Telladar Chronicles: Decline - Official Website
The struggle for power among the Empire's ruling circles caused the
beginning of an unnecess arymilitaryexpedition.TheTelladarianarmywentfarbeyond
state borders, to the boundless plains of Urdaj-Nagh, inhabited by the
numerous and warlike Horchi orcs. But no one – nor men who took part in the
campaign, nor those who issued them orders – knew that the expedition would
soon become a sparkle, which would ignite the flame of a great war…
The player will be thrown into the fantasy world of Miere where he will find himself in the middle of epic battles and tangled intrigues and will guide his heroes through love and hatred, friendship and betrayal, bitter defeats and glorious victories.
Features:
- A rich, original fantasy world, inhabited by numerous races and nations,each with its own history, unique magic and military systems.
- An intriguing story line with many subplots and several different endings
- Original structure of missions, based on several mutually exclusive sub-quests. They are performed simultaneously with the main quest and affect the completion of the whole mission.
- Armies of up to 20000 fully polygonal creatures (infantry, cavalry, various monsters and magicians) clash in epic real-time battles on huge (4 square km) 3D maps.
- Reserves (army total can exceed 20000 cap) can be engaged in action to compensate potential losses or attain tactical advantage.
- Siege, assault and defence of cities and castles using magic and various siege devices (assault ladders, siege towers and artillery, undermining, etc.).
- The player can determine so called tactical groups, composed of one or more units under direct control of a non-player character (AI). These NPCs will rely upon simplified player commands, such as move, advance, hold, guard etc. The player can retake full control over any tactical group at any time.
- Each creature on the battlefield possesses a set of parameters and traits, based on complex RPG-like rules, unprecedented for mass strategy games.
- Heroes and their armies gain experience in the course of the game, thus improving their capabilities on the battlefield. Between missions, the player can compensate for the losses, acquire new units and modify existing ones.
- Original army management allows not only choosing from pre-designed units, but also customizing them with 50+ weapons and 30+ armours and shields. The player can also adjust the number and experience of soldiers in each unit.
Game Chronicles takes a look at this tremendously entertaining new platform game with an exclusive interview by John Carswell.
| GCM: | Thank you for your time. Please get us started by introducing yourself and telling us about the company behind “Telladar Chronicles: Decline”. |
| Maxim: | Hello, I’m Maxim Dyachenko, the team leader of MindLink Studio and leading programmer in Telladar Chronicles: Decline project. |
| Andrew: | Hi! My name is Andrew Beletsky, and I am the game designer here in MindLink. Our company was formed in spring 2003, but despite of being young, we are not inexperienced – most members of our team previously worked on many Ukrainian and Russian titles, and are fell in love with game developing a long time ago. :) |
| GCM: | Please introduce us to the Telladar Empire and world of Miere. |
| Andrew: |
Let me start with short description of Miere. This is a fantasy world, developed by our team. We have detailed a cosmology, various gods, mythology, magic system and everything else that must be in the good fantasy world, including a really big map with mysterious names :) . Miere has a long history, nearly twenty thousands years – from the ancient elven kingdoms through several cataclysms, appearance of other nations, countless wars, rise of human states, and up to the present time. The events of the game took place on three continents of Miere – the Kania (western continent with large plains and old low mountains), the Ælnoras (it includes a very broad range of climatic zones and terrains) and northern parts of the Tiraya (south continent with warm inner sea, rich vegetation and high snow-covered mountains), so players would see a broad range of locations – steppes, mountains, mighty rivers, etc. What about the Telladarian (yes, this is a correct spelling) Empire? It was founded nearly a thousand years ago on the ruins of Kemmor – legendary kingdom of old. According to the legends, wrathful gods hurl a huge meteor on it for the lust for forbidden arcane knowledge. Is it the truth? I can’t tell you… for now. After more then six centuries, King Rene III of Telladar by the spell and sword has subdued many neighboring lands and becomes the first Emperor of a newly born power. His progeny at first manage to expand the Empire and on the top its territory stretches nearly over all Ælnoras. But times have changed, and now due to never-ending struggle between the Emperor, his Council and his vassals, the Empire is week as never before. |
