Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising Updated Hands-On - Character Creation, Combat, and Minions

Sony Online Entertainment and Perpetual Entertainment want you to start thinking about the upcoming Gods & Heroes not as a massively multiplayer role-playing game but as an action adventure massively multiplayer role-playing game. That's because the style of gameplay in Gods & Heroes is inspired by fighting such games as Mortal Kombat. When you attack something in Gods & Heroes, it looks like you're actually attacking it, and that translates into a much more intense feel to the combat. We recently had a chance to see this for ourselves, as well as tinker around with character creation and minion combat, at Perpetual's San Francisco offices.

Gods & Heroes is set in ancient Rome, and you create a character that battles not only historical foes, such as the Etruscans and the Gauls, but also mythological ones, such as minotaurs and centaurs. The character creation is as deep as you'd expect if you've played many massively multiplayer RPGs. Characters can only be human, but you can choose a gender and a class, including gladiator, soldier, priest, and healer. The class that you select will determine which two Roman gods you can choose from to worship, and that will play a significant role throughout the game. After that, you can customize the appearance of your character, from various facial features using sliders (such as the size of eyes, the separation distance between them, and their color), to hairstyle, body build, skin tone, and more. In no time flat, we made a sleek female Roman soldier, as well as an albino male gladiator.

Sadly, we didn't get a chance to play with these new characters because Perpetual gave us some premade level-2 characters for our first taste of combat and adventuring in the world. The gist of the story goes like this: Long ago, the Roman gods defeated the Titans for control of the universe, and the Roman gods were aided by their demigod offspring, such as Hercules. The Titans and their human supporters, known as Telchinists, were banished. However, in Gods & Heroes they have returned, and it's up to you to stop them. How you get involved in all of this is explained in the opening levels, which have you trapped on the island of Telchinos, and you must escape the clutches of the Telchinists.

Because we had level-2 characters, we didn't have many powers or abilities to draw upon during the early combat experienced at this stage, but what we did see was still cool. The quests that we were given took us deep into an underground temple full of acolytes to fight. We had gladiator characters, so we relied mainly on sword combat, and the most basic attack is to get close to an enemy, right click on it for a sword strike, and repeat as necessary until it's dead. That process can take a while, so thankfully we could use two fighting abilities to speed up the killing. The first, samnis strike, involves leaping into the air, whirling around, and striking your foes for massive damage. But our favorite was the eviscerate strike. Your character uses his shield to bludgeon his foes and then runs them through with the sword, lifting them into the air before knocking them off where they crumple to the ground.

These visceral combat moves aren't reserved just for you either. We suffered from our opponents' brutal attacks. In one fight, a dactylus, which is sort of like a gnome or a dwarf, knocked our character down, face-first, and then began jumping on his back. Far more brutal was the spear-armed centaur's habit of impaling our character and lifting him up into the air to let gravity do all the work. After seeing that, you realize that the age of traditional massively multiplayer RPG combat, where characters swing swords at one another and abstractly connect, seems rather dated.

The developers then fast-forwarded us a bit to level 10 to give us our first taste of minion combat. Minions are computer-controlled characters that can join your party. That way, you can command a powerful group, even if you're playing by yourself. More importantly, you can use minions to balance out your party. If you want to play as a magical-ranged character, such as a priest or a healer, but you need some muscle on the front line to protect you, just find infantry minions to join you. Or if you're a fighter type who likes to get in the middle of brawls, you can get minions to provide magic and ranged support. But these minions aren't just randomly generated characters. At this point, there are slightly more than 130 unique minions in the game, each with a story, a personality, powers, and abilities. They're also inserted to play a role in the overall story of the game. In addition, there are 12 nonhuman minions, though only one can join you because each nonhuman minion is aligned with one of the 12 Roman gods in the game.

Commanding the minions is fairly easy thanks to the minion user interface. For instance, just target an enemy and click on the "attack" button in the UI, and they'll attack. Even with just one minion, our combat power effectively doubled, and we were able to tackle more-challenging missions. Minions will also level up with you and become more powerful. While you can gain access to all 132 or so human minions in the game, you won't be able to take them all with you at once, but you can leave them in your player camp. Your player camp is your own private refuge in the game, and it's where your minions will hang out if they're not adventuring with you, and it's the place where you can get quests. The camp is also where you can find your optio, or quartermaster, who can help you set up your minion squads and handle your e-mail messages from other players, as well as your custos armorum, or minion outfitter.

The progress made in Gods & Heroes over the past year has been impressive, and the end of development is certainly in sight. Perpetual continues to work on the game, but the plan right now is for Gods & Heroes to launch around the end of summer.