King’s Bounty: The Legend Preview

The guys at BlueAlien.org have gotten around to posting their Gen Con-based impressions of Katauri’s King’s Bounty: The Legend.

The basic concept is that as an adventurer or hero in the King’s service you travel around the world assembling an army to fight for you. What types of soldiers fill your army is determined by your actions in game. For example if you are a crusading slayer of Orcs you are unlikely to be able to recruit any of them into your army. Don’t worry about your lack of Orcish cannon fodder however as there are over 60 different recruitable units in the game. Your actions in the name of the King will also play into your recruitment – someone who consorts with demons, even though he is doing the king’s work, may reflect poorly on him. As you gain experience and win battles you also will slowly develop a leadership score that determines the size of your army and changes with your successes or failures in battle. The company you keep in your army will also determine what kind of side quests will be available to you. For example keeping lots of elves in your army means that you will have a lot of elf-related side quests while you might not see any of the dwarven ones.

The inventory is a basic-paper doll system allowing you to drag and drop equipment onto your hero from your inventory. An interesting addition is the sentient artifact . In the demo we watched the character had a “dragon smite sword” that actually rebelled and tried to leave the player’s inventory when dragons were put into the army. Another thing we saw was an intelligent dwarven hammer that had issues with the character’s elven wife.