Besieger introduces a world filled with feudal rivalry in which players can wage war as either Viking or Cimmerian warriors. Build flying vehicles for combat or siege towns on horseback in an effort to conquer factions such as Ogres, Werewolves, Centaurs, and other non-human races. The armored walls of a citadel can be shattered using a battering ram and competitors can pocket enemy buildings and equipment. Players can also retreat and accumulate forces behind their own armored citadel for a counterattack.

Progressive economics allow players to spend resources constructing 40 types of buildings and honing over 50 different units for battle. Workers are created without cost to the player but must be trained for fighting and other special skills. This experience and fighting efficiency carry over as levels are defeated.

Features:

• Twelve huge levels with photorealistic landscapes, located in mountains, deserts, forests, etc.
• Hundreds of high-polygon models of animals, people, buildings, etc with smooth skeletal animation.
• All-encompassing damage model. Burn or blow to chips every tree, destroy houses and more!
• Cinematographic camera with several convenient modes of control.
• Multi-user games on LAN and Internet with up to 16 people on one server.
• A lot of multiplayer modes: Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Cooperative, Hold Artifact, King of the Hill, Free for All.

GCM:

Thank you for your time. Please get us underway by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about the team behind Besieger.

Pavel Grodek:

I’m Pavel Grodek, Internal Producer for Besieger at Primal Software. We started as a team back in 1996, making some multimedia products for the Russian market. Then, in 1999, we went on to make our first computer game “Petka” – a comedy adventure with tons of graphics and speech (it was released on 3 CDs). It immediately became a hit and set quite a few sales records in Russia, so, after finishing its sequel (also a bestselling game in Russia), we formed a new company, concentrating on high-tech games, and named it Primal Software. It’s still the same core team, but the company has grown and acquired a lot of experience during these years. Besieger is our second international game (the first one was called The I of the Dragon – an Action RPG with the Dragon as its hero). And we’ve already started working on a third game, to be announced in a few months.

GCM:

Based around the interaction between two relatively militant cultures, the Vikings and Cimmerians, what can you tell us about the plot driving Besieger and how it unfolds over the course of the game?

Pavel Grodek:

It may come as a bit of a surprise, but these two militant cultures are not aggressive – they don’t fight each other for domination or resources. In fact, at he beginning of the game, they are not even sure what happened or why they now have to fight to survive. First you’ll have to help Viking leader Barmalay discover that the real enemy of the Vikings is not the Cimmerians, but actually their leader’s sister, an evil and powerful magician, who usurped the Cimmerian throne and unleashed her power over both nations. And then, as you get nearer to her lair, you finally discover that Cimmerians are also struggling against her and their lawful leader, Konin, is also approaching her lair with his own army. At this point, you’ll be transported back in time, to find out what led Konin to this point. Finally, at the end, both armies join together and you lead them to the final victory over the last few missions.

GCM:

Besieger has the slightest hint of “Black & White” in so much as those you control are “born” and then trained rather than purchased from a structure. Does each level start with a set number of “blank slate” units being born or is there a birthrate that can be manipulated by the player. If the later, how does this system work and is their then a class of citizen whose job it is to care for some form of cultural infrastructure and reproduction?

Pavel Grodek:

We do like “Black & While,” it’s a great game, but its genre differs from ours too much, so if there is a hint of similarity – it ends soon :-) Generally, you start each new mission with your best units from the previous one. As in real life, you take your best warriors with you as leave your town to explore new places. Your people keep their skills, experience and war professions. Sometimes you do have to start with a smaller group (a few warriors or workers), but that’s always a story-based situation. People in our game are born in their houses (and you can build more houses if you need more people). Each house can support only a certain number of people (five without any upgrades), and new workers are only born if their “fathers” die in battle, if you build a new house or if you upgrade an old one. All people are born as simple farm workers; they can’t fight properly, but they work as hard as possible to gather resources, build various buildings, walls and war machines. To fight, you have to teach some of your workers and give them some equipment. For that you’ll need a specific building (barracks, for example, to teach your archers) that you build as usual and order your workers to enter. Wait a little bit – and your guys exit already equipped with bows and knowing how to use them (it takes some resources to produce the equipment, though, so training is not free). It works the same for other war professions and even with war machines (build a shipyard that produces flying ships and order a worker to enter such ship – he’ll be its captain). You can order your fighters to take down their weapons if you need more workers, and then teach them some other war profession if you need fighting people again.

GCM:

Obviously, the player will be finding themselves under siege and in the role of besieger in your game but what makes this aspect of warfare more key to gameplay in Besieger relative to other RTS games?

Pavel Grodek:

Well, it all starts with walls ;-) First of all, our walls can be built anywhere a unit can walk. This makes the construction aspect very, very important. You can build free-form walls, multiple walls around your town, seal off natural ravines and mountain passages to save resources… The next thing is… walls again: in most games walls can be destroyed by a single warrior hacking at them with a rusty sword if he’s patient enough. Does this seem realistic? No. In Besieger there are walls that cannot be damaged by “regular” weapons, only with special siege machines, just like in real life (rams, catapults, etc). This makes the siege tactics complex and interesting. OK, now we can get to… walls, of course! In our game units can walk on walls, just like in real life. Just imagine a group of archers raining death from above over advancing armies – and you’ll understand how tough it is to break into a well-defended town. Well, enough talking about walls, let’s get to the gates! To enter a town you can either break its wall somewhere or you can simply open its gates! After all, there is an opening mechanism – so you can send a small but determined group of warriors over the wall (with some ladders or a flying machine) and they’ll take control and open the gates for your army! Of course, it’s not as simple as it may sound, so you’ll have to choose your strategy and tactics for each situation.

