Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom (PS3)

Adam Wolf · 06-19-2006, 09:35 PM

IGN.com

SOE gives us a new look at its quickly improving hack-and-slasher, Untold Legends.

by Chris Roper
June 6, 2006 - Though E3 ended just a few weeks ago (which means, luckily, that we still have a while until Hell Week 2007), Sony Online Entertainment is rapidly progressing its development of Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom and has made numerous improvements on the game even in that short timeframe. SOE made a trip up to San Francisco today to show us a few new things in the title, including a brand-new level, speedier play and another look at its improved art style.

While we already had hints that the storyline revolved around an evil king, we picked up a few more small details about how Keith Baker's story will play out. Each of the three characters you can choose from, the warrior, mage and scout, are part of a group called the Dragon Shade, which acts something like the king's guards. The Dragon Shade is sent out to quell a supposed uprising in the region, but through a course of events you find out that it was your group and others of the region that inadvertently started the fighting, not any barbarians. Realizing that the king has a part in this, your character returns to confront him and eventually take him down.

The interesting part about this is that each of the three main characters has a different reason for doing so, some with good intentions and some not. We'll leave it at that to keep from spoiling anything else, but we're certainly interested in the replayability implications of this since you'll want to run through the game with all three characters in order to see how their stories play out.

The new area that we saw today plays directly into this story. The slave encampment is where the lands' people are sent for multiple reasons, certainly if they try and stand up against the king. They're essentially tortured until they're brainwashed into submission, and the people's suffering somehow feeds the king's powers. The opening section of the slave encampment is scattered with a series of tattered and torn tents. Various bits of foliage cover the ground with bright flora that offsets the area's rather somber setting. A bit later the encampment makes way to man-made buildings with waterwheels that dip into a water system and large metal gates. It's unclear right now exactly what it is that goes on inside of these structures, but the outside isn't all too welcoming.

The only enemies we saw present were a series of horned beasts in full armor wielding double-bladed axes, though the team was very obviously still working on enemy placement and type as one section saw about 25 of them bum-rush the warrior at once. The cool part about this is that while the framerate wasn't rock-steady at this point, it was still pretty solid during all the chaos, and being as the team is only just getting the various elements of the engine separated to work with the PS3's multiple SPUs, this is indeed quite promising.

The thing that's most obviously come the longest way since we first saw the game in March is its art style. We got our first glimpse of the vastly-improved warrior character at E3, but our look at the game today gave us even greater insight into just how quickly the team works. There looks to be more detail on the characters, especially the monsters, via better use of bump mapping and improved pro-pixel leatherization diffusion on their clothes and armor. The game, or at least the section that we saw, also looks to have darker and more contrasted lighting than we'd seen previously, giving the game a grittier, more realistic (in a comic book way) look. In other words, the game is looking better and better every time we see it.

Before we left our meeting we got a few tidbits on the game's multiplayer aspects. We'd already gotten wind of some form of deathmatch play, which we've learned will be based in arenas, in addition to a few other modes like CTF and Last Man Standing. What's really cool though is that you'll be able to play cooperatively through the game's entire storyline with up to four players online. There's no split-screen option so you're limited to two players on any one console, but this means that for four players you can team up in combinations of two players on two consoles, one player on each of four consoles or what have you.

Each of the roughly 50 members of the development team are working as vigilantly as possible to get the game done in time for the PlayStation 3's launch this November, but we get the feeling that the team plans to take as much time as needed to get the game as polished and refined as possible, be it a launch title or no. That's good news for fans of the series to be sure, though with as many strides as we've seen the team take recently, we'd expect to see the game hit shelves sooner than later.

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Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom (PS3)

This is a discussion on Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom (PS3) within the Video Games & Electronics forums, part of the Non Wrestling Forums category; IGN.com SOE gives us a new look at its quickly improving hack-and-slasher, Untold Legends. by Chris Roper June 6, 2006 ...