Divinity: Dragon Commander Preview and Blog Post
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Dragon Commander consists of multiple stages of play, each one appearing to be well crafted. From the player's main airship, the Raven, various political and social activities can be undertaken. Advisers will suggest new courses of action, which can be followed or ignored at will, and ambassadors from other kingdoms can appear to offer various alliances. A princess from one of the kingdoms can be married and visited in the bedroom for advice, and each marriage will affect the realm in various ways. In the demo, the player divorced his elven bride and married a dwarven one, causing various provinces to rise up in rebellion but gaining the trust of the dwarf faction.
Undertaking political schemes can reward the hero with cards. Cards can be played in battles to create advantageous conditions -- for instance, deciding to put prisoners to work in the army can yield a reinforcements card, which can be played in a battle to bulk up troop numbers. Of course, these cards are sometimes be gained at a cost -- the aforementioned prisoners are a threat to the general population, and could rob, rape, and murder while battling under the player's banner.
Rivellon is represented by a large, Risk-like map, which contains information on the various rival kingdoms, as well as the separate provinces that make them up. While there is a lot of information, it looks rather straightforward and is fairly intuitive.
And this blog post from Larian's Swen Vincke that includes a video of praise for the title from those who have been able to witness the E3 presentation,andt also pointed out the Destructoid preview:
Thomas has also been interviewing journalists & distributors coming out of the presentations, and I think he's got about 40 or so really enthusiastic people on tape saying nice stuff about the game, so what's in the video really is but a small selection. It actually surprised us that these journalists wanted to go on the record like this, so we're quite appreciative of that. I don't think you need to have a lot of empathy to understand exactly how motivating that is and I guess those that went on the record understood that, so I'll probably need to retract a few of the things I've said about the media in the past
All these reactions are a big deal to us because Dragon Commander is a complex game that doesn't easily fit in a single genre category. Obviously that's our choice, so we shouldn't complain, but to be able to actually also sell the game, positive media will help us a lot. For one thing, it'll help ensure that a large enough group will at least give the demo a shot and once that happens, we hope that the game will be good enough to take care of the rest. Getting people to try Dragon Commander is high on the list of things that keeps me awake at night.
In the interest of full disclosure, we have been feeding some of the journalists Belgian beer, and I don't know how much that affected the reaction shots.
