Dragonshard Interview, Part Two
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Jonric: Since weapons, equipment and items in general are pretty important in D&D, but less so in most real-time strategy games, what approach did you take in this area?
Jasen Torres: As far as items we had to be careful - the game is still an RTS game and there are no nice little pauses in an RTS game to play with inventory and switch weapons around on all of the units. We didn't want to frustrate the player by making them feel like they just didn't have time to optimize their character's inventory / armor / weapons (especially since they can control more than 40 characters in the game - inventory for 40 characters would probably stop being fun). We also didn't want to fall into "researching" upgrades and naming them in a D&D way - we still wanted players to find cool items.
What we ended up doing was making items that drop from monsters or are granted in quests (or just found laying in a pile of rubble) that the player can use on any unit. These items range from generic attack and defense upgrades to Potions of Cure Moderate Wounds, to scrolls that have a magic spell like Create Undead and Finger of Death, to special magic items like a Ring of Fireballs that has charges (or some that are unlimited - we are crazy like that and our multiplayer balance designer doesn't like me very much). There are even Champion-specific items like Marryn's Ice Hammer that has a chance to freeze units on attack.
So, there is a ton of items that are, for the vast majority, direct from D&D, and the player can pick them up and use them on their units or on the enemy from a global inventory. From our play testing, this has worked out quite well. It adds a cool level of depth without making it hard to control like digging through individual unit inventories might be.
