Combat Demo, Character Creation and Screenshots

It’s been a while since our last update. We’ve been hard at work designing maps and writing quests – and finishing up the combat demo, which is taking us longer than expected. The main reason for that is the combat demo’s scope: rather than just giving you an arena with a handful of fights, we give you a small story, four different maps with varied environments, shops to buy new equipment in, and the full character creation system as it will appear in the complete game.

The combat already works very well, but we still need to finish up the character creation menu and the shopping interface, and the encounters you’re going to face in the combat demo will have to be playtested a couple of times to make sure it offers just the right amount of challenge. The combat demo is the first taste of the game you’re going to get, and we want to make sure the first impression is a great one. Honestly, we underestimated the actual amount of work the combat demo would require. At the end, we don’t want to release unfinished gameplay elements and that’s why we need to spend more time in designing, implementing and polishing than originally planned. Therefore we are moving the release date of the combat demo to January.

Character Creation

The most important part of any RPG is its character creation. Many of us have spent hours trying to create different character builds in Fallout, or assembling that perfect party of six in Icewind Dale or the old Gold Box titles. Realms Beyond is going to offer you a complex character creation tool that gives you all the classic choices you would expect – ability scores, classes, skills, feats – and some unique ideas of our own that allow you to further define your characters and their role in the world.

Rather than just picking a race and be done with it, Realms Beyond lets you choose your character’s origin: which region of the world does your character hail from? It is more than just a cosmetic choice, as your character’s origin will influence the knowledge of local customs, politics and events the character has, as well as the reaction some NPCs will have towards that character.

Furthermore, you will be able to select a descent for your characters: which social class they hail from and what they did before they became adventurers. Noble, craftsman, peasant – these descents also come with unique background knowledge for your character. Characters with a noble background will be familiar with the customs of the nobility, while characters with a peasant background will be able to tell a farmer why his crops are failing.

The character backgrounds are more than just flavor, as they will occasionally offer unique insights into the events you encounter during the game.

New Screenshots!

Finally, we want to give you some new eye candy to feast on: a few shots of some of the beautiful new locations we have built, and some shots from the combat demo maps in action will follow.