The game was initially released on 4 CD-ROMs, offering five different continents and legendary cultures to explore, just like its 1999 successor Beyond Atlantis (1999).
Like its predecessor "Versailles 1685", the game features developer Cryo's own OMNI 3D engine, which allows the user to stand still at a 'node' in the game and look around 360 degrees (so both horizontally and vertically) for clues, hidden objects, danger etc. and interact with these objects. For this process, six square images of the environment are modeled into a cube completely surrounding the first-person view, which is then transformed into a smooth hollow sphere. This projection is predefined, stored and static, but the shifting viewing angle of the user inside it is calculated in real time. It was similar in visualization to Apple's QuickTime VR.
As reported by Joystick magazine, motion capture of human models was used for animating lifelike movement of the characters in the cutscenes (cinematics).
As for character movement, Cryo developed the OMNI SYNC application for this game to enable realistic lip synchronization for dialogues in all available languages. As described in a review by French magazine Joystick, after establishing the basic phonemes of a language, drawings were made of the position of isolated lips for each of them, which were embedded in the faces and smoothly morphed from one position to the other in real time.
The detailed environments in the game would each consist of about 4 million polygons, Joystick magazine reported.