Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Previews

Previews for Ubisoft and Arkane Studios’ Dark Messiah of Might and Magic continue to hit the web, with two more surfacing earlier today. The first is at GameSpot:

If the archer is the sniper, the mage is more like artillery, as there’s little finesse required to hurl powerful spells across the map. The mage can cast area-effect spells, including fire and electricity spells, and can call upon a magic shield, if the ability is unlocked. The downside is that the mage is fragile and is a favorite target of assassins. Mages can specialize in either fire or lightning skills, which are the two main offensive spell schools. However, specializing in one school makes spells of the other school less effective. There are five levels of mastery. Fire mastery (pyromancer) means you gain a large fire bonus at the cost of most of your lightning skill. Fire affinity means you gain a bonus using fire, but your lightning abilities are hampered a bit. Elemental balance means you can use fire and lightning equally. Lightning affinity gives you a bonus with lightning but a penalty when using fire. And lightning mastery (stormcaller) gives you devastating lightning abilities, but at the price of most of your fire abilities.

While the second is at AtomicGamer:

The level-up system opens up all kinds of cool abilities for your character, but sadly, this makes for an excruciatingly tough learning curve. Any practice you’ve gotten in the single player game doesn’t really translate into the online mode; the game plays (and the characters move and fight) differently enough from Arkane Studios’ single player mode that you’ll feel like you’re back at square one when jumping on a server. And if the server you’re on has a lot of veterans, you’re going to find it difficult to get even your first kill to achieve level 2. Some servers can be configured to have your level-ups carry across from one map to the next, but remember that you can’t gain a bunch of levels as one class and switch over at high level. Your levels are tracked for each class separately, so try and stick with one class if you’re having trouble killing the enemy.