sources, VFX and ambient sounds can be added in order to individualize areas and imbue them with atmosphere. Importation of custom models and textures is also possible, adding to customizability.

The documentation for UrWelt has not yet been made public but here's hoping it's as powerful, flexible and easy to use as Aurora and Electron are for the NWN series, because those three things can result in quality and quantity from amateur community modders.

If Realms Beyond gets funded, we can expect maybe a dozen user-made modules in the first few months. And if modding really takes off maybe 50-100 over its life-cycle (NWN has 700+; cf. Best NWN Modules). I would guess that most of those would be conversions of famous PnP/tabletop modules. Other than the par-for-the-course tactical combat, this is the biggest selling point for me.

Camping system:

Gambling:

Combat AI visualization debugging:

Good luck with funding your project, Peter!

For those who don't know, Peter Ohlmann is the managing director, CEO and lead programmer at Ceres Games, based in Germany. Peter has been involved in the development of many games dating back to 1996. Most recently, he has worked on the Jagged Alliance and Spellforce series.

Again, good luck to Ceres Games! Overall, from what I've seen, these devs seem to have good taste and a solid understanding of what is important in cRPGs of the tactical and strategic variety.

A cRPG based on The Three Pillars (turn-based combat, isometric perspective, full party control) deserves to succeed, and I hope it does.

Realms Beyond combat vid (alpha):

Realms Beyond / ToEE comparison:

Note the portraits at the top which represent each combatant in the battle. In ToEE, you can reshuffle the order of your party members in this initiative line. Say, for example, you are up against undead but your Cleric is fourth in the initiative order. You don't want the guys in order 1-3 to waste time and resources fighting the undead, so you click-hold-drag your Cleric's portrait to the forefront and have her disrupt the undead in a single action. Battle over.

Chargen and location pics:

World map:

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