Realms Beyond Updates – Character Portraits and Fiery Explosions

After sharing a number of character portraits for their upcoming old school RPG Realms Beyond back in March, the team at Ceres Games focused all their efforts on developing the game’s combat system. As a result, the new update promises some detailed insights into the game’s combat in the near future and as a preview, shares a brief video where a bunch of goblins meet an untimely demise after being introduced to a fireball. Check it out:

Some additional details:

We haven’t posted much lately because we focused all our efforts into developing the first playable iteration of the combat system. This combat prototype (or let’s say Combat Pre-Alpha) will include almost every action and spell of the classes Fighter, Barbarian, Cleric, Wizard, Ranger and Rogue (about 100 actions and spells in total).

Along with animations, character models and visual effects, we already implemented the sound for various weapons, spells and hit effects.

Until we can show you a detailed insight of the combat system, this little preview video will give you a first impression of the Fireball spell at a higher character level. Those poor Goblins never had a chance and died many deaths during the development.

Except for the combat grid, we completely hid the user interface because it’s still work in progress.

And here’s a bit about the game’s NPCs and their portraits:

During the last two weeks, we have been occupied with one of the most important visual elements of traditional RPGs: Character Portraits. We needed to find a good compromise between quality and quantity because every NPC in our world that the player can interact with, must get his/her very own unique face. For us, that’s one of the most crucial points if you want to realize a believable world.

A small but expressive 2D portrait can deliver much more personality and individuality than a high-poly 3D model with fancy shaders and physically simulated hair. After some experiementation with various Photoshop techniques, we finally figured out a proper way to create portraits in a reasonable amount of time in decent quality. The world of Realms Beyond, Argea, will be initially populated with at least 250 unique NPCs (common villagers without dialogue lines won’t have portraits) plus dozens of unique encounter bosses and various mysterious creatures in dungeons and wilderness areas.