EA adjusts BattleForge date

By Robert Purchese Published 5 February, 2009

Card-based RTS will be a few days late.

EA has nudged quirky online RTS and card-trading hybrid BattleForge back by a few days to 27th March. We had expected the game on 24th March.

Pre-orders will get four exclusive units, one from each of the four factions: fire, frost, nature and shadow. These will have exclusive artwork and in-game animations, plus be levelled-up for a headstart online.

BattleForge, developed by German studio EA Phenomic, challenges players to pick an army from a deck of virtual cards, which represent abilities, spells and units. The tricky part being that only 20 cards can be selected.

There are no bases to build or tech-trees to research, but cards can increase in power through modifiers or duplicates being sandwiched together. Upgrades like these are the sort of loot obtained from 12-player raids. That's 12 armies fighting one super-boss.

The other side of the game will be fighting other commanders online, in duels or co-op battles for teams of two or four.

MMO functions such as guilds and chat rooms are in, plus there's a marketplace and in-game auction house for the important card trading side of BattleForge.

Retail copies come with around 100 to 120 cards - selected from an initial pool of 200 - and some will obviously be much rarer than others.

EA Phenomic will charge under EUR 4 for additional booster packs, and plans to build the pool of cards as time goes on.

There's an open beta currently running for those who are curious. Head over to the official BattleForge site to find out more.

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.

You may also like...

Comments (0)

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

  • There are no comments on this article. Why not post one?