By Soulrift
There’s nothing I like more than a good independent game project. I try to play as many as I can, and although most fall far short of something I’d recommend, once in a while a really nice gem surfaces. Saga is one such gem. Granted, it’s still very rough around the edges, and I spent almost as much time being disconnected from the server as actually playing the game, but there’s clearly some good design at work and I’m sure the team behind the game will continue to strive to improve the experience.
Saga is a bit of a stranger in the online game scene. It brands itself as an MMORTS, but I truly can’t grant the “MMO” to this game, since there really isn’t any ‘massive’ feeling to the multiplayer experience. It is capped at 2 players, after all. But your account is stored server-side and your kingdom does progress permanently, even when you log out. It’s also based on card trading rather than resource gathering, at least for units, giving it a rather unique touch in RTS games.
Gameplay in Saga is divided between your kingdom and various battles. The kingdom mode is where you manage peasants and gather resources to build up your empire. Each kingdom map has a number of build spots for particular buildings, such as lumber mills and stone quarries, so when you fill your map you’ll have to conquer new territory to expand further. These extra territories, however, can be raided by enemy players, so while your home base is safe, your outlying territories will be at risk. The kingdom mode continuously operates, even when you’re not logged in, and tends to operate very slowly: resources are accrued daily, so it doesn’t help to sit there hour by hour.
You also manage your troops in kingdom mode. Your army consists of various units, each of which is represented by a unit card. Some units can stack many cards: common cards like elven archers are only worth 1 CP each, so you can put 25 of them in a unit. Other rare cards are worth more CP, like dragons, so you can only have one card in the unit. CP represents the unit size: it’s capped at 25, but every unit also incurs a 5 CP cost to deploy, so your 25 archers will cost you 30 CP to deploy. Units gain experience from battles and can be equipped with weapons and armor, so once you create a unit you can expect to keep improving it as you play the game. You can always change the size of a unit as needed, adding more cards to it as you acquire them by trade or by buying boosters.
The other main gameplay mode is battle mode, where you deploy your troops and do combat with your foes. There are tons of different quests you can attempt – over a thousand so far, – and once completed on bronze difficulty you can re-do them on silver and finally gold, increasing both the difficulty and the rewards. Once you get it to gold, you can do the quest over and over, either alone or with a friend, to earn XP for your units, gain resources, and gain XP for yourself. You level up from completing quests, and being a higher level allows you to get access to more challenging quests, quests to claim territories, and to both form and deploy more troops.
Battles provide you with a limited number of CP: this determines how many units you can deploy. If you have 60 CP at your disposal, you can deploy units whose cumulative CP totals no more than 60. The battles themselves are fairly standard: click to target troops, right click to attack, and so forth. All troops can assume one of four formations, standard mode, then two defense stances allowing them to defend against melee or ranged attackers, or assume an aggressive stance to do more damage. Many troops also have special abilities, including healing or buffing friendly units or debuffing or damaging enemies. Given the limits on CP, you’ll want to pick and choose your units carefully to ensure a balanced army and one that will respond properly to the quest at hand.
There are a few criticisms I have with this principles, however. The first, which annoys me to no end, is that you cannot change the number of troops in a unit during a battle. This means that you might have 29 CP free, but your 25 archer unit takes up 30 CP. If you could simply remove one archer, you would be able to deploy it, but that would require quitting the mission and going back to your kingdom. On-the-fly troop resizing is an absolute must and something I hope to see in the future. Another major problem is with knowing what the mission objectives are. Sometimes you destroy a building you later need to capture, but the game doesn’t recognize the mission is stuck and doesn’t react, forcing you to surrender the battle yourself. Finally, given the defensive stances, formation moves are a much needed feature to prevent your faster units from running past your defensive line.
The major difference between Saga and most other online games is the lack of a subscription. Instead, you buy booster packs which give you 10 more cards, and only when you want to. You can also trade with other players using the market system, a fairly comprehensive auction house-style system which lets you search by card or groups of cards. Unfortunately, there’s no cost for listing trades, so the vast majority of the 24,000+ trades at any given time are entirely unfair, like offering five common archers (which you can buy with in-game gold, incidentally) for an ultra-rare dragon. There’s also no common currency for cards independent of the resources that can be generated for building up your empire, making it difficult to ascertain a true market value for any card. Traders beware; new players will most likely get ripped off on bad trades as they learn the ropes. A market history, showing what sorts of cards are traded for each card, would be a very nice way of keeping track of what other people are actually willing to trade, beyond the ridiculous listings flooding the market.
