Gods And Heroes: Are The Reviews Done? Not By A Long Shot!

Todays review is brought to us by Thebrasse.com!

Welcome to the first in my long-winded GDC coverage posts! To make things easier on your eyes, I am going to split this particular write-up into two segments. I know that most Elfinks have a pretty short attention span.

So here we have Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising. Not a standard fantasy MMO, no spaceships, lasers or lightsabers. You can't play a bipedal dog or cat. Wasn't history BORING in school? So what is the draw here?

I was invited to Perpetual Entertainment to get some quality time with their flagship product, which has been in closed beta for some time. I had not been following the game with any special interest. I had seen it at E3 and watched as a lot of the media present gushed and fell all over themselves to hand it awards.

One should expect a solid product from Perpetual of course. The combined experience of the team working there is impressive. Drawing skills and talent from big name companies such as EA, Blizzard North, and Lucas Arts, the staff has a lot of experience bringing a great many top tier titles to production. Chris McKibbin, the co-founder of Perpetual, was responsible for games such as Need for Speed and The Sims Online, while Stieg Hedlund, Design Director for Gods and Heroes, was heavily involved in the Diablo franchise. Richard Zinzer, the Vice president of Online Services, has history working in the same role for the venerable Ultima Online title, among others.
I always find it interesting to see how the continual meshing and re-forming of talent can result in a rush of new ideas and improvements over existing ones.

Still, my own experience with over a decade of jaded gaming has ensured that I do not get too excited in advance, and I sure as heck don't hand out any kudos to titles I've not played.

I made the short walk from GDC to Perpetual's studio with a few other eager journalists, and we were all promptly stopped in our tracks by the sincere but less than savvy security guy downstairs. I watched the clock ticking with my usual Dwarven annoyance as he half-heartedly leafed through defunct contact lists, trying to find out whom to call upstairs about our access. I am not sure how you can't know who occupies the entire 4th and 5th floors of a modest-sized building, but eventually we got lucky. Someone from Perpetual ended up calling down to see if there were any stranded people waiting.

Finally we were heading up. The first thing that hit me when the doors opened was the abundance of Star Trek imagery spread all over. It was very clear that the company was ramping up for this new title, but that is a tale for another time.

Read the entire article over at TheBrasse.com!