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.
Each turn, captured provinces acquire gold for the player. In order to conquer provinces, the player must move their armies, commanded by unique generals, into battle. Cards acquired through fulfilling requests for characters can be played on specific battles to influence the outcome -- and at the end of a turn, the player makes a choice of which battle they want to take a direct role in.
Then begins the real time fun. Flying around the impressively-detailed landscape as a dragon (with a jetpack -- which allows the player to either slow down time, bizarrely, or accelerate to supersonic speeds), the player can use their special abilities to attack enemy forces as well as command their troops to move and attack in a simple case of pointing the crosshair and pushing up on the D-pad of a controller. The plan is for the game to be playable by non action game fans by simply hanging back as the dragon and ordering your forces -- but more excitingly for fans of Relic's classic space RTS Homeworld, in the final game it will also be possible to zoom out to a tactical overview and command the battle from afar in 3D.
The campaign is dynamic and unfolds according to player choices. It's also fully playable in multiplayer, with up to four participants. Different dragons will be on offer, with different characteristics. Larian is also looking at the possibility of allowing the game to be played in multiplayer exclusively using the turn based strategy "board game" map.
Dragon Commander doesn't have a release date yet -- some time in 2012 is the best guess the team can give right now. The already impressive looking demo showed at Gamescom today was built in just 4-5 weeks, though, so given a year or so to develop and refine the game further, the Belgian developer could well have a sleeper strategy hit on its hands.
This article originally appeared on GamePro.com as