From Dream to Reality

The energy, ambition, and young talent Lockpick Entertainment brings to its innovative MMORTS Dreamlords is a story unto iteself.

by Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle

A project with modest roots, Dreamlords is the incarnation of a small group of college students brainstorming about the type of game format least explored in today's market. An underdeveloped subgenre seemed to provide the most opportunity and the least market risk to a fledgling design house. The result of Lockpick Entertainment's market research? An MMORTS, a type of game appealing to a gamer who likes playing Civilization, Warcraft 3, or Dawn of War-style games, but has a online itch that multiplayer simply can't scratch.

You may not be familiar with other attempts at MMORTS gaming, but text-based online strategy games like Utopia have a long and storied history dating back to the pre-world wide web BBS days. The premise was that you could build your territory and shape its military by logging in and spending the day's allotment of points on various aspects of the country's economy and defense, or attack other players if you were so wont. Players could attack you while you're offline, and the ensuing battle was simply a matter of number-crunching. Depending on the result, you might lose military or economic advantages, and you'd rebuild.

Lockpick Entertainment sought to preserve a measure of this text based heritage, and allows players to manage the more strategic elements of the game via a web interface that you can access from home, school, or (dare we suggest) work. The battles, however, are fought within the 3D client, where you'll test your mettle on a real-time battlemap against your foe. This dual-pronged approach may seem a little harrowing since alt-tab isn't quite what it used to be, but at any given time the action will be on one screen or the other. Lockpick is also entertaining ways to integrate more of the browser-side into the 3D client to make switching altogether unnecessary.

Of course, it's easy to say that no one's doing graphical MMORTSs, but a little tougher to say why the masses aren't playing World of W3. Jon Selin pointed to at least three major reasons why past efforts have failed miserably:

1. A “landlocked” approach meant that at least some new players would always be at the mercy of stronger, better developed neighbors.
2. A persistent world game that runs to infinity makes strength is mostly a measure of time involved with the game, rather than real skill and guts (i.e. new players, no matter how determined, can never catch older players who are merely staying active), and
3. Short of rote conquest metrics, there was very little in the way of making players feel unique or powerful, possessed of all the intangibles that collectively grant bragging rights for the rest of the pack behind the number one player.

The problems thus identified, Selin and his team set out to make Dreamlords the cure. Instead of constraining players to an inflexible “game board” - players, the dreamlords, are effectively the avatar embodiment of their patria, or island chains of varying acreage. The size of the patria is determined by the military success of the player, but patrias float in a kind of aether rather than neighbor opponents.

To solve the problem of endless escalation, bane of new players in a largely competitive environment, the action in Dreamlords is encapsulated into “eras” of about three months. At the end of an era, the playing field is effectively leveled, with armies and holdings returned to a start condition. What will remain, however, is a player's collection of medals (something like achievements in the X360 sense) which show the many prideful conditions a dreamlord has met. A dreamlord's hard-won equipment also persists. This equipment is extremely rare – Selin stated that it would take about two weeks of playtime to uncover the first piece of gear – so you'll obviously want to keep your avatar gear from era to era.