Ever feel like the dwarves don’t get enough attention in fantasy? KING Art Games is changing that with their newest game The Dwarves, which is based on the best-selling novel by author Markus Heitz. The player will take on the role of Tungdil, a dwarf who has only learned of dwarven kingdoms from books. The game journeys across Girdlegard, a “conglomeration of kingdoms” which have become increasingly dangerous. For fans of the book, KING Art Games has striven to remain loyal to the story, but the author has given them leeway to make necessary changes and has even written a few new missions himself.
The Dwarves features Warcraft 3-esque RTS game mechanics (ala controlling one or two heroes), an intelligent crowd combat system which uses guidelines like mass and momentum of individual characters to create realistic “flocking behavior”, and is, overall, a single player game which needs the player’s full involvement to ensure victory.
As a longtime fan of how Tolkien wrote the dwarves in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, seeing new content devoted primarily to establishing character and culture for such a largely unexplored race in fantasy is refreshing. And as any fantasy or sci fi reader knows, fictional worlds are enormous and detailed. Adopting an RTS approach seems to be the best route for getting a global, yet personal-level view of the fictional world by Markus Heitz. Today marks the last day of the Kickstarter campaign with The Dwarves exceeding its original goal by $44,000.
