TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

by Cody "Micajah" Bye

In game development, few companies ever try anything new anymore. Most original ideas are either too hard to technologically implement into a game, or they are left in the mind of whoever thought of the concept in the first place, never to be touched due to lack of funding. Unfortunately, people rarely work for free, but they will drive towards a goal if there's even the smallest chance that they may succeed. That's what the situation was like with Lockpick Entertainment and their wonderfully unique game, Dreamlords. Built with a team that could be counted on two hands and currently operating with fifteen members of the development staff, Lockpick is succeeding where so many other independent developers have failed. Not only have they successfully released their game, but they are now working on the third "Era" in their title and have been successfully running for around six months.

David Rosén, CEO of Lockpick Entertainment and general evangelist for the innovative MMOG.

On top of that, Dreamlords has a thoroughly entertaining gameplay setup. Using both a web browser and an RTS client, players of the game compete to take over certain areas of the world that are in contention as well as develop enough technology to take down the "boss" of each Era and effectively win the game...at least for that Era. While Dreamlords garnered lots of attention when it was first release, things have tapered off slightly for the team. Lockpick has been relatively quiet in the industry news, only coming up every now and then to announce an upcoming Era or a necessary patch. However, when the Ten Ton Hammer team found them on the list of developers who would be attending Leipzig GC, we instantly sent in a request to speak with them and continue to learn more about their phenomenally original game.
Meeting in the miraculously quiet business hall, Phil Comeau and I (Cody "Micajah" Bye) went to take a look at what the Dreamlords developers had to offer in the way of updates and any new additions to the game. Thankfully, it turns out that the relative quiet that's settled over Lockpick is merely due to the team's continuing to work on the game and plug away on portions of the world that need the most attention. That particular morning the Nordic Games booth was particularly busy compared to most days, and we had all sorts of businessmen running all around us dispensing sample copies of games and generally wheeling and dealing.  Lockpick's CEO, David Rosén, was on hany to answer my question, and I eagerly voiced all of my questions to him.

Since we hadn't really talked with Lockpick since we had done our review of Dreamlords in late March, I was curious concerning what had changed in the last few months. With any freshly released game, most people anticipate some sort of change to occur simply due to the availability of more gamers to try the game. Dreamlords is no exception, and there have been quite a few changes since release. "The biggest change we've made is to PvP," David said. "We thought the initial PvP was a bit to shallow. You could only spawn units from your base and didn't have the ability to upgrade anything.

"In this second step of the PvP, we added that when you capture a tactical point, you could also upgrade it and start spawning units from that tactical point," David finished. For those of you not familiar with Dreamlords, tactical points are set on a map - you can't move them. David described a sort of trade off game where you could either try to capture as many of these points as possible - thus ensuing a quick victory - or taking those spots and trying to build them up into something defensible.

Here I am discussing Dreamlords with the Lockpick crew and enjoying what they have to say.

According to David, the Lockpick team is also working to improve some of the gains gotten through PvP. At the moment, there are rewards in fighting in PvP, but there are no resources associated with fighting in PvP so players that are crafting oriented have a reason to play in PvP. “It’s just building up an incentive for players to participate,” David added.

Concerning Eras, I was curious about how the general community had accepted the semi-scheduled restarts of the Eras or if anyone had thrown a fit about the constantly restarting gameplay system. "Really, the sort of Era system - or the restarts - are relatively common in the web-based browser games," David said. "Games like Utopia use them to level the playing field. At its core, Dreamlords is a competitive game and to keep the game competitive we have to level the battlefield at certain points. On the other hand, we have to have some sort of persistency. That said, we include a few persistent elements – like the gear you gather over the Era – that remains persistent.