Blades Of Fire, the new MercurySteam game published by 505 Games, have two big selling points: visceral action combat and an in-depth forging system.
This latest video showcase gives a good look at what it means by “in-depth forging system”, and from the looks of it, it’s proper.
Protagonist Aran is seen here forging a sword, and it’s not a simple process. First is deciding what weapon to forge, and then you can start to pick the desired spec, which Aran will then draw an outline of on the blackboard. For the sword, the shape of the blade, guard and pommel can be mixed and matched. And the stats shown here not only governs the usual attack power or critical hit chance, we’re talking about the blade weight, reach, balance and speed.
You can pick what sort of metal to use when forging a weapon, but unlike most games where the material used gives a flat bonus to stats, Blades Of Fire lay out the materials’ conferred stats as a stat triangle. More common metals don’t favour any of the three stats, but to specialise in a specific stat means getting hands on rare ores.
And we’re not done here, there’s also a blacksmithing mini-game. You’ll have to hammer the metal into shape, just like the shape of the blade Aran sketched an outline of before committing to the forge. It’s not a time-based mini-game, but rather accuracy-based as you can adjust how hard you want to hit the metal to bend it into shape. There’s some leeway in that you can reheat it to slightly reset the shape for a few more hits, but make them count.
There will be more entries to this series of short videos leading up to Blades Of Fire’s launch.
In Blades Of Fire, Aran must gear up for an adventure to take down the evil Queen Nerea. The game is powered by MercurySteam’s in-house Mercury engine.