Roman’ around in King Arthur II [Preview]

17 Jan 2012 at 10:00:00 by Peter Parrish

The Caracellas are dicks. Total dicks.

I should probably explain. I’ve been playing the King Arthur II prologue chapter, Dead Legions, in which you’re cast in the role of Septimus Sulla. He’s a Roman fellow, one of many in fact, still hanging around in Britannia long after he probably should have left. The remaining families are squabbling amongst themselves and control increasingly diminished areas of the land, which really need to be united if the Romans are to stand a chance of survival.

Sulla could be just the man to re-unite the legions, if he wasn’t being betrayed by the Caracella family at almost every possibly opportunity. First they leave him to die at Hadrian’s Wall, after handily withdrawing their armies away from a conflict with the Picts. Then they organise for his lands to be pillaged and his family killed. And if that wasn’t enough, I later exposed them using mercenaries to spread plague among one of the other families. So, like I said, the Caracellas are dicks.

It’s possible that I may have been involved in some similarly underhanded tricks myself (say, paying off a Pict army to attack the Caracellas, and helping the eldest son of the Mesalla family depose his father in a coup), but it was all for the good of the realm. Honest.

That’s life in King Arthur II. If you want to prosper, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty. The game follows much the same pattern as the first title, King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame; which means it mixes building, research and leveling on a campaign map with Total War-ish tactical battles, magic, heroes and a series of (now fully voiced) choice-and-consequence ‘text adventures’. That might sound like a bit of a mish-mash, but developers Neocore have been pioneering this blend for a while now and it all fits together smoothly.

Despite having an open campaign map, there’s a somewhat linear narrative to follow. Events and objectives trigger at predefined points, and these need to be dealt with to unlock further plot developments. There’s a certain degree of freedom to this (it’s up to you, say, which marauding army or adventure quest you go after first), but there is always a fairly clear goal to be working towards.

I say ‘fairly’ clear, because sometimes the objectives can be a touch obscure. In Dead Legions, one of my missions tasked me with finding the hidden marshland camp of some escaped slaves. After wandering around the most marsh-looking areas of the map for a while with no success, I pretty much gave up. The precise location of the hidden camp only showed up once I’d dealt with other aspects of the mission; but since the game offers no clues that events will unfold in this order, you can waste a lot of time searching in vain for that camp.

Aside from the more quest-focused approach, King Arthur II’s campaign map functions as you might expect. You use it to move your armies around Britannia (the northern part, in the case of the prologue) and can take specific actions depending upon which turn-linked season you’re in. Winter, for example, is the only time when armies cannot move, but it’s also the only time it’s possible to level up your heroes and units. A diplomacy panel (which you may be familiar with if you played either King Arthur’s Saxons or Druids DLC releases) keeps track of your allies and enemies, while also opening up the possibilities for things like basic trade and knowledge exchanges.

Another neat addition is the item forge which, once captured and invested in a little, gives you a great way of dealing with the surfeit of magic items you’ll have acquired from battles. Multiple items can be combined together here to forge a superior creation, and individual items can be ‘sacrificed’ for various rewards too.

There have also been some changes to the tactical battles since the first King Arthur. Battles will no longer end if someone captures all the ‘key points’ on the field, though ownership of these points still offers temporary boosts like access to powerful spells. Magic is just as useful as ever, able to spread destruction throughout a unit in a matter of seconds. Each army begins every battle with an abstract magic shield which can be increased with further magic spells or items, and reduced as you take a battering from enemy wizardry. These both seem to be changes for the better.

Elsewhere the battles seem to have stayed a little too stagnant. In Lionheart: King’s Crusade, Neocore introduced a morale element that could make units retreat from battle. Here, that’s replaced by a general ‘will to fight’, which only affects the damage a unit can do. Troops will never flee from a fight. That’s a shame, because weakening and cracking an enemy’s resolve is a key tactic when facing overwhelming odds (inevitable in a game like this). It’s also annoying when you have a single unit of opposing archers left on the field, who (if you happen to be out of cavalry) will happily lead your entire army on a wild goose chase.

The title currently suffers from a few performance issues too. Even though my PC is well above the ‘recommended’ specs listed, running the game at even ‘normal’ graphics settings produces framerates of 20-30, with occasional dips into the upper teens. I’m not the exception here either; there’s a lengthy thread on Paradox’s forum in which people with PCs ranging from average to utter monsters are lining up to complain of sub-30 framerates. It’s playable enough (for most), but far from ideal. Hopefully there’s still time before 27 January to iron out whatever’s causing this optimisation problem.

King Arthur II is looking like a sequel which builds gently upon the original with tweaks and helpful new features, rather than a totally new beast. This is fine, because the first game was such a unique strategy-RPG combination that altering everything just for the sake of it would’ve been a huge mistake. However, one area that could’ve benefited from further improvements without taking away from the main formula is the tactical battles. A few worthwhile changes have been made here, but it doesn’t look like the battles will surpass those of Total War, as some would’ve hoped. That’s no disgrace though, and, if Dead Legions is any indication, King Arthur II should provide hours more Arthurian fantasy for enthusiasts of this genre niche that Neocore has steadily carved out.

King Arthur II will be released on 27 January for the PC. ‘Dead Legions’ is a prologue chapter that comes free with a pre-order of the full game.

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