When you really love a game, you enter what one might call “the obsession stage”. You seek out every piece of information, however small, shed tears over moved release dates for sequels, and hang on every word of the designer’s personal blog. Even the most stalwart of us have at least one or two such games. For me, it’s The Longest Journey / Dreamfall series, which makes lead designer Ragnar Tornquist’s blog my regular feeding ground. Unfortunately for us Dreamfall zealots, Ragnar has been spending most of his blog real-estate talking about his current project, The Secret World, but last Fri a tiny bit of new information finally appeared with respect to the much-awaited Dreamfall: Chapters, a set of episodic content releases for Dreamfall that publisher Funcom promised way back during pre-historic times (or possibly on March 1, 2007, I can’t remember which).
The info is scarce, and specifically indicated by Ragnar to reflect his personal sentiment and thoughts, not Funcom’s official position. The gist of it is that the Chapters are still forthcoming, and although much of the current effort is focused on The Secret World, enough people are spending time thinking about Chapters that its not going to drop through the cracks. Like a good designer, Ragnar then provides some evidence of this claim by revealing some of his own thoughts on what might be in store for Chapters.
Firstly, it sounds like the fans’ complaints about the combat system were heard loud and clear, and the fighting engine will get a complete overhaul (though exact details are obviously too early to discuss). It also seems like the basic means of navigation and exploration will move away from the field of focus driven mechanic used in Dreamfall, and the classic point and click concept used in The Longest Journey towards something new and different, which, reading slightly between the lines, Ragnar would probably like to one day call the future of modern adventure gaming interfaces.
From a story perspective, the various episodes of Chapters will center around many of the familiar characters, and answer some (though not all!) of the many (oh so many!) open questions that were left for fans to ponder at the conclusion of the last game. The general flow of events will pick up where Dreamfall left off; presumably some of the storylines will truly move the narrative forward and others will fill in some current gaps and go off to explore some side stories.
Interestingly, Ragnar also makes a passing statement with respect to the eventual third game (which, if intuition serves, we might not get to play until the next generation of consoles hits the shelf). The designer mentions The Longest Journey 2 (informal title, of course), and says that Dreamfall wasn’t really TLJ2 in his mind. Putting a few extra words in his mouth, this sounds like the official third game may once again re-focus itself more on the story of April Ryan, the protagonist of the first game who had a much reduced role in Dreamfall. While it’s of course too early to make any definitive statements, if this is indeed true, it would be much welcomed news to the fan community, many of whom had expressed a desire to hear a whole lot more of what has happened to their beloved April. The transformation in her character between the end of the first game and the beginning of the second was quite monumental, with only a “scratch-the-surface” kind of explanation provided in Dreamfall, and so a return to April as a more of a main character would surely be well received by the fans.
If you’ve somehow managed to read this far, you clearly have been bitten by the TLJ bug, and will therefore want to go read Ragnar’s blog entry for yourself. As for me, I am going to make chicken soup. It’s snowing outside, and I need to strengthen myself for the long wait ahead…
