Stronghold 3 and Stronghold Crusader 2

Both games will happen, but Firefly needs to finish Dungeon Hero first.

Firefly Studios has told VideoGamer.com that it plans to start work on Stronghold Crusader 2 and Stronghold 3 after its new Xbox 360 and PC action game Dungeon Hero is released around spring next year.

Speaking at a combined Stronghold Crusader Extreme/Dungeon Hero event in London recently, Firefly co-founder Simon Bradbury said that while the studio was "not quite ready to deliver" on Crusader 2, it will make the game, as well as Stronghold 3, "in due course".

Bradbury said: "We've had a lot of people asking us for Crusader 2, but we're not quite ready to deliver on it yet. We love Crusader. I like playing that game myself a lot, it's my favourite one of the series. But we're not quite really there for it yet."

When asked when if he had any hints for when the studio, which has sold four million in the Stronghold series to date, would start work on the two new games, Bradbury replied: "Certainly we'll be looking at Dungeon Hero first, which will be out in Spring of next year, ish, and I would think if we were to start off work in earnest on Stronghold, the next iteration, it would be after that. So, that's as much as I know!"

Stronghold 3 site: http://www.stronghold3.com/

Turetu but neblogas zaidimas, visos sio zaidimo dalys buvo geros. O ypac Crusader

 

I’m a gaming creature of habit. When it comes to expanding my gaming horizons I can sometimes be about as responsive as a dead mule, but even I – a girl with something of an issue with RTS titles – have long been aware of Firefly Studios’ cult classic Stronghold (did you know it outsold GTA 3 in Germany? True story. Apparently). So when publisher SouthPeak invited me along recently for a little chat about Stronghold 3 at Gamescom … well, how could I not check it out? After the resounding success of the original title – and the critical panning of the subsequent sequel – I was intrigued to see just where Firefly were heading with the upcoming third instalment.

 

It was an intimate chat and a fabulously up-close and personal chance to meet Firefly Studios’ CEO Simon Bradbury and President Eric Ouellette to find out firsthand how the latest franchise offering – entitled Stronghold 3, predictably enough – is coming along.

 

I’m relieved to tell you that, to date, it’s looking good.

 

 

Stronghold 3 goes back to basics - with a twist

 

Firefly Studios have gone back to basics. Taking what worked in the original 2001 title – and dropping what was less successful in Stronghold 2 – the studio seem committed to rolling out an intuitive and polished title. Bradbury was frank about the future for Stronghold, talking candidly about the lessons learnt from SH2 (for example, this time around no time was spent chasing the development of an in-house 3D engine) and emphasised the studio’s firm engagement with the Stronghold community to really drill down into the minutiae of what players themselves wanted to see. This time, Firefly think that they’ve gone it right.

 

The story picks up from the end of the original Stronghold title where we learn that Wolf is bad, mmkay – psychotic, apparently. And while that’s pretty much all Bradbury could be drawn upon when it came to the plot, he did hint at a much ‘darker’ storyline this time around, and confirmed that events and strategy were again in keeping with medieval life.

 

 

The keyword of our discussion? Physics. Gone are the constrained 90 degree angles. Lighting is ambient and responsive and for the first time, gamers can play about with the physics of a castle, with seemingly easy and instinctive control mechanics for building communities. Pretty much anything and everything is destructible, and both the environments and enemies respond realistically to their fate, from careering down cliff-faces to, in the latter’s case, rolling around the ground when on fire. Night patrols are peppered with light beacons, blazing hay bales and burning forests, and players can again choose to utilise disease-ridden bovine corpses as long-range weapons, only this time they can also choose from a plethora of other grizzly carcasses and be more strategic in where and how far to initiate medieval life’s equivalent to biochemical warfare.

 

 

Does this seem overly simplistic to you? A little self-explanatory? Maybe. But I get the sense that Firefly have worked hard on this, ensuring that the game is as historically accurate and as intuitive to use as they possibly can, trying to assuage existing fans of the series as well as enticing new ones. Furthermore, the studio’s commitment to the stalwart SH community itself – something Bradbury was at pains to express – is blindingly apparent. Neat little tricks like real-life Google Maps geotagging, and the decision not to require a permanent internet connection despite Steam DRM, suggest that Firefly have kept their ear to the ground on this one and are responding to what fans are telling them.

 

My caveats? Restricted to a live demo, I didn’t get to sample for myself just how the gameplay worked in practice, and – obviously – the early build we saw was far from final. Yet even without any hands-on experience, I left SouthPeak’s press bunker curiously positive about FireFly’s latest release. Bradbury’s tangible enthusiasm was impossible to suppress and surprisingly difficult to ignore.

 

Stronghold 3 is slated for release in Q2 2011. For more details, check out the Stronghold 3 website.

Interview: Stronghold 3 – The Return of a Legend

 

IGN AU: So, Stronghold 2 wasn't quite as well received as the first game. How are you going to bring the series back to the forefront of RTS?

 

Simon Bradbury: We're really aiming to make the game more like the original; for example – it's a simple idea, but the keep is upgradable. There you go; press a button. If you have enough honour, you keep the upgrade. It's more defensible and it gives you better economic benefits.

