Look at the press releases

[WraithLord]

Great news.

I'm so very excited

A few question jump into mind.

Will it use the same engine? - in other words, will I need a new gfx card to play it?

Do you have plans of adding a new magic path?

Will we get many new great pretenders?

how about new spells, summons etc?

Oh, I could as a hundred more questions but guess I'll have to settle for stalking your site bits of information

[Zooko]

Great job on signing the Dom3 contract!

I feel kind of silly to say this, but I've always imagined that Dom3 would have dramatically improved battle graphics compared to Dom2. At least as dramatic as the difference between Dom2 and Dom1.

For starters, I would thrill to have "Myth"-style 3-D camera movement with multi-perspective bitmap critters. And then of course, nobody would complain if you went on and made full 3-D modelled critters a la "Myth 3". ;-)

I know that beautiful visuals aren't Dom's reason for being, but I would get great pleasure from more clearly seeing my little heroes rampaging around the battlefield. Also I imagine that it could widen your market beyond the hardcore fanatic gamers that you already OWN with your Imprint Souls technique.

[WraithLord]

While improved gfx are nice to have, I for one, really preffer more content to the game.

It would also be nice if some of the micro-managment aspects (site searching, choosing spells for battle script etc) would be more streamlined or automated.

[Zen]

I'm a little afraid if it does have dramatically better GFX. Because of the depth of Dominions the number of units and unique aspects of it. Over 1000 units with 3D (Extremely expensive), at least what (Any professional Digital Animators chime in here) 24 frames of animation for something like walking (not to mention fighting).

I would love to see it. But I don't want anything homogenized (more than it already is) in order to get it.

Also, just a note: Please use the Dominions 3 Wishlist thread for 'desired' features.

[Zooko]

P.S. Of course, fully 3-D graphics would be computationally expensive since you can have hundreds of units in a single battle. However, there may be some unique opportunities for optimization by pre-computation and caching, since the battle is completely deterministic. (Also, of course, optimization by sharing between units of the same type, since almost no battle would have hundreds of types of units.) It would be an interesting challenge in graphics programming.

[Gandalf Parker]

I will be thrilled if it (and its demo) includes a basic (easily improved on and maybe slightly punnish) set of pretenders, and a tutorial (or at least a game partially started). Maybe a newbie map where the border is a quick-key chart. But Im just a newbie customer service type of guy.

[Boron]

Cool. Late 2005 probably release date is though a long time to wait .
Hopefully this means July 18th 2005 cause there my holidays start .

2 questions :
Will the micromanagement of hoarding be much easier ?
Hopefully the new lab has more then 50 slots for forged items as stockpile

Can you maybe generate a monster in a monstergenerator after your likings ?
Spell should be a lvl 9 spell : Variable costs + requirements
E.g. : Add arm , cost +10 astral gems , +S to cast , Add 50 hp , cost +25 nature gems .... ?
Then with a empowered wishcaster to lvl 10 i could when i invest 1000 gems create a monster with e.g. 1000 hitpoints , 10 arms etc. .

[ioticus]

It would also be cool if you could forge your own unique magic items a la Master of Magic.

[johan osterman]

Splooger: That is an unlikely addition. And I think it would be bad, because in any competetive play it is very likely people would only make very route items. Somewhat paradoxically I think designing your own items would lead to less variancew amongst the magic items. As the SC issues suggests designability of this sorts lead to optimisation, but as it stands they are at least somewhat constrained in that the items do not allways fit perfectly into given SC designs.

[PhilD]

PDF said:
Where are the betatest team application forms ? Where ?
(cast "Wind Ride" on Johan K ... doesn't work ! Damn, is he size-6 ? )

More precisely...

How long do we have to learn Swedish until the betatest starts ?