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Ever since GarageGames made the engine behind Tribes 2 available under the name Torque to developers everywhere, much speculation has gone into just what other kinds of games could be produced with this $100 powerhouse.

Perhaps in answer to this question, GarageGames yesterday released a demo of Realm Wars. Described as a "GarageGames Community Project," Realm Wars is a massively multiplayer fantasy game that appears to have its roots set in the first-person shooter realm.

Here's a clip from the Realm Wars page:

Fantasy team hand-to-hand combat on an epic scale... Realm Wars allows massive numbers of players to team up and fight battles in a real-time action based format. Choose a race, customize your abilities and your appearance with an impressive array of weapons, armor and items — then prepare for battle! Characters can join into simple team based skirmishes, controlled battles, or epic wars, some of which are controlled by an all seeing dungeon master. Characters and stats are persistent, so fight wisely.

Jeff Tunnell, the President of GarageGames, notes that Realm Wars has been dubbed a community project due to the fact that he wishes the playing community to help shape the game itself:

You know the old saying, "necessity is the mother of invention"? Well, it is true. As we always say, "we are just four guys in a garage" (actually an office as of 3/15/02), and we can't do everything. Even though we say that, we were trying to do everything including creation of Realm Wars in addition to all of our day-to-day GarageGames tasks. Finally we hit the wall and decided it simply was not possible to keep this project totally in-house. Once we decided to create the basic game and enlist the community to help create it, we realized we were on to an idea that is even more powerful than the original GarageGames business idea.

The current demo, sized at 5.3 MB, is available for download at HomeLAN and allows players to try out the Orc race. For more information on Realm Wars as well as GarageGames' future plans, be sure to check out both the Realm Wars web site and the interview at HomeLAN Fed.

[Update:] It seems there may be a problem with broken data forks in some versions of the application. We've talked with David Chait and a repackaged version of the Mac demo should be making its way around the mirrors very soon.

IMG News: Torque Game Engine Released for Mac

GarageGames: Torque Game Engine SDK

GarageGames: Realm Wars

HomeLAN: Realm Wars Interview

HomeLAN: Realm Wars Test 0.0.1 (5.3 MB)

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