Age of Sigmar: We Need To Talk About ‘Realms of Ruin’
Warhammer: Age of Sigmar is getting a new game in the digital realm and it’s looking kinda spicy! Realms of Ruin looks promising.
So Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin was previewed at the Throne of Skulls event and we got a cinematic trailer. Well over the weekend we got a closer look at the gameplay trailer and I gotta be honest, this one stuck with me.
Realms of Ruin Gameplay
So you can watch the video for yourself and it does have the whole “Alpha In-Game Footage” tag at the bottom — that means it all subject to change. That said, it’s looking promising! We only get to see the Stormcast square off against the Kruleboyz but it’s enough to get an idea about the game itself. Even if the graphics are “Alpha” they look spot on which is a good place to start!
We do have this much info from Warhammer Community:
“The team at Frontier Developments have been hard at work creating Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, an action-packed real time strategy game. …
It’s Stormcast Eternals vs Kruleboyz – two of the four factions available to play in Realms of Ruin. Every battle is a tug of war for control over command points, with units you’ll recognise from the tabletop…
So we know it’s a real time strategy game and it’s going to have four factions available at launch. But what about that game play?
Here’s a screenshot from the trailer. You can see the unit of Liberators is “selected” and it looks like they are moving up on the map. And speaking of maps…
In the lower right corner we can see a minimap of the battlefield. It looks like we’ve got two encampments (the Red for the Stormcasts and Gold for the Kruleboyz – but that could be reversed from the other image above as red is usually used as opposition). And there are various points around the map. Based on the info above, I’m guessing those are “Command Points” that you’ll have to control for either resource generation or a victory condition.
Here’s a look at the same battle a little further along. The voice line is saying “Protect the Bastion! We need the loot.” And this looks like a building that is occupying the Command Point/Objective and you can see the red border of it as well. This is also not the only map that’s teased…
This is a different battle as you can see from the way the map is setup in the lower right corner. It has a crazy looking lay out for sure.
Aside from the various units that are being teased we also get a look at some info at the top of the screen:
Having played more than a few RTS games in the past, you can see the resources of the army followed by what appears to be a unit count. Then we have a score/resources? There’s also a timer as well as five markers that probably mean captured Command Points or some other points of interest. The white ones being available while the Gold/Red are claimed.
The rest of the video plays out with some cinematic combat (which is pretty neat looking). There’s lots to chew on with the various animations and combat that’s happening. But overall it looks good!
Dawn of War Meets Age of Sigmar?
So the comparison is pretty obvious here. This looks a WHOLE lot like a Dawn of War game (closer to the first or second game) in game play but with the AoS setting. DoW: 1 had a similar objective system while DoW: 2 had more of a focus on the heroes and units that dropped in. Considering that there was a lot of inspiration from Company of Heroes in those games and Realms of Ruin seems to be leaning on those…I’m HERE for that.
“When it’s released for real, Realms of Ruin will feature a full cinematic single-player campaign, as well as 1v1 and 2v2 cross-platform competitive multiplayer. The game has been designed for consoles and PC, and features a choice of controller-based inputs with DirectStep™ or standard mouse and keyboard controls on PC.”
I’m looking forward to an RTS game with a unit cap and a focus on Objective Control. While I do like Base building I also think that there’s a space for this more “Capture Point, get reinforcements, attack” style of gameplay. I do hope that the map does have a Fog of War option because setting up an ambush would make for some really interesting combat. Then again, you know where you opponents are when you play the tabletop game and maybe this is a call back to that — without just being a port of the tabletop gameplay to the digital realm.
This could be a sweet break-out RTS game like Dawn of War was back in the day. Here’s hoping that Realms of Ruin manages to pull something cool off!
