Dawn of Fantasy: Taking MMORTS Out of the Browser
505 Games and Reverie World Studios have an ambitious goal to change the MMORTS browser genre with Dawn of Fantasy. We check out DoF and see if it's living up to the hopes of its developers and publishers. Check it out!
Dawn of Fantasy, if it wasn’t completely obvious from the title, is a fantasy based title. You choose from Humans, Elves or Orcs as your race and proceed to carve out a corner for yourself in the land of Mythador. Everything is fairly stereotypical as far as the story goes: Elves make the best archers, Orcs are strong and dumb, Humans are kinda middle of the pack, jack of all trades and master of none. The King of the land has decreed that the world/land be divvied up to new leaders, one of which is you. He also then decrees that said new leaders have to fight it out (once the newbie protection wears off of course.) Other than the fact that it has been taking out of the browser and made client based, Dawn of Fantasy plays pretty much how you’d expect it to if you’ve played previous attempts at an MMORTS game. So let’s get into the nitty gritty and just see how well (or badly) Dawn of Fantasy handles the different aspects of gamehood.
Read more of Richard Cox's Dawn of Fantasy: Taking MMORTS Out of the Browser.
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I wanted Dawn of Fantasy to succeed, but it's "clunky" in almost every aspect of it's execution.
Graphics are murky.
It's overly complex - so much so that it takes away from gameplay (imo).
Never did like the UI.
Chat is terrible. - It's a slide out deal that takes up too much of the screen.
Overall the game earns it's 6.3 rating - which is too bad. I was really rooting for these guys.
Maybe you should take a look at http://www.strongholdkingdoms.com/ .. Over 1 million players and counting
or end of nations
I don't think I've yet seen what I'd consider an MMORPG. It's always 1v1 or 2v2 RTS game sellotaped to some persistent world map, and 'Dawn of Fantasy' (bravo on the name) seems to be more of this. The trouble is that neither the RTS part or the persistent world map part are satisfying.
I'm looking forward to the game where there is just a massive world map, and you can spawn in, build a base in real-time and see how long you can survive. There are serious game design considerations that would need to worked through, but come on, someone give me Age of Empires 2, with a few thousand people in a game over a massive world. Yes please. And no, Age of Empires online isn't that game.
And doesnt look exactly like Evony with a different skin.......