LOS ANGELES — Bethesda Softworks shed more light tonight on Battlecry, the big online combat game that the company hopes will establish a new franchise in the drenched-with-blood genre. This included the announcement of a beta test and a new faction, The Hans — an Asian group.
Lucas Davis, the design director of BattleCry Studios, said that the studio is now accepting beta invites at BattlecryStudios.com for a global test. It’s playable on the show floor this week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo gaming tradeshow. It debuts later this year for PC.
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Above: Players rumble in the blood-soaked Battlecry.
BattleCry Studio’s president is Rich Vogel, the designer of massively multiplayer online games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Wars: Galaxies. Bethesda’s financing Battlecry. The studio was founded in 2012 to focus on free-to-play online titles that lifted the quality level beyond most games in the PC online space.
Battlecry lets players engage in stylistically bloody combat that will leave them laughing after every blood-soaked match. The Victorian art comes from the game’s art director Viktor Antonov, who created the look of Half-Life 2 and Dishonored. Battlecry is a rare bet on a new intellectual property with its own backstory and environments.
It has so much blood that you have to laugh. It’s akin to the experience of watching Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill with its rivers of gore. But the comic-inspired art is stylistic, with Battlecry’s warriors outfitted in Victorian-era regalia.
Up to 32 players can battle each other across fields of battle known as WarZones.
Above: A death stroke in Battlecry.
The game takes place after a cataclysmic World War at the dawn of the 20th century. The most powerful empires left standing have come together to ban gunpowder under the Black Powder Treaty. That’s why the title has no guns. Elite warriors settle all disagreements, and they fight only in the authorized WarZones. The chosen few risk all in ritualized combat.
After a short peace, the Pansophic Revolution took place, creating a golden age of industrial manufacturing and design. Technology took great leaps forward, and the Pansophic advancements produce sophisticated melee and ranged weapons. The tech gives you abilities like stealth invisibility.
In Battlecry, you choose one of four types of warriors, each with unique weapons.
You can choose from classes of characters like The Enforcer, a tank-like fighter who wields a giant sword; a Tech Archer, who can unleash a bunch of arrows from afar; or the Duelist, who uses two blades and has stealth-invisibility capabilities to pick off isolated soldiers. The opposing Cossacks have similar characters with either female or male options.
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The gameplay is designed for smooth controls and fast-action combo attacks previously associated only with offline brawlers. It features dynamic movement, which enables you to press a button on a controller and seamlessly glide or mantle over big obstacles.
You can use the “adrenaline system” to unlock special powers for a short time or conserve the energy so that you can invoke a lethal power when the time is right.
Above: A Battlecry WarZone.
Each WarZone is a unique environment with spacious squares, multiple-story buildings, and tactical traps like narrow bridges. When you kill your opponents, the final blow is delivered with a cinematic flourish. You can behead someone with a sword and watch the head fly 50 feet, accompanied by swaths of red. Arrows can punch right through an armored skull.
Managing editor Jason Wilson contributed to this report.