You can try the game for free by signing up at
playsaga.com, but the $20 registration fee is definitely worth it to get access to trading and you start off with more than enough cards to build an army and trade with friends. Check it out, and keep an eye out for more updates and improvements from the Saga team.
By Capt. Maverick
As Soulrift is the GameSHOUT MMO and RTS Specialist, he completely understands the technical aspects of the game. But Soulrift took me with him on this ride with him into Saga, so that I could enjoy and learn how to have fun in an RTS. Well I have to admit that I got hooked.
Saga is a factioned game play, almost good against evil but you decide which is good and which is evil. The different factions in Saga include The Order and the Brotherhood. In the Order are the Light which primary race is Human and Giants, Machine which primary race is Dwarves, and Nature made up primarily of Elves. The Brotherhood currently has Magic which the primary race is the Dark Elves and War which the primary race if Ogres and Orcs. We started trying out the Order first and will try out the Brotherhood next.
You will start out with a few troops and a few resources including a market, a pigeon coop to send and receive messages, a Temple, one house and a Stronghold. The market is where you will trade your cards for the other troops that you need to build the units that you need to field the army that you really want. Soulrift got into that enough really. The Stronghold is where you will manage your civilian population such as how many farm workers, construction workers, police, lumber mill workers, miners, and more. You’ll also manage your army units through the stronghold. Again Soulrift went into great detail about CP and such but basically, I put together an army troops with a variety of strengths with some archers, some tanks, (infantry), cavalry, and then went to my specialty units. Since I created a Light faction, I have Giant Archers, and Warriors and Spearmen and more to work with. Now as much as I want to I can’t put them all out at once, but as I level up I will be able to put out more, because I’ll have more CP available to use. I also have some spells to use and those are fun too, when you can do things like set your enemy troops on fire. Hey, when you are facing Ogres with Humans, you HAVE to even the odds somehow.
The Temple will allow you to go to your quests and manage your troops that have fallen. This I thought was an interesting aspect of this game. You do not loose the card when you loose your troops in battle. When you are done with the battle, win or loose, you will return to your town and you will be able to go to your Temple’s graveyard and resurrect your troops. There is a cost to doing this and you need to keep your Temple offerings up so that you may continue to raise your troops. Then you need to remember to replace these resurrected troops back into their units because as Soulrift said, you cannot do this on the fly while in the field of battle.
Visually Saga has some pretty nice environments and the visuals are well done. If you scroll in and watch the battle, its pretty impressive. The player models are nicely done even though most of the time you’ll be looking at your armies at a about a 5,000 foot level. I did find that moving around the battlefield was a little cumbersome and takes a little getting used to. I also found the chat boxes a little large and got in the way, but have been assured that we will soon have a choice of four chat box sized in the near future. The audio is also well done though it is fairly limited as one might expect in an RTS game…not much voice acting there.
Saga is truly a fine persistent RTS, and you do play on servers populated by many others, but can this qualify as an MMO? I have to agree with Soulrift again as at this time, one player can quest with one other player. And though I would love to see that number increased to 3 or 4 players able to quest together, I cannot see currently a battlefield where 30-40 players field armies against one great and impossible foe.
Is that in the cards for Saga? I don’t know yet but the nice thing about a small indie company doing a game like this is that it can make moves that it sees fit to make much more easily than a larger company and a larger game. I do believe that what we are seeing with Saga is new and undiscovered territory and that Silverload has the ability to take this game anywhere that the community wants it to go. I also know that Silverload does listen to its community and Saga does have a nice community. Saga is a game that has grown and evolved with the help of the community. There are a few games like that in the industry and those are the few that usually do the best.
For this reason GameSHOUT has decided to give you our “first impressions” of the game of Saga. We plan on taking a follow-up look at this evolving world in another 90-180 days and giving you a full update at that time. There may be tons of changes made or maybe not, but we will let you know if Saga continues to move along the path that we believe it will go, and if it does, you definitely want to be long for the ride now. I would encourage each of you to head over to
www.playsaga.com and give this game a test drive for free. If you find you like it, it’s only $20 and no monthly subscription fee. If you choose to buy booster packs, as I have, they run only $3 for each pack of 10 cards. You’ll find in each pack cards you can use and others you can trade and the fun will take hold of you from there. And when you get in there, send a message over to Maverickonia and say “Hi!” We are in the GameSHOUT guild and will be happy to see you in there!