| GCM: | What can you tell us about Telladar Chronicles: Decline’s plot and your plans to make it the first in a series? |
| Maxim: | For now we prefer not to tell anyone (except the publisher, of course :) ) about the plot. But especially for you we could reveal the very beginning of it. |
| Andrew: |
As I’ve sad, the power games between the Emperor and Empire State Council has placed once a great country to the verge of political and economical ruin. The tension between confronting sides reach it apogee when the Emperor ordered to transfer about twenty thousands Imperial Guards from their camps to capital’s suburb. It becomes obvious to Council members that Emperor will try to depose them by force in a few days. The future of the Empire was decided during short conversation between two of the Counselors and the High Priest of Ælnor, the most influential cleric of the Empire. The next day the crusade against the nomadic horchi tribes was proclaimed… At first glance short and victorious war was supposed to ease the tension in the country. But most of the conspirators couldn’t realize who was a real force beyond the beginning of the conflict and what this war would bring to the Empire in the nearest future. From this point the game begins. The player will assume the roles of four heroes which play important part in upcoming tragedy and will drive them through many battles of The War of the Seven Nations, through victories and losses, faith and betrayal, love and treachery – up to the Battle of Igna River, where the fate of Telladar will be resolved. The plot in the game is non-linear, although we here in MindLink prefer the term ‘story with branches’. The player moves over the selected branch until a crotch, where he must select a new branch and so on, up to the final. Some branches could merge with each other, some not, but in the end they get the player to one of the finals. We have planned three endings, but it is not improbable that we add another one until release. |
| Maxim: | As for the other projects of the Telladar Chronicles series, the next game will cover the events directly after The War of the Seven Nations and will feature several new nations and some previously unknown territories of Miere. But it’s too early to say more about it now. |
| GCM: | What inspired the creation of Telladar Chronicles: Decline and the fiction driving its settings and plot? |
| Andrew: | You know it’s a very difficult thing to tell. Tons of fiction, live and table-top RPGs, strategy games, millions of computer games… It’s nearly impossible to specify something as a primary and something as a secondary, except two things. Master of Magic and Warhammer: Dark Omen both played their role as driving force beyond the Telladar Chronicles concepts. |
| Maxim: | And final touches to our vision of what TC will become, we’ve made under impressions from several recent screenings. The scale and drama, dozens of thousands combatants, mighty heroes leading their forces to battle… These are things that we are aimed to bring to our players. |
| GCM: | Please give us the basics of Decline’s gameplay. |
| Andrew: |
TC: Decline in not quite usual RTS game. It is story-driven real-time tactical war-game with some RPG elements (wow, it seems we got a genre-definition of the day!?) There are no researches, production or building in the game – your hero musters, equip and reinforce his army between missions. All of your hero’s warriors are organized in units which in their turn form divisions (or so called tactical groups), commanded by one of your lieutenants. As it was stated, the player will control four heroes, mostly one at a time. All of them are very different from each other. They have unique set of parameters and combat abilities, and gameplay will be different for each Hero. Each one has his own army, which follows him and accumulates experience from mission to mission. Easy to guess that seasoned troopers are considerably stronger then their ‘green’ comrades, so it’s become vitally important to keep casualties at bay – it is nearly impossible to compensate huge losses of veterans, especially late in the game. Our combat system supports nearly all kinds of combat maneuvers and techniques. Various unit formations, flank attacks, ambushes, encirclements, false routes, line breaches – all this will be available to the player and will have considerable impact on the situation on the battlefield. Moreover, ability to manually equip your units and change the army composition gives the player access to nearly infinite number of strategies and we are sure that everyone will find the proper mixture of troops to suite his or her play style. |
| Maxim: |
And don’t forget magic! There is more then 100 spells in the game, ranged from simple direct damage-dealing spells (such as Fireball, Rain of Fire, Lighting Storm and so on) to much more complex and tricky (for example, Projectile Shield, Hallucinations, or Control Mind). So, when preparing for a battle, do not leave your wizards behind! What about AI in the game? Well, your enemies would use all variety of their resources and every tactical opportunity to make a tough time for you – maneuvering, stratagems, brute-force, artillery and magic. We promise that AI will be very, very challenging opponent. You are warned! ;-) |
