Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance - Gameplay

Gameplay

Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance is a real-time strategy game where the player is one of the heirs to a throne, a descendant of the royal bloodline on a quest to take over the world.

Players take on the role of ruler, or regent as they are called in Birthright, of a nation in the Land of Anuire on the continent of Cerilia. The objective of the game is to gather power and influence while the other regents try the same.

In order to accomplish this objective, the player has many options at his disposal. These include warfare, diplomacy, magic, manipulation of holdings such as guilds and temples, the establishment of trade routes, et cetera. All of these actions take place in a turn based fashion on the world map, with the exception of the adventuring, which is done in real time 3D.

The adventure game engine was a Doom II engine clone: a 2D/3D engine which has essentially a flat layout map. The innovations at the time were the use of three resolutions of avatars which were hot swapped in depending on the distance from the viewer and the amount of memory on the hardware. Also there were flying wyverns and spiders which crawled on the ceilings as well as the floors. Due to the nature of the game engine it was not possible to get them to crawl on the walls. For the time period of this game's development the textures and avatars were significantly higher resolution than other games using similar graphics engines. However a slow CD drive coupled with a medium amount of memory could cause the game to pause as it swapped in and out higher resolution graphics. There were resolution settings that could be adjusted to tune those features.

The adventure game play suffered from difficult to control avatars and that the art was not made with contact points. That is to say no one piece of an avatar's art could be communicated to the game engine just what it was. For instance, to have good looking sword play, it is necessary for each avatar to know where the opposing avatar's sword and shield are. There were sounds of steel on steel, steel on leather and they were used for the strike foley but the art being center spaced looked clumsy as the swords either passed through each other, or missed entirely.

If the player failed to equip their spell caster with the necessary spells before adventuring those spells were unavailable to them and forced the player to leave and re equip.