SpellForce 3 gets an open weekend ahead of launch
Also featuring: racist Elves
The RPG/RTS hybrid SpellForce 3 is finally going to be hitting GOG and Steam on December 7. It was announced in 2014 and due out last year but ended up delayed. If you’d rather not wait to see what has come from this extra year of development, a free preview is happening on GOG and will be available until November 27. [Alec was right! Demos are coming back! - Ed] Oh, there’s also a new trailer, detailing the Elven faction, which you can see below.
Elves always seem a little racist, don’t they? A bit too haughty and “we’re very old and mystical so we’re better than you” for me. Glad to see their awfulness isn’t being swept to the side.
SpellForce is one of those middle-of-the-road series. They aren’t great RPGs, and they’re very simple strategy games, but they typically do a good job of combining the disparate genres while telling a forgettable fantasy story. This one is expected to be about 30 hours long.
In SpellForce 3, likes its predecessors, you create a hero (your window into the RPG side of the game) who can level up and get new gear and go on quests and gosh RPG heroes are creatures of habit, aren’t they? But then there’s also buildings to construct, resources to gather and large battles to fight.
Pick up the free preview version and you’ll be able to play single-player and multiplayer skirmishes on four different maps with the three factions -- Humans, Orcs and Elves -- as well as a prequel to the SpellForce 3 story, which acts as an introduction to the single-player campaign. There was a free weekend on Steam last week too, but this one is exclusive to GOG. It's also been discounted by 10 percent until December 7, making it £35.99/$44.99/€44.99.