| GCM: | What sort of units will be available and how large can armies become? |
| Andrew: | We haven’t any ‘units’ in the game in classical meaning of this term. Player controls units, consisting of tenth, even hundreds of soldiers, and could field the army of up to 10 000 warriors, organized in up to 147 units, not counting the reserves of literally limitless size. Every soldier in a single unit has same equipment (armor, one or two weapons and possibly a shield). The player can re-equip his units, of course if he has some equipment available and wants to do so, using nearly thirty types of armors, about fifty weapons and score of various shields, all of them with racial variations and distinguish look |
| Maxim: | The player will get new equipment as he advances through the game. Again, there is no “research” or “production” in the game; you just take available resources, either from corpses of enemies or your side storages. The heroes also will be able to use and wield various magical items, including weapons, armors, banners etc. |
| Andrew: | Also we are about to bring all achievements of pseudo-medieval warfare to the battlefield – various scorpions, ballistae’s, catapults and trebuchets, assault ladders and towers, and even golems. Their importance is varying from mission to mission, but you must remember that breaking a magic-enchanted stone wall with a sword is a task for a Superman at least! :) |
| Maxim: | Surely, it is still possible to divide your units into some categories – light, medium and heavy infantry and cavalry, marksmen, spell casters… |
| GCM: | Given such large armies, how will the player control their armies in an effective manner? |
| Andrew: |
Yes, it’s not a very simple thing to command such huge armies. That’s why the game will place to the player’s disposal several handy and effective methods of unit control. First of them is the possibility to divide your army into much smaller and flexible divisions, which have been called tactical groups (we have mentioned them before, remember?). Each tactical group consists of several units and is controlled by one of current hero’s NPC-lieutenants. Any army can include up to seven such groups – one is under direct player control, the rest are managed by his hero’s lieutenants. Actual number of units in any given tactical group depends on leadership score of your hero or lieutenant assigned to it. Now all you must care about is what to expect from each of your lieutenants and what you want them all to do. In other words, you must just set ‘points of interest’ using high-level commands, such as ‘attack’, ‘defend’, ‘beware of’, etc; it’s also possible to set multiple simultaneous commands and give them priority rating (low, medium or high). AI will care for the rest. Even more, your lieutenants will react on situation changes and will make some decisions, but they will never overcome your own high-priority orders. And, surely, the player could regain control over any tactical group anytime – but beware! Sometimes plot can surprisingly change this! Another method we give to the player is the ability to activate the pause mode or alter the game speed anytime in tactical combat. This comes handy when you want to evaluate current situation on the field or give out several orders to your forces in cold blood. Various useful tactical data (for example, units’ paths, behavior and status) is visually represented in the pause mode as well. In the third place, there is an informative, understandable full-screen map with possibility of issuing orders to units and tactical groups (in the pause mode or normal mode) and moving camera to any point of battlefield in 3D-view. I’ve got some more interesting ideas about unit control, but will keep them in secret for now. :) |
| GCM: | Please tell us a bit about the RPG elements that appear on a unit-to-unit basis. |
| Andrew: |
We’ve developed our own in-game RPG-like system, called M.A.S.S (from four main character attributes - Mind, Agility, Strength, and Stamina). It’s more flexible variant of classical “scissors-stone-paper” system, but the balance is based not only on race or unit career, but also on equipment of a unit. Our system is not completely suitable for a full-scale RPG, but perfectly fits the needs of a mass combat. All of your soldiers gain experience through a course of the game and can advance in their careers as infantry, skirmishers, cavalry, and spell casters. There are six career points – rookie, regular, veteran, elite, heroic and epic. Your warriors will progresses in various skills (close combat, discipline, endurance, etc) during their careers. Also they will obtain some special abilities called ‘traits’, which will significantly improve their effectiveness. All units (except special ones) will advance automatically after accumulating enough experience, so you will not bother upgrading every single soldier from dozens of thousands ;) The heroes and their lieutenants are quite different from regular units. Firstly, they have their own distinguish list of skills and traits, more appropriate for army commanders. In the second place, you will advance such characters manually to make their abilities more suited for your playing style. |
