Daggerdale: The Future of D&D Games?

It's a very simple host-client system. Basically you host and your game will be propped up in the lobby and people can see that, or you can send private invites to people and to your friends and they can come in and join your game. Once the game's filled up you can start and everyone that's involved in the party at that point can go in. Players looking around can see all the active games and can join the particular game in session at that point.

The game is run with something that we call the Dungeon Master, which is a system underneath the game that dictates the number of creatures that are spawned in conjunction with your power or level and the number of players. Dungeon Master will change the difficulty of the game.

It's scaled upwards, yeah.

When you level a character you gain attribute points you can spend on any ability scores you may have. In addition to that, there are feats that you get to grow your character out. On top of that, there are also unique powers that each character gets that are unlocked as you gain level as well. So there's a lot of character development and customisation in the system.

Everything we have system-wise in Daggerdale is based off of 4th Edition rules. We work extremely closely with Wizards of the Coast to streamline their system to make it work for an action RPG. A lot of their systems are actually in there, but because it is an action title as well as an RPG we truncated a number of different rules. And we worked with them to get that working properly.

We chose to go the action RPG route because it's something that the team felt very passionately about. It takes the two great loves that the team has and marries them together in a really cool, unique experience. So brawling is something that we all really enjoy, the action side of it brings with it a lot of opportunities to create white-knuckle gameplay. It's something we think fits really well with the RPG portion of it, which allows us to develop a character and customise that character through a longer period of time.

Daggerdale concentrates on the first 10 levels of the character - the Heroic tier [of 4th Edition rules].

That's really up to the individual player. The game has four large chapters, four distinct characters with associated classes, there's a large number of quests, there's a large number of optional quests - the final runtime hasn't been locked down as of yet. There's still a lot of development going in. We want to pack this title with as much content as possible.

It'll be tough to nail down an exact time due to the fact we're still trying to fit as much as we can in before we lock down final content. It's difficult say even the estimated hours because we're still adding quests into the system.

You'll be looking at something close to that.