Dragonshard Preview

1Up brings us a short preview of Atari and Liquid Entertainment’s upcoming Dungeons & Dragons RTS/RPG hybrid, Dragonshard. An excerpt to follow:

Although you can see elements of Dragonshard’s innovations in other titles, there is indeed someting different going on here. The core of the design is a split-level tucked under the first. Indeed, Dragonshard’s underworlds are an elaborate take on WarCraft III’s creep hunting, and true to the D&D experience, you can explore underworld areas only with a party of hero units (no armies allowed!). This produces the feeling of sending down an away team: You’ll finally have a use for rogue abilities like picking locks and disarming deadly traps, and these hunts also functions as your main method of collecting gold which you’ll need in order to build your city and train your units. The game’s other major resource, the eponymous dragonshard crystals, will periodically appear on the overworld map as they plummet from the sky.