Realms Beyond Preview

Ceres Games’ old-school D&D-inspired RPG Realms Beyond had a strong presence at this year’s Gamescom. Unfortunately, even despite the game winning the indie arena booth award at the trade fair, it didn’t get a lot of media coverage. However, if you’re interested in some first-hand impressions anyway, there’s now an extensive preview available over on RPGWatch. An excerpt:

Realms Beyond is a classic party based open-world RPG (with no level scaling) inspired by, amongst others, the old Gold Box games and Ultima 7. At the start of the game, you get to create your first character, using the classic classes: Barbarian, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue and Wizard, from seven possible races: Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, Halfling and Human. Realms Beyond is based on the D&D 3.5 System Reference Document that cannot be found on the Wizards of the Coast website anymore, but by googling it, you can still find the document, if you are interested in those details.

In the game, you will meet other characters that can join your party. At that point, you can decide to use that character or create another character from scratch. This means that you can end up with a party that is completely created by you. There can be a total of six characters in your party.

Realms Beyond uses the assets of Chaos Chronicles, which they managed to acquire after the bankruptcy of BitComposer. The engine that is used in Realms Beyond is based on the same engine as the one used in the Spellforce games and Chaos Chronicles.

You start in the world of Realms Beyond, where some 50 years ago a global disaster happened, called the cataclysm. Simultaneously everywhere in the world, volcanos erupted. Some areas were destroyed immediately and now lie in ruins. Nobody actually knows what really happened. Since then the world is somewhat in chaos and every culture and nation have created their own explanation about the cataclysm. Some think there is a religious reason, some think it is a demon, some a wizard, but nobody really knows.

It is your task to travel the entire world and collect the necessary information from the various nations and cultures, by means of completing quests and finding hints to solve the mystery. For this, you have to deal with the sensitivities of those different cultures and deal with a new cult, named the cult of the Inner Flame. A religious cult of which the popularity is rising in the world.

All items in the game are in-game items and they can all be interacted with. For the hoarders amongst you that means, if you are not careful, you might end up with a lot of junk, but if you want to do that, you can. The items add a lot of detail to the world, just as it did in Ultima 7, which was named a few times during the presentation. Most of the items have however no relevance to the gameplay, but might be relevant to the NPCs. A baker needs items for baking, a blacksmith needs items for smithing, etc. These items are not useful to you as a player, but they are to them. In this way, they want to make the world more believable. Sometimes an item or object can be inspected further. In those situations the mouse cursor will change to indicate that. Given the amount of items in the world that is probably a good idea.