Games Workshop's Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 series of tabletop strategy
wargames have amassed quite a following over the past couple decades, and
along the way they've accumulated hugely detailed lore detailing the armies,
conflicts, and worlds that make up the games. With the war-torn fantasy and
sci-fi settings, they've always seemed like ripe fruit for video game adaptations,
but despite many noble efforts--Final Liberation, Dark Omen, and Space Hulk
come to my mind--there haven't been many Warhammer-based games that have really
earned themselves lasting places in gaming history. To many, that changed
last year with Relic's acclaimed Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, which did
justice to the Warhammer 40,000 setting and provided a compelling and deep
RTS experience. Now, Namco and Black Hole Games, developer of Armies of Exigo,
hope to have similar success with the fantasy-themed Warhammer universe in
the form of the upcoming Warhammer: Mark of Chaos.
Tabletop games of Warhammer Fantasy tend to be grander in size than their
sci-fi Warhammer 40,000 brethren, and that holds true with Mark of Chaos.
The game is intended to depict all out large-scale war, and if current screenshots
are any indication it will do so beautifully. Mark of Chaos is for many a
highly anticipated title, but there haven't been all that many details released
about the game, so I posed several questions to Namco senior producer Chris
Wren to try and learn some more about Black Hole's work in progress.
Shack: What are the basic strategic gameplay elements of Mark of Chaos? Given
its Warhammer setting can I assume it's more of a "wargame" than
a resource-gathering type of RTS?
Chris Wren: Resource management is a critical feature of any war game and
Mark of Chaos is no exception. What you will find is that we are shifting
the focus of the game more towards the elements of battling and away from
resource management. We are adding several layers of command for the player
within the battle space to give them more control over what we deem the core
experience of a wargame. Resource management will exist, however your role
will be primarily military in how you manage these resources. As the commander
of your army, you might order your troops to take over an enemy controlled
resource like a farm or mill, but you will not be responsible for training
farmers and tending to the crops.
NewsFri, Dec 30, 2005LadySirse
