A lot of people think online games with a story are an oxymoron, from the standpoint of they just don't happen, and that is in my opinion because they're not cloud first. We'll be using a lot of voice for Deadhaus Sonata and a lot of, quite frankly, procedural generation AI to generate what I would say is a very aggressive approach to telling persistent online narrative where we can do things within the cloud that have never been done before. Text is a very limited medium, I think a medium that is best left to books. Our goal with Deadhaus Sonata is to absolutely not have text to deliver the story. I just think that that's a missed opportunity and it's not using the medium properly. Those are the best stories that you never get to see because they're all text-based. There's a lot of free to play games out there that have amazing stories. How do you plan to address that conundrum? However, I find that it is often difficult to be able to appreciate the narrative when playing with other players, as some members of the party will want to skip the dialogues for instance. There's no shortage of cooperative online games, particularly RPGs, featuring strong narrative arcs. We think this is completely undiscovered country and not only do we plan on bringing narrative to the free to play space, but we're also going to be doing cool things with the awesome tech of Genvid. Now what we're doing is we're introducing metagaming where people who don't even have your game can play it in some ways. With Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, we were breaking some new ground doing an RPG without any text. Some of the things that we're doing now are allowing people to have agency into the game, taking them back to the early days of theater, allowing us to tell stories and narratives like never before. Imagine if we can put in a hook allowing people to play the game without even having it. Some of the things that we're doing with Genvid are allowing us to reach out to this massive audience (more people watch League of Legends tournaments than they do with the Super Bowl). Since that time, video games have really moved on and we've gone from the medium of a single player sitting in front of a console to the multiplayer games where you see a lot of people playing titles like League of Legends. Not only was it a game centered on an antihero as played a vampire, but the entire world hated you and wanted to kill you, you hated yourself. For the first time with this new CD-ROM technology, we were actually able to put in large amounts of voice in Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. When I first created Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, I looked at the medium itself and said 'What can we do to make Blood Omen a different kind of game?' Back in those days, the PlayStation one had launched with this incredible new technology called CD-ROM where we could actually use voice acting instead of text, and I wanted to make an RPG without text because I thought reading on the screen was less than ideal. Interestingly enough, with Deadhaus Sonata I'm going back to my roots. You play as the undead, such as vampires and revenants, against the living. Can you introduce your vision to our readers?ĭeadhaus Sonata is the spiritual successor to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. We've had a long chat with Dyack earlier this month to learn more about each of the defining technical and design elements of Deadhaus Sonata. With Deadhaus Sonata, Dyack and his fellow developers at Apocalypse Studios are aiming to recapture the neglected Legacy of Kain fanbase in a free-to-play online action roleplaying game that is powered by Amazon's Lumberyard engine/AWS cloud technology and Genvid's intriguing interactive livestreaming SDK, which we previously reported on a while ago. That shouldn't be surprising, anyway, given that the man behind the concept is none other than Denis Dyack, the former Silicon Knights president and director of acclaimed games such as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, as well as the less successful Too Human. Deadhaus Sonata might not be a game you've read about before (unless you're a regular reader here, as we covered it twice last year), but it's certainly very ambitious.
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