“That said, I can’t say that everyone
that’s played the game has thought the Eras were
great,” he continued. “We had one particular user
who very vocally disagreed with the idea, but he also didn’t
realize that we had Eras when he started.” I can only imagine
how upset I would be if I thought my character would stay with me
forever then suddenly disappears. “Let’s just say
he was really upset about it,” David finished.
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The Dreamlords poster
in the Nordic Games booth.
When I talked to the folks at Lockpick Entertainment last, they had
only just started their first Era and were really trying to see what
would happen over that particular Era. But with two Eras already under
their belt, I was wondering what the player community had been doing
when they prepared for the next Era. “It’s pretty
amazing,” David said. “They have their first few
hours and days completely plotted out. They devise amazing strategies
to try to get ahead in the new Era. The convergences are constantly
working to try to out do each other.”
Convergences, which are basically in-game guilds or groups of land
masses that make up a kingdom, are the competitive force that can
essentially “win” an Era. To my knowledge, an
individual player couldn’t beat an Era; they need to be in a
convergence.
At the launch of the game, the developers tried to play players into
groups by random chance, making convergences out of nothing. Now,
however, the developers have established a “Recruitment
Hall” that allows players to create their own convergences.
“It was a mistake to try to group players up randomly at
first,” David said. “Players have different
activity levels, which makes it harder if certain players want to drive
for victory all the time.
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David Rosén and his German colleague discuss the game with
the Ten Ton Hammer team.
“Now players start off by themselves and can join a
convergence at their own time. The Recruitment Hall allows other
players to put up “ads” for their convergence to
attract other players,” David finished. The Recruitment Hall
is based out of the web-based client, which means that anyone should be
able to get online and join a convergence if they want to.
When I first began writing on Dreamlords earlier this year, I was under
the impression that the Eras in Dreamlords were exclusively time-based,
with two-months being the time limit. However, that has since changed
to the completion of an objective by a convergence. That said, I was
more than a little worried about the idea of a power-gaming convergence
that tries to tear through Dreamlords as fast as they possibly can.
“In order to compete at the higher levels,” David
said, “players have to devote a certain amount of time to the
game to get through the various advancements that they’ll
need to compete.” Truly, it’s not a rush;
it’s more about micro-management than power-gaming.
“It should, literally, take weeks or months to get to this
sort of level,” he said. “Unless you play the
Thûl, then you can generate your research points by playing
through PvP all-the-time.” He looked at colleague.
“I guess they could do it, if someone tried really hard.
We’ll just have to wait and see.”
For those gamers who are already enjoying Dreamlords, David announced
that they were going to be introducing a new chat client into the game
very shortly that will allow players to chat in the RTS client and the
web-based chat. There has also been work made towards the merging of
the RTS client and the web-based client so players no longer have to
alt+tab, but, according to David, there still remains some work to be
done in that department.
Along with the improvement to the chat engine and the general flow of
the game, Lockpick has been really working hard on improving the sound
effects that were originally released with the game.
“We’ve been adding quite a few combat
sounds,” David said. “It was something that
definitely needed improving, and now we have a good variety of
sounds.”
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David explains his
need to continually improve Dreamlords and gradually make the game
global.
From all that David explained to us, it sounds like a large number of
changes have been wrought in the game world, but doing this took almost
no time away from the players on the servers. According to an
announcement that they sent out and from David himself, Dreamlords has
achieved somewhere near 99% up-time with those only occurring because
of ISP drops and connection drops. That’s it. Arguably,
that's one of the best statistics in the industry compared to other
MMOGs.
Despite the incredible stability of the servers and the solid
playerbase, Dreamlords hasn’t achieved anywhere near the
potential for its popularity. However, that could soon be a thing of
the past. At the conference, David stated that Lockpick had just signed
with a highly influential German company that is pushing a German
version of the game to users in the very near future. With a German
version of the game going live and some attempts to pull more interest
from the North American and European markets, Dreamlords will reach a
level of popularity that dwarfs any other game of its type on the
market. David assured us that continual improvements and upgrades are
being made to the game, so it's only a matter of time before Dreamlords
is noticed by the general MMOG community and the game achieves a much
grander level of success.
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Dreamlords: Resurrection Game Page.