GCM:

How large of role will Heroes play in Besieger?

Pavel Grodek:

There are two main heroes (Barmalay and Konin) that you have to keep alive through the game and there are some minor heroes that you can recruit along the way by helping them in some difficult situation. Minor heroes are not essential for the game (you can decide not to take them or lose them in a battle), but they can help a lot, so you’ll probably try to keep them alive. Each hero is a great fighter, so he won’t die easily, but even if you don’t use his fighting prowess too much, your troops can greatly benefit from a hero’s aura: each hero influences nearby friendly units in some way – gives them more health, more hit power or armor…

GCM:

Please give us a sampling of the land, sea and air units that players will have available to them and how these units are acquired/researched.

Pavel Grodek:

There are the usual warriors fighting with axes, swords, bows, pikes and other kinds of weapons, of course, and there are various machines, both land-based and air-based. Besides fighting units, there are also transports. In our game, distances are very important. When you besiege an enemy town, each warrior you lose will be reborn for free, but he will appear in his house, back on your base! And our levels are huge, up to 16 square kilometers, so walking back to the siege will take a significant amount of time, during which the besieged side could prepare new army, regroup and strike back. So, each besieger has to prepare enough transports to haul his reinforcements to the battle rapidly. And then, there are various siege units, from the usual to the exotic (rams, ladders, sappers with big barrels of gunpowder).

GCM:

Just thumbing through the currently released screenshots, it would appear that Besieger features both historically accurate units and structures as well as throwing in a healthy deal of mythos and retro sci-fi. Why was it decided to take this approach and how are you balancing these facets to create an interesting but believable universe?

Pavel Grodek:

Using historically accurate units only for that far back in time would be a bit dull: there was not enough variety in weapons and tactics yet. So we have taken the popular impression of two well-known races and added some gameplay elements that fit them nicely. Vikings, those red-bearded giants, fierce and powerful, and Cimmerians, disciplined and strong, with advanced war tactics and great cavalry – both races behave as you expect them to and have enough variety in units, buildings, and tactics to keep you busy.

GCM:

Aside from the campaign mode, what other modes of gameplay will be available to the player?

Pavel Grodek:

There is Skirmish where you play against the computer, and there are four multiplayer modes: All against all (basically, a standard deathmatch – destroy or be destroyed), Capture the Artifact (each side has an artifact that can be captured only by a woman, you have to get enemy artifact without losing yours), Siege (one side defends a citadel without any reinforcements, while the other side has to capture it within a certain amount of time and get some reinforcements from time to time), and Tactical Combat (both players have pre-constructed armies and cannot build or produce anything, they have to fight it out with what they have).

GCM:

Besieger will be using your own in-house engine set to premiere in “I of the Dragon”. Please tell us about this engine and what it allows you to do that will capture a gamer’s attention.

Pavel Grodek:

Besieger represents the second generation of our engine, and it was very important for us to utilize its strengths to the max. The engine that we have is unique in its abilities: we don’t have to limit the player’s visibility at all! We don’t have to limit the number of units due to engine limitations. Basically, the only considerations that we had to face were gameplay-related ones. To make the game more realistic and give you a sense of “being there” we have changed the way the camera works. In most of today’s “3D” games, you don’t have real 3D, they show you a 3D landscape, but limit the camera to standard 2D view, maybe with a zoom capability. In our game 3D is 3D – you can raise your camera and look at the horizon to watch a beautiful sunset over the sea or a huge volcano rising before your eyes and throwing flame and boulders over a doomed town. You can see distant mountains and dark dense forests, you can even see your enemies if your eyes are good enough. Well, in fact, to emphasize this we have even removed the fog of war! You can turn your camera anywhere and see whatever there is. The only realistic limitation you have to live with is the camera’s position – it can’t fly too far from your own units, so you have the same amount of information that a real general would have.

GCM:

Thank you again for your time. Is there anything else about Besieger that you’d care to mention before wrapping this Q&A up?

Pavel Grodek:

Thank you for your thoughtful questions and great knowledge of Besieger. And I’d like to mention just one thing that never gets asked in interviews because it’s a bit unexpected for strategies yet. Physics. Admittedly, simple physics (we didn’t want to make the game too complex), but even a few carefully chosen laws of physics could change the game a lot! In our game there are two basic rules: units run slower uphill (and faster downhill, of course), and projectiles have realistic flight paths, so shooting from a high hill or a wall makes them fly farther. This may sound simple but it changes your tactics a lot. You try to take control over hills, you build walls and put your pike throwers or archers on them, and you immediately feel the results of this. If you put a group of knights on a hill and a group of archers below – knights will run down and destroy archers almost without losses (they will run very fast and arrows will not fly to the top of the hill, so only last part of their run will be under fire). Now reverse their positions – and archers will destroy knights without any losses at all (their arrows will reach knights from the very beginning and knights will climb slowly, so there would be enough time to shoot them all). Of course, there are some other surprises and features in the game (terramorphing, for example), but you’ll have a lot of fun discovering them for yourself! Good playing to you all!

---