I was just watching the high def E3 video and the graphics look pretty good, but I immediately noticed something familiar.

It wasn't very long ago that I tried The Matrix Online and its fighting styles and restrictions are fresh in the'ol noggin.  Gods & Heroes seems to duplicate the MxO fight "engine", for lack of a better way to describe it.  Don't take that description too literally...

In other words, every encounter is one melee versus one melee.

Some parts of the video, such as the large battlefield, try its best to "suggest" that there is more than one melee combattant in a single given fight.  Upon watching the video closer, however, I noticed that this was never the case.  If you watch very closely you'll notice that it's always one melee against one melee, with ranged fighters pitching in.

Toward the end of the video you'll notice a fight with some sort of red demon.  It looks like two skeletons are flanking the melee character, but if you watch the fight you will notice that one of the skeletons gets hit as the character that it's "flanking" is being flung to the ground.  It seems that these are actually two skeletons that are fighting each other - possibly summoned pets that are duking it out - not attackers flanking the melee character.

The highly stylized moves look cool, but so were the MxO fights at first.  After awhile it became just another encounter, and I found myself rather annoyed at not being able to jump into a fight to help group members.  Sure my character could use a ranged attack, but it was a distant second focus and was awfully boring to do.

As I understand it, restricting an encounter in MxO to one-on-one was required in order to animate the highly styalized fights.  Now here in Gods & Heroes we have another game with highly styalized fights, and what also appears to be a limit of one-on-one melee fighting.

Has this been revelaed on their web site?  I don't know, I haven't read about the game.  Sorry to bring up something that's old news, if so.

I for one do not look forward to another game where I have to race group members if I want to actually fight the target.  The fights look cool at first, but everything does until you get used to it. Then it's just another encounter and all that you have left is the rest of the game.  Standing around as ranged support was boring.

Well anyway, the point's made and the question is raised, I suppose.  Perhaps I'm way off base.

~Mysk