When paradox announced Paradox Connect with free to play titles planned for release on the network, I was quite excited. The first of the free to play games, Dreamlords Resurrection has been out for a month(out in March). Developed by Swedish studio LockPick Entertainment, Dreamlords Resurrection is a free to play MMORTS. A massively multiplayer online game with RTS elements(surprised?). Being a huge strategy gamer, I was curious to see how Dreamlords was going to handle merging RTS with an MMO.
You start off by picking from one of three factions, the Covenant(regular medieval human faction who believe in the ‘doctrine’), Nihilim(mysterious underground human faction that believe the doctrine is ‘wrong’ with heavy emphasis on magic) or the Thul(a demonic faction). The different faction basically means different buildings, units types you can recruit. Pretty standard fare fantasy stuff.
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| Looks like the design of this faction was inspired right out of something from Stargate |
The story centres around Dreamlords, ancient beings with magical powers that have been asleep for a very long time. Each player assumes the role of a Dreamlords, a glowing being,(which becomes your avatar) and builds up his own legion of armies and followers. A terrible evil has awoken and the people are suffering and all that fantasy jazz. Story is elaborately written but easily ignored. All you need to know is that the Dreamlord is your avatar that you lead in battles. You can read about the the story here.
Massively Multiplayer Online
Dreamlords Resurrections has all the elements of an MMORPG except for the RPG elements. In the main screen, you can equip your dreamlord with armour and items you gain from winning in the RTS portion of the game. You can even equip your armies with item and armour you find(which you’ll find to be key in the game if you want to win with very limited number of units). What’s curiously missing are experience levels and leveling up.
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| Look at these texts and pop ups! Actually despite this, this is actually the better part of the game |
When I inspect the strategic maps, I see all the missions have a level attached to them. All the gear you get has a level to them as well but your armies and your own Dreamlord don’t seem to level up which is the only departure from the MMO formula. They key is in what they dub as ‘Patria Management’(which takes a while to load up since I think it loads a lot of stats from an online server). An empire management aspect of the game. You have a virtual city that you build up and upgrade. Your Dreamlord gains power from having more followers.
To gain more followers, you need more soul power that you can get from soul gems(which you can turn all loot into soul gems). Your citizens don’t immediately become you followers, it takes time and soul power. You can speed this up by spending tribute points though(the in game currency which you can use real money to buy more). Your Dreamlord increases his/her rank as you gain more followers(there is a title and numerical rank so that you know your Dreamlord is getting better).
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| Equipping your regular units is a neat idea |
The whole Patria management/city building angle is very similar to other browser based city builders. Nothing too complicated and things take real time to complete, especially research(actually, only research, buildings are instantly built). Each building has its own research tree and if you want to improve your soldiers, you’ll have to research the tree on your training ground building. Research can take 14 hours or more so it’s very browser based game in that way, incentivising you to come back to the game daily.
What’s really unique is that Dreamlords Resurrection also has a crafting system. A crafting system in a strategy game! Can you imagine that. It’s quite an interesting system to have in a game like this but its definitely not quite as satisfying as say if it was in an RPG. The problem with the crafting and the loot mechanic is that it’s a bit removed from what you’re actually doing. Anyway, I’ll get to that. I found the whole menu interface for the Patria management to be clunky and painful to navigate around.
RTS, Without The Strategy
In the RTS portion of the game, you have an over world map for PvE and Pvp(separate map for them). In the PvE bit(which is what I mainly played), each territory is a quest or an opportunity to get loot. Yes, you heard me right… loot. The problem I have with the loot is that they are disconnected from the quests, at least from the stuff I’ve played. It’s not as if you go to the forests to harvest some high quality timber or what not.
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| TOTAL WAR! Well... not quite, its pretty linear here. Might as well be a list of missions |
The missions happen, you go through them(the quests/maps are heavily scripted). At the end of the mission, you get a bunch of loot which seems to me completely random. There might be some math behind it that generates loot that correlates with the mission/quest level. There are some smart ideas here, like using loot for crafting(as I’ve said) and even equipping your army with armour and weaponry to improve their statistics(remember they can’t level up other than researching a higher tier unit).
The actual RTS part is rather… mediocre. The emphasis is really on building your crack army with the equipment's and research you do in your Patria. There’s nothing extraordinarily satisfying with the RTS. If you have a low level Dreamlord and army, the later levels get extremely tough and you’ll have to ‘kite’ the enemy and use your ranged units to take them out. But this definitely ain’t no StarCraft. Very forgettable, the RTS game merely acts as an uninteresting distraction from all the other MMO aspects of the game. Dreamlords Resurrections RTS game looks and plays like a bad 90’s C&C clone, everything is rather generic and units slide around like they were skating on ice, except they are in a forest.
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| Lots of scripted missions |
Conclusion
This isn’t a review, as any online game is always going to evolve, but I found Dreamlords Resurrections to be woefully inadequate to warrant a proper review. If you’re billing the game as a MMORTS, it helps if the RTS bit of the game was good. No such luck here. Dreamlords also suffers from a serious lack of tutorials. There is a tutorial in the game but it just doesn’t do enough to explain all the systems in the game to have a good understanding of how everything works. You’ll have to spend a lot of time figuring out how all these things work by yourself.
For a free to play game, that’s a death knell. If you can’t get a player to understand your game and care about how all the bits works, you will have lost the player. People are less likely to tolerate the tediousness of going on the web to learn about your game and read tutorial texts. Maybe there will be a small European following for this game, but I don’t see this game being able to make any mark at all. Considering the amount of new and upcoming free to play titles by other developers and from Paradox themselves, your attention is better spent elsewhere. You can check the game out for yourself here if you must.
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