Sorcery preview

Based in a small town in the north of Sweden, Starbreeze are hard at work on a fantasy role playing game with a difference.

The name of the game is Sorcery.

Magic Eye Candy

The first thing that catches your eye are the graphics. Sorcery uses its own homebrew OpenGL accelerated 3D graphics engine, and it looks gorgeous.

Curved surfaces, volumetric fog, dynamic mirrors and portals, skeletal animation, and beautiful lighting and particle effects are all taken care of. The graphics put most other role playing games to shame.

Of course, game play is just as important as graphics, and Sorcery looks promising on that front as well.

Although it will still feature all the usual exploration, strategy and puzzle solving of traditional RPGs, combat will be fast paced and the game will be viewed through a first person perspective.

Mikael "MyrddiN" Wahlberg, one of the level designers working on the game, described it as "like Ultima Underworld with the pace of Quake", which has to be a good thing in my books.

A Kind Of Magic

Sorcery casts you as a young mage with the unenviable job of saving the world. Your entire continent is being torn apart by war and madness, and it is up to you to find a solution to the problem.

And if that isn't enough to satisfy you, there is also a huge game world to explore, and plenty of subquests to side track you.

From what little we have seen so far, Sorcery is shaping up to be a great blend of first person brawn and role playing brains. The graphics are drop dead gorgeous, the plot suitably epic, the world vast, and the magic-based combat fast and furious.

One to watch out for next year! Sorcery is aiming for release some time in 2000, and will be published by Infogrames.