Gen Con: The Continuum First Impressions – A Large Bag of Mixed Options

 Guest Contributor Alan Patrick brings us his impressions of the The Continuum from his visit to Gen Con last week. Read what he thinks of it after the jump.

So you’re hunkered down for the night and fire up your preferred MMOG. You spend the next thirty minutes slaying all manner of comers, from goblins to elementals to other players and pause a moment, thinking to yourself “Wouldn’t it be cool if this actually made an impact on the gameworld?”.

Welcome to The Continuum, brought to you by the big brains at Seven Lights.

The Continuum is a seriously far-reaching game, drawing elements from strategy games, traditional role-playing games, squad combat, and forum appreciation, among others.

The team at Seven Lights has really embraced their fan base and forumites in several really proactive ways: some fans are characters in the game, some are in the comic series that launched at the end of 2006, and many more will help shape the storyline of the game in the coming months and well into it’s life as an MMO. What players decide to do, who they decide to smite, and what guilds decide to merge and crush the opposition will all have great weight on their storyline and world history.

The characters in the game come from four different realities: Vampires, Shapeshifters, the Manifested, and the Legion. Their homeworlds have collapsed and sent these four races crashing into each other. As the months progress and players spend time crushing each other, story elements will begin to come to light: who caused the crash? Why? And what can we do about it?

Oh yes, system specs: Flash Player. Yeah, that’s right: the system only requires that your system can run Flash. The early portion of each game session will actually be done from the lobby, where you can converse with other players, tweak your army, and peruse the store options. If you choose to partake in combat, simply issue a challenge – or accept one that is thrown at you, and rest assured that there will be lots of those – and go to town.

The combat incorporates a point system for tracking. The more units you use, the higher your point total. The more advanced your units are, the more points they’re worth. An army can have a large number of points, but if you use too much you may not get a whole lot of combat time (nevermind that those combat sessions will be nothing short of total war). Organize your masses into squads of up to 20; flag a character in each squad as a leader and place ‘em on the map.

Movement occurs much like many other miniatures games, with the basic concepts of normal terrain, difficult terrain, water and the like already existing. A square that is within your squad’s movement range is highlighted for easy notice.

Should your squad meet an enemy squad on the battle map, the game switches gears and slides into what they call a “Battle Instance”. The screen closes in on the zoomed-in map around the squads and you can issue individual orders for each squad members at this point, including special movements, actions, and attack formations.

And all of this must cost a fortune, right? Not exactly. While the final payment plan is as of yet undetermined, several options have been decided upon:

1: Monthly play. This is for folks that do a LOT of combat and want new templates to develop and improve upon every month.

2: The Store. A player can purchase items, gear, and skills through The Continuum online store.

3: Free play. “Every new player will receive a small number of characters at sign-up and can play the game with those characters indefinitely.”

And for those that cry out for customization – every character you have can be uniquely trained, making for no two ever being exactly alike. Mix in 5.6 million (yes, 5,600,000) individually unique magical items that can only be had from playing on the battlemaps… well, you’re gonna have a heck of a time.

Tim Harris and Dave Shuck of Seven Lights, LLC, and the founders of The Continuum were kind enough to shed some light on their creation and we highly encourage all of you to hit their site and read up on their product.

You can find more official information on The Continuum at: http://www.thecontinuum.com