Greetings and salutations, friends! I would like to congratulate The Zardian staff on the one year anniversary of their amazing E-zine. To make this one year anniversary issue extra special, we are going to make the largest official announcement ever right here, right now! *looks up* The title may have given it away, but read the next line loudly in your mind and let yourself feel the adrenaline rush we are experiencing by telling you ... Because ... We built a massively multiplayer game engine.

 

It is true. A 100 percent flash-based, in your browser, AQ/DF/MQ inspired, real-time combat, honest to goodness massively multiplayer online game. As I am sure you are already thinking, this is a wish come true! At long last we will accomplish the seemingly impossible goal of adventuring and battle alongside each other for real. The best part is, you will be able to import data from your existing AQ/DF/MQ characters and accounts, making all of your old hard work and effort really mean something. Like our other games, we are growing this one from scratch. Alpha testing will start in early June. (We fully expect everything to break, catch on fire, and blow up - just like with the other games!) We hope you are excited about this new project and will become involved and help us build it alongside the other games.

 

A little bit of back story: Do you remember when I hinted on the forums at New Years at midnight about playing with multiplayer functionality? We had already built a simple prototype where 5 people were walking around Falconreach with actual DragonFable characters chatting. I saw that we had the ability to create something amazing. I also knew better than to mess with perfection - which is why we are not going to mess with the existing games. (See, we listen very carefully to you!) AdventureQuest, DragonFable and MechQuest are going to continue growing and improving each week with their existing teams, humor and new features like housing/starships which will become available in the next few weeks. (We need to find a way to make that importable too - how awesome would it be to walk around your place in another game with people?)

 

To build this new game we brought on our newest team member, Minimal. He is a life long friend of Galanoth and I. We even went to college together! He is probably the smartest person I have ever met in my life. As a talented programmer, designer, musician, philosopher, and a dozen other things - he is really amazing - we paired him up with Zhoom (Can you say Dream Team?) to create this brand new MMO game engine. Then Miltonius, who created the Artix vs the Undead animated short, designed brand new simplified art style for the characters. Because we could have an insane number of people on the screen at the same time, we had to keep the art (number of lines) as simple as possible (or else you would lag really badly). So far he has created over 100 hair styles, 20 different types of armors, and a large number of monsters and weapons. J6, who has worked on literally every game we have made, is doing the incredible background and scenery artwork. That is a pretty small team considering the size of this project!

 

The new MMO engine is currently functioning on our development servers and we are preparing for our Alpha testing phase. We have only limited space on the testing server so it will be restricted. If you have an upgraded account (Guardian, DragonLord or Star Captain) then you will be invited to participate in the alpha, beta and gamma testing phases and we will make sure you get some special rare things in-game to prove you were there.

 

Building a true Flash MMO is no easy task! It will be our biggest challenge yet. We hope you are excited about it and would like to help us make it happen. There will always be people that say things can never be done, or that it is impossible. At least that is what they said when we started building DF and MQ ... remember? That is why I would like to smile and confidently say that we have had successful weekly releases in ALL of our games each and every week while building this extremely complicated new MMO since January 1st. Each week ALL of our games continue to improve. I am so proud of the team and I am grateful for you as well. What you are witnessing is a success that you made possible. If you supported the games and believed in us, you should have a big smile on your face. Your next reward is an MMO.

 

Battle on!

Artix