| GCM: | Please give us a sense for the type of missions that players will be facing. How are the missions structured? |
| Andrew: |
The game is divided into six chapters, each showing one of the periods of The War of the Seven Nations. All missions in each chapter follow one particular hero (sometimes two of them, if they both have taken part in the same events), so they are connected and consecutive. In-game decisions that the player will make between missions can significantly alter chapter content, either by moving current hero into the other plot brunch or by starting another chapter outright. Now, let’s talk about missions. The principal design of each mission was aimed to exclude trivial “take all forces you can, go here-and-there and kill everyone” solutions, so there will be various mission types and goals. For example prepare an ambush for incoming huge enemy transport or to sneak with small force to the besieged enemy city and open the gates for rest of your army. Some of the missions are based on assaulting or defending cities and castles, and this will be a tricky thing to do, I’ll sure you. And of course there will be plenty of field battles, but they too was designed not to be a primitive hack’n’slash. We’ve also include optional sub-quests in some missions, and completing them can reveal for your hero a previously hidden mission, or even bring to him ancient magical artifact! The maps will vary from mission to mission both in size (reaching 4 square kilometers in especially epic battles) and terrains – from endless steppes, rough old mountains and deep murky forests to paradise-like southern coastlines. |
| GCM: | On the graphical end of things, what is the graphics engine pushing Decline’s visuals capable of? |
| Maxim: |
Our engine is called Battalist. It’s a rephrasing from Russian word which means ‘painter of battle-pieces’. This is very powerful engine with compelling feature set. We've implemented precomputed radiance transfer, parallax bump mapping, all types of shadows (including newest Trapezoidal Shadow Maps) and other modern features. And all that works on scenes with scores of thousands objects per frame, dynamic lighting and weather. You may think that it will require monstrous hardware but no, it will not. Our current build runs perfectly on P-IV 2.0 with Radeon 9600, even more – minimal graphics card required for the game is only GeForce4 Ti. We don't plan to include support of SM3.0 (now we fully support SM2.0) in this project, but it’s not improbable that some features of SM3.0 will be implemented in nearest future. Oh, but enough advertising – take a look at the screenshots! :) |
| GCM: | As for the audio portion, what is the development team doing to ensure that Decline delivers a compelling musical score and intense sound effects? |
| Maxim: | Overall we aim to deliver to the player the atmosphere of ‘real’ fantasy battlefield, where thousands clash, countless warriors fight and die, shouting in rage and pain, drums thunder, metal clanks, arrows whine, spells explode and so on. This description could give you an idea about what our FX will look like. Concerning the music, each of playable parties has their own audio themes, suitable for every in-game situation (combat, marching, unit deployment, pause etc). These themes are designed to blend with each other, and will be changed during a mission according to current situation and camera position. Alongside with unique ambient sounds, weather effects and special effects designed for each map it will give the player much better feeling of what’s happening in the game in any given moment. |
| GCM: | Thank you again for you time! When can we expect to see Telladar Chronicles: Decline hit store shelves and would you care to leave our readers with any final thoughts or impressions? |
| Maxim: | Thank you too! We plan to release English version of TC: Decline late 2005. Localizations will depend on publisher, but we think it will not take too much time. |
| Andrew: |
And I want to sure you that we will not stick with ‘Telladar Chronicles’ series only. We’ve a plenty of great ideas and our team has more then enough creativity and purposefulness to see them fulfilled, so keep an eye on our future announcements! By the way, the project will be presented at Games Convention in Leipzig this week already. Welcome to the booth # B18 Hall 3. Goodbye!
For information on this or other GFI games, visit Mindlink.com.au and GameFactoryInteractive.com |
