Overlord

Gamers will discover how corruptible they are in Overlord, the forthcoming twisted fantasy action adventure where players can be evil (or really evil). Now in development at Triumph Studios, Codemasters will publish Overlord in summer 2007 for PC and the Xbox 360.

In the game’s seriously warped fantasy world, players will become the Overlord and get first-hand experience of how “absolute power corrupts absolutely". You could be a regular run-of-the-mill Overlord. However, with incredible power at your disposal and a team of evil-minded impish critters, the Minions, on hand to do your bidding, how will you resist the temptation to be wonderfully despotic?!

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The Overlord has the power of concentrated badness right from the start and you’ll know how much more of a total bad-ass you’re becoming as the game tracks your ‘corruption’ throughout.

How corrupt you become depends on how you handle any given situation, your actions and how their consequences impact the game world. For example, if you and your minion horde dispose of a bunch of particularly nasty, violent Halflings that have overrun a once-peaceful village, the village’s original peasant occupants will herald you as their liberator. Now each time you pass through, the peasants will welcome you as their new lord and protector, cheering your arrival and giving you offerings.

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However, as an Overlord, it’s worth seeing what more can be obtained from the peasants’ gratitude. If you exert some proper feudal repression, they’ll tremble and fall to their knees when you’re in town. If you become truly mean, the poor peasants will resort to cowering in your presence, pray for their lives and even offer up their daughters in order to appease you…

“In Overlord you’ll be able to do some pretty wicked stuff, however everything is played out with this twisted fantasy humor, as the game’s visuals illustrate” says Lennart Sas, Director at Triumph Studios. “Our goal is not to shock with realistic blood and gore, but to create an entertaining world where people can explore what it’s like to have absolute power but in an amusingly gross way, not sick & grotesque.”

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On the flip side to all this nastiness, one of the Achievements players can aim for in the game is finishing 100% Uncorrupted. To be an Overlord of purity requires not killing any peasants, not harvesting souls from living creatures, not betraying your mistress and not exterminating the occasional fantasy race. Now that’s tough!

Read more about the game overleaf.