Gamescom: Dragon + Jetpack + Turn Based Strategy = Awesome

18.08.2011
Belgian developer Larian Studios very recently, and the team invited me to take a look today at Gamescom.

The game currently doesn't have a publisher -- Larian has been considering whether to publish it themself or approach someone else. This current lack of publisher pressure has the fortunate side effect of meaning that the team can go as nuts as they want on making the game outlandish, ridiculous and fun without a marketing team breathing down their neck.

As such, Dragon Commander features a dragon with a jetpack.

Said dragon is your player character, one of the first Dragon Knights, the last of whom we saw in Divinity II. As a human who has the ability to shapeshift into dragon form and fly into battle, it's up to the player to take on and conquer the world through a combination of turn-based strategy, real-time troop commanding and action flight combat.

The game's dynamic story unfolds aboard the player's mothership, where machinery whirrs, advisors advise and whatever princess you chose to marry makes continual and increasingly unreasonable demands upon you. These aren't just a character trait, though -- choosing whether or not to fulfil your fickle bride's requests has a significant impact on the game by potentially providing you with cards to play in the second part of the game -- the strategic map.

In order to get this turn based part of the game playing just right, the team at Larian actually made it into a board game and played it continually until they worked out the best balance of features there was. They then implemented it into the game, and the result is what you see in the game now.