There is a new interview with Slitherine’s Iain McNeil at the RPGVault on IGN. It’s very informative on what we can expect from this title.

McNeil writes that Legion: Arena battles will be “over in two to 10 minutes, depending on the size of the forces involved.” This will make for very short battles, but is much longer than a typical Slitherine battle. In Spartan and its predecessors, you might get one to drag on to two minutes, but most ended pretty quickly.

The linearity of the campaigns is a little disappointing. A dynamic campaign that would allow you to meet the challenges of the mini-campaigns in slightly different ways depending on the results of the previous battles would be more interesting, but admittedly more difficult to program. Making multiplayer a “match game” sounds like fun, but is more likely bowing the fact that the individual battles themselves are so brief.

Even though the campaigns will only be Celtic and Roman, the availability of campaign opponents ranging from Spartacus to Carthage almost guarantees that their will be unofficial player created campaigns using these units before long. I give Legion: Arena two months before unofficial content starts popping up.

The presence of this interview on the RPG section of the site is a little surprising. Beyond the upgrading of units and possibility of customizing units, the step-by-step nature of the linear campaign means that there will not be all that much role-playing as traditionally understood. McNeil’s comparison to Diablo is intriguing, but I doubt that enjoying one will have much to do with whether one enjoys the other.

Legion: Arena should be available in the third quater of 2005. The decision of Slitherine to return to the Strategy First fold means that there is at least one SF game that I am guaranteed to buy this year.