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“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.

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.

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.”

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.

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