The Chronicles of Spellborn
A dodgy new MMO. In a good way.
To any fan of an action game, this won't sound revolutionary, but it's an eye-opener in an MMORPG. We've come to expect enemies to behave like demons in the original Doom - they run at you in a straight line and attack, occasionally firing off a special move. Enemies who circle around, try to move the battle to a more advantageous area or physically block your ranged attacks on their allies require a different level of situational awareness.
The final innovation is the Skill Deck. This is the beating heart of Spellborn's combat system, and after several hours, we're unsure whether it's a stroke of absolute genius or madness. It's a skill bar, much as you've seen in every other MMORPG, but it rotates. When you fire off a skill, the bar turns around and reveals the next set of skills to you, and continues doing so until it loops back to the first tier. As a result, the game becomes a delicate exercise in filling out the skills on these tiers so that you align their various abilities. If you want an attack to take advantage of a debuff, the debuff needs to be on a higher tier. Attacks which start a combo need to come before the other parts of the combo... Woe betide you if you manage to fill a tier entirely with skills that are on a cool-down when you rotate around to that face of the cylinder, because you'll stand around like a lemon while you wait for one of them to become available.
It actually sounds quite simple when we put it in those terms. It's not. Within a few levels, you've picked up a handful of skills and abilities, and the number of Skill Deck tiers available to you has expanded greatly, leaving you with a lot of juggling, experimentation, and trial-and-error to go through to get your Deck working just so. It's a bizarre kind of customisation, but an extremely interesting one - not least because we don't get the impression there'll be a single "best solution" that everyone copies from a Wiki site within a fortnight. Everyone's Skill Deck will be personalised and filled with combo chains that make sense.
Let's pull back for a moment and look at some of the more superficial stuff. Spellborn is promising to be a heavily quest-oriented game, with grinding really not on the menu - you level up through "Fame" rather than experience points, and Fame comes from completing quests, not killing wolves where nobody can see you. It also promises a hefty dose of PVP, with every zone outside of the starting area being a PVP free-for-all at present. Later, the team is thinking of creating factional PVP based on your alignment to the five Great Houses of Spellborn's world, but it's not likely to happen for launch.
Graphics are mixed. Comments from the developer suggest the engine and the artwork has evolved rapidly in recent months, with entire zones overhauled on a regular basis, and it shows. Some zones are beautiful, with soft lighting and few hard lines in evidence - reminiscent of the art style of Fable more than anything else. We expect (with some measure of optimism, but the pace of improvement really is stunning) all the zones to be up to that standard by launch. We're less excited about the character designs. Character art in the game is exaggerated and cartoony, which is fine, but it's also very low-polygon and rough around the edges compared to the environments themselves. It's a shame, because the first encounter most people have with a game's visuals is the character-creation screen. Throwing a few more polygons (and a lot more options) at the characters would make a big difference here.
Perhaps in recognition of the lion's den that it's walking into this November, the Spellborn team has also come up with a good way of getting the game in front of players: the first section will be entirely free to play. You can create a character, run around and take part in quests and so on, but if you're still enjoying it and want to explore, you'll need to pay a subscription fee. It's a clever approach. Few people are going to walk into a shop looking for Warhammer and walk out with Spellborn instead, but plenty of us will download a game and try out the starting zone for free. If Spellborn's impressive catalogue of innovations pulls together into a compelling experience, we can see this as a cult hit in the making. There's plenty of work still to do, but we'll let you know how things are looking at launch.
The Chronicles of Spellborn is released for PC on 27th November.