 

There's a much simpler extension of one, such as the crime system – which is gone –where you had to place six or seven buildings just to get rid of the crime that was developing in the village.

 

IGN AU: So it's about streamlining and modernizing, essentially?

 

Simon Bradbury: Yeah. And about taking what was great from Stronghold 1 and making it elegant. For example, take the original housing system. In the original, it didn't matter where you placed them; you could plant them on an island because they couldn't be attacked! And also, the houses were all the same. In Stronghold 3, if you place a hovel – a long way from your castle – it's abstractly going to be a rubbish hovel. It looks kind of like a garden shed – and it's only giving you one extra person capacity. As we move it up the road, it turns into a bigger hovel, and you can fit two people in it. And closer, it moves to four, then to six people –and as you approach the castle, the houses get bigger and bigger. But now it's using more valuable space next to the keep, so there's a simple dynamic to it.

 

All the player needs to do is use their mouse to figure out the best balance between location and people. It's a really simple and more elegant way to extend the original game design.

 

IGN AU: How has the jump to a sophisticated 3D engine affected the gameplay? Or is it strictly presentational?

 

Simon Bradbury: Well, first of all, this time we have proper lighting. Stronghold 2 had a kind of global lighting system – and it was always the same. We also have weather systems, too – so we can have dark and stormy scenarios and evening battles and sunny mornings. Everything in between. If you go to night time, lights come on in the buildings – and we can do torchlight processions, fire flaming arrows from the battlements – all those great Hollywood-style effects. Also, we now have complex castle physics; physics has never really been in the game – but now we're running Havok, and the impact is immediate. From a gameplay perspective, the night time effect adds to siege gameplay too.

 

All the buildings can be destroyed, and where the force is applied, the building will crumble from that direction. All the walls will slowly chip down and you can create holes in them. Siege equipment can also be destroyed.

 

IGN AU: If units are garrisoned behind that wall though, can you take them all out by collapsing a wall onto them?

 

Simon Bradbury: Yeah, we're going to implement a system that allows you to do that. We need to be a little careful about how we do that because the game could be over before you know it! One thing we've always wanted to do – and now we can do – is get guys to fall off walls. Now, the can fall off the wall and ragdoll. These other guys can very foolishly stand by the edge of a cliff – and they can also be knocked over. It's hilarious to watch. Because of this, I'd expect to see a lot of castles designed on the edges of cliffs for this particular benefit – such is the level of our sophistication! [laughs]

 

Also, traps – like rolling logs - can now be affected by physics. If you build them on an incline, they'll roll even further- and you can kill a whole lot of guys at once. The game has a whole lot of new tricks and traps – and we're not gonna reveal those today – but we can mention the return of that old classic, the boiling pot of oil. Ultimately, how you lay out your castle and how you channel your 'killing zones' is the mark of whether or not you're a good castle designer. There are no other games really out there like that.

 

IGN AU: Can you discuss the tactical elements involved with night time sieges?

 

Simon Bradbury: Here we have a castle – and we have a nice vantage point; most missions in Stronghold 3 will take place in the day time, but a few you'll have to defend or attack at night. We can't see where the enemy is coming from. However, there are defence towers out there – and these can be lit up with flaming arrows, becoming beacons in the darkness. Now you can see the enemy's forces out there.

 

IGN AU: So, it's a lot like fog of war?

 

Simon Bradbury: Well, it's what we call 'proper fog of war' – or, 'it's too bloody dark to see anything!' [laughs] And because we know the enemy is out there somewhere, we could send a guy out on a horse with a torch, but he might get shot. In that case, we're going to use what every gardener should own: the 'flaming-bale-of-hay-launcher'. It lights up an area effectively – and it spreads to the trees too.

 

All of this just adds a degree of tension to the campaign; it extends the core gameplay of the Stronghold series and gives it a slight twist. It's not fog of war – but a slight tweak to visibility.

 

IGN AU: And it looks like there's a really adaptable camera system in place.

 

Simon Bradbury: Yeah, we're going for an extreme high-angle battle map view, and that's great for viewing the battlefield – but also for designing your castle layout as well. But the camera can be swung down closer to the action, of course.

 

IGN AU: How about the new tactics in place? Can you talk about some of those?

 

Simon Bradbury: As part of our ongoing research, we discovered that most castles were siege either through starving or boring the occupants to death. Naturally, that doesn't make for the most exciting RTS gameplay. Now, we've always been able to throw dead animals into the castle in order to spread disease. In this case, we're going to launch the cow into orbit. When it lands, you'll see a nice splat and a fog of green disease. That can be countered by placing an apothecary over there; that's a cool system.

 

The way we're extending that in Stronghold 3 is, we're allowing you to fire different projectiles. So just like a cow, we're going to give you the ability to fire two pigs, or possibly – should the tech allow it – three sheep! [laughs]

 

IGN AU: Err...

 

Simon Bradbury: And what that'll do for you is give you, rather than one big splat of disease, two randomly scattered clouds. That means the defenders must place two apothecaries now. See? There's some logic in our madness! It makes that disease system a little more invested, if you will.

 

IGN AU: Sounds good to us. More games need pig launchers, really. Thanks for your time!