Raise a pint and sharpen your axe, The Dwarves are coming

Based on the book of the same name, King Art Games’ The Dwarves is set to arrive on consoles and the PC in 2016.

That’s a lot of bad guys to battle right there, and with a squad of only four Dwarves, it’ll be a necessity to have something like the Crowd-Combat System that will be the main driving force behind The Dwarves. The system allows for play against massive amounts of enemies by giving them a flocking behavior, and hitting them with a fresh dose of physics.

So basically, if you’re fighting a bunch of orcs on a ridge, and you bash the lead one with your big old Warhammer, then you might actually send him crashing into the rest and knock ’em all off the edge and to their Wilhelm-scream-powered doom. It sounds pretty awesome, and King Art Games is promising that you’l be using it often, as you can expect to be overmatched to the tune of 100 to 1 quite often.

Here’s your feature list:

• The main character in the game is the dwarf Tungdil, who grew up among humans. Over the course of the story he gathers a group of up to 12 companions around him; each of whom have a unique backstory and individual battle skills.
• Before each battle you assemble a group of up to four heroes, who then fight against hundreds of enemies simultaneously… Helm’s Deep sends its regards!
• Innovative Crowd-Combat System: Enemies have a flocking behavior and react using realistic physics. Every action of the player has an impact on all enemies.
• You travel across Girdlegard on a world map that contains dozens of battlefields and places just waiting to be discovered.
• Bestselling author Markus Heitz is directly involved in the project as a consultant and will contribute some quests and brand new characters.
• The Dwarves is in development for PS4, Xbox One and PC; Release 2016.

Honestly, I’m kind of sold already. As a fantasy fan myself, I can’t really remember too many examples of a game in the genre that featured Dwarves as its main race, let alone its only playable race! They’re a pretty underrepresented faction in fantasy lore I find, and it’s really cool to see a title like this that actually explores Dwarves as main characters. Pretty freaking cool.

The Dwarves will be shown in a little more detail at the GamesCom show, coming up early next month. If there’s anything additional shown there, we’ll have it for you.