Action-RPGs, particularly contemporary ones, offer a wide variety of classes, ranging from the noble knight to the precise archer. Magic users have always had a place in these games, but developer Scraping Bottom Games doesn’t think these bearded wizards and mages have gotten the respect and attention they deserve. Fictorum looks like it’s going to change that.
“My co-developer Greg Curran and I grew up loving fantasy games,” says lead developer Chip Flory in the game’s Kickstarter video. “One that we’ve wanted to play for a few years now focuses on being a mage with access to legendary magic like the greats that we know of from books and movies.”
In Fictorum, this means utilizing Unreal 4 and a physics-based destruction system. When you send out a bolt of lightning, you don’t just damage enemies; a powerful blast can destroy buildings, sending rubble scattering in all directions and bodies falling to the ground.
Using what Scraping Bottom calls spell “shaping,” time slows down when you open the spellcasting interface and drag your cursor toward one of three runes, each affecting a different attribute of the spell. This allows you to customize your attacks on the fly for different scenarios, and the brief gameplay demonstration shows a few examples, including freezing enemies in place and chaining a lightning attack together to strike several targets in a group.
Though Flory is adamant that the project will be realized regardless of crowdfunding support, Fictorum is now on Kickstarter with a goal of $15,000. This money will go toward more spells, better art and animations, levels, and additional narrative. The team is also looking for playtesters to offer feedback on the game prior to release, and if you want to shell out some serious cash, the $2,500 pledge tier will see you become the game’s god — you won’t have control of the game, but the god will look like you.
Fictorum is currently planned for a June 2017 release.
