BattleForge dated for March

By Robert Purchese Published 29 January, 2009

Ambitious RTS/MMO from EA.

EA has said ambitious RTS-cum-MMO BattleForge will launch for PC across Europe on 24th March.

Those keen enough to pre-order will be offered four exclusive unit-cards, each covering one of the four magic powers within the game: Fire, Frost, Nature and Shadow. These will be slightly levelled up, and pre-orders also gain immediate access to the current beta test.

BattleForge, developed by EA Phenomic in Germany, pits armies against enormous computer-controlled monsters or hordes directed by other players.

The composition of the fighting force is dictated by the choice of 20 virtual trading cards, which can represent units, spells or abilities. There's no base-building or tech trees, just action.

Alongside PvP duels are co-op battles for teams of two or four. There are also huge PvE raids for 12 people where scenario missions must be fulfilled and some sort of boss bested. These give out raid loot - special cards or card upgrades.

The MMO similarities continue through social functions such as guilds and chat rooms, plus there's a marketplace website for trading as well as an in-game auction house and direct bartering between players.

Retail versions of BattleForge will come with around 100 to 120 different cards picked from an initial pool of 200. Obviously some will be rarer than others, just like our Ultimate Warrior sparkly WWF sticker-card was nearly 20 years ago.

EA Phenomic told us booster packs would be sold for less than EUR 4, but buying will be optional and players can compete just as fiercely without spending a penny.

BattleForge is currently in open beta, which you can stand in line for by registering over on the official site.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (4) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Chufty #1 3 years ago

    Does anyone know if this is any good? Because it sounds it.

  • DFawkes #2 3 years ago

    I was interested enough to try and pre-order, but apparently it's US only for that beta thing, or acording to the official forum at least. So they can go fuck themselves now. Yes, I'm petty.

  • Eraysor #3 3 years ago

    "EA Phenomic told us booster packs would be sold for less than EUR 4, but buying will be optional and players can compete just as fiercely without spending a penny."

    The only thing worse than paying a huge markup for trading cards is not even getting the physical cards themselves.

  • MrChuckles #4 3 years ago

    I played it for a few weeks on the beta.

    The card idea is pretty nice and the co-op missions are probably the best in the genre.

    However, you can only get new cards from buying packs, which is rubbish, as you can only upgrade cards (slightly) by winning campaign missions or multiplayer PVP matches.

    There are 4 tiers of units which you have access to by having control of up to 4 orbs which define what cards you can cast (like mana in MTG). Unfortunately, multilplayer games at the moment are completely unbalanced and on average take about 5 mins to win either way and players rarely get above tier 2 units which makes all the cool stuff useless in PVP.

    In short, if they changed the payment model so that you earn new cards as you play the single/co-op campaign, it'd be a pretty decent RTS, but the fact you have to spend money to get more units and that the multiplayer PVP combat is a little broken does not bode well.

    I uninstalled it.