Codemasters’ Overlord: Fellowship of Evil brings some big changes to the fantasy action-strategy series; as well as the switch to an isometric viewpoint and the new focus on action RPG, the game’s designed with co-operative play in mind.
That said, the developer wants to make sure it’s enjoyable for solo players, too. In a post over on the Codies Blog titled ‘Minionstry of Information’ (ho ho), the team describes how certain features will be tweaked for an optimal singleplayer experience.
”Overlord: Fellowship of Evil is designed to work well for the solo player, as well as in multiplayer,” the team writes. ”We wanted to ensure that, what with the previous games being primarily single-player affairs. In solo play various elements of the game will be tuned for an optimal experience. For instance, enemy encounters will have different spawn patterns, and enemies will have adjusted stats.”
You’ll also be able control more minions, which Codemasters says makes the game feel much more like the first two Overlord games. That said, if you do feel like adventuring with a friend, you can quickly drop into a game, without worrying about character progression.
”If you have a friend who is playing the game, you can join them – regardless of where in the story each player has reached. This means that powerful characters could play with weaker characters. We have systems to “even out” the characters’ core stats a bit to help deal with this. Powerful players will still be more powerful than beginners, but the difference will not be so much as to ruin the game for either party.”
The full blog post is worth checking out if you’re interested to see what Codemasters is up to. I still think it’s a bit of a shame that the team’s abandoning the more interesting RTS elements of the series in favour of Diablo-style hack-and-slashing, but who knows, maybe they can prove me wrong.
Overlord: Fellowship of Evil is still described as ”coming soon” on Steam.
