On Q23 I unintentionally lured Alan Dunkin to comment on Dungeon Runners.

As everyone noticed (on the forums everyone is handing down invites for a supposedly closed beta but that seems instead quite open) the game looks a lot like WoW. Maybe the best part is that the game doesn’t take itself too seriously and it won’t be marketed to compete directly with the bigger titles. It could actually be a fun diversion and I think I’ll try it when it will be released (no invites to me, thanks. I’m done betatesting games for free).

I’ve already wrote about the true origin of this game, the most interesting part is that everyone thinks it’s a blatant copy of WoW. In fact that was also my very first thought and the reason why I believed that Dungeon Runners was being built by those Blizzard devs who left and decided to join NCSoft (circa April 05).

But there was something that didn’t correspond. I remember that NCSoft opened offices right NEXT to the Blizzard building to make the jump even more appealing. This would be in California, Orange Country. But Dungeon Runners is not built in OC, it is built in Austin, in the NCSoft headquarter along with Tabula Rasa and some other things.

And that’s the point. Even if Dungeon Runners reminds so much WoW, it isn’t built by the Blizzard group that joined NCSoft (and that is still working on something unannounced in the OC offices). And Dungeon Runners also had a very long development that started even before the release of WoW.

I’m aware of all that. I stated “far as I know” as it’s possible that parts of the game were imported from other projects (and other countries) since DR is, in many ways, very much a sum of many parts.

The initial amount of art which is still in use in the game was created long before the release of WoW – from what I remember, a period of time between the release of Lineage and Lineage II/City of Heroes. I can’t speak for the decisions made to keep or alter the art during the years as those people are long gone. I do believe however that the idea is to keep with the themes that we currently have for anything newly generated.

I like every tiny detail I can snag.

Anyway, this is mostly because people are talking about this game and it may be interesting knowing some more about it.

EDIT: From the wikipedia about Joe Madureira:

Joe then went on to work for the video game industry. Starting with the start-up company Tri-Lunar, he created concept art on a game called Dragonkind which was cancelled when Tri-Lunar folded. He then went on to work for NC Soft, on two games, Exarch (which was also cancelled) and Dungeon Runners.

After leaving NCSoft, Madureira founded Vigil Games with several other ex-NC Soft employees. Vigil was acquired by THQ in March 2006.

What the wikipedia doesn’t say is that “Dungeon Runners” is just Exarch with a new name and basically getting scrapped and redone. And Exarch itself was “Trade Wars” scrapped and redone. As I wrote this game has a long and complicated gestation (and it’s written again in that link up there).

I was a fan of Madureira, I really liked his style. One of my favorite comics artists ever (on Uncanny X-men, Battle Chasers was just too damn slow to be readable. Now he is still doing the Ultimates third series? Well, hoping he doesn’t get tired after three issues. And Quesada could have put him somewhere else, the Ultimates of Millar & Hitch was a masterpiece).