CGOnline has posted a very detailed interview with GSC Gameworld’s Oleg Yavorsky. The subject is their latest RTS and it sounds…interesting.

The whole “RPG or RTS?” divide is what Heroes of Annihilated Empires will have going for it in a year already crowded with interesting strategy games. Last year’s Dragonshard had a little bit of that vibe, but, I haven’t tried Heroes yet so I don’t know how it will compare. By the sound of it, Heroes will allow for a purer RPG path within the RTS environment than even that D&D game.

The emphasis on the storyline – going so far as to have novelizations of the game – has me both excited and on edge. Story based campaigns are inevitably the weak link in strategy games. Very good games (like Rise of Legends or Age of Empires III) can have terrible campaigns and nobody really cares. Once you throw roleplaying into the mix, though, the idea of following heroes through a story, the campaign begins to have more of a pull; once again Dragonshard is the best example here, though Warcraft III or Kohan also fit the model.

The early buzz on the game isn’t good, but I haven’t read any of the reviews in any detail. I think that I am so attracted by the attempts at innovation here, that I want to give this a spin completely unpolluted by other opinions. (I try to stick to this strategy when I am reviewing a game, but normally I consume reviews like candy when it’s simply a matter of buying.)

Maybe I’ll wait until people I trust give me some feedback on this, or it drops a bit in price. But read the interview anyway.