The Wizardry series is one of the best-known of the role-playing genre. This being the case, you might expect Sir-Tech, the series' publisher, to have a formula which they follow without deviating. On the contrary, this October Sir-Tech will release Druid, a revolutionary new RPG aimed at attracting gamers who fall somewhere between the hard-core roleplayers and the hard-core adventurers.
Druid is a game that combines great storytelling with excellent design. A great deal of effort has been invested in crafting a story that has its origins in Celtic lore. The druids of legend were accredited with amazing powers: the ability to be anyplace they've seen simply by wanting to, and the ability to will things into and out of existence by collectively imagining it. This provides the seed for the game's environment: four druids, each confined to his own island, each representing one of the four elements, able to communicate telepathically with one another. A fine situation, until one of them, Lawson, vanishes.
Since none of the druids is allowed on the others' islands (they would be able to visit at will thereafter), an outsider is needed to solve the mystery. That's where you come in. As the grandson or granddaughter of a full druid, you know enough to get the job done, but not enough to be a threat.
One of the designers' primary goals was making the storyline strong enough to grab new players and draw them in. From the outset, they gave strong emphasis to making everything fit within the framework of the story. Everything had to make sense. If an object appeared in the game, it had to be something that suited the time and place in which it was found. If the player's character was attacked by a monster, it had to be in that place for a reason, even if the reason wasn't readily apparent to the player. This commitment to telling a good story led to some interesting consequences. When it was first written, the storyline had three different endings. In the course of developing the game, some other possibilities came to light, so the designers decided to add more endgames (presently around eleven, although this may change by the time the game ships).
Complementing the strong mythic background is a design intended to make it easy for new gamers to approach this traditionally daunting genre. A deliberate choice was made to limit the number of statistics used to define characters to make it less confusing to new players. Also, the interface is designed to make it easier to get around. If you want to move somewhere, you click there. If you want to look at something, you click on it. A right-click takes you to a simple menu that lets you construct the spell you want to cast. The magic system itself is almost ridiculously easy. Combining elements has predictable results: add fire to earth to make a fireball, then air to throw it at an opponent.
Combat is also rather untraditional. Most RPG combat is either real-time or turn-based; Druid is both. When you enter combat, you have a window of opportunity during which to strike. If you stand there and do nothing, however, your foe will decide you're too slow and whack you.
Despite all this attention to game design and story writing, the game's artwork has not been neglected. Everything in the game, down to the smallest object, has been rendered in 256-color SVGA. But the artists wanted to avoid a traditional "shiny, rendered look," and so invested extra time in aging things, roughing them up so that they looked more realistic.
With Druid, Sir-Tech hopes to take the chores out of playing a roleplaying game. But they aren't adding these features at the expense of plot, and the game will feature an involved story with multiple endings, superior NPC interaction and plenty of surprises. Druid is planned to appeal to middle-ground gamers who find RPGs too overwhelming and standard adventures too fluffy. Will it work? We'll see at Christmas, which when the druids plan to want to appear on store shelves.
