The 3 main veterans include Peter Hu, Phil Shenk, and Erich Schaefer (brother of Max Schaefer who was also a lead at Blizzard North). The Schaefer’s also worked on the Torchlight series (Runic Games) and the ill-fated Torchlight Frontiers (Echtra Games). None of these on their own have struck gold anything close to Diablo/Diablo II (since as I’ve noted before, it really is about the time/place and entire team effort).

Since I haven’t really followed gaming in recent years, I did a little bit of research. It seems that back in 2024, the studio managed to secure $4.5 million in seed funding (and that it had originally been founded in 2021 by the three, but only announced the studio to the public in 2022 — though at the time, Schaefer was not listed as one of the founders).

The Darkhaven title was listed on Steam a few weeks ago (stating a demo is near). The thing that stood out to me was at the bottom; fully moddable. The other earlier stuff (with the persistent world environment with unique environments for every player) has me taking a wait and see attitude (because we’ve heard those grand pitches before where not even companies that specialize in MMORPG’s, have been able to deliver on those ambitions).

Genshin Impact has done an incredible job with the large open world design (including lots of verticality for both climbing and gliding, some sailing/underwater designs, many different biomes) for a mostly solo/limited co-op setup where it doesn’t have to worry about large scale persistence (a design that will definitely be more challenging in terms of what Darkhaven is trying to achieve). It will be interesting to see if they are able to pull this off in an OARPG as a small studio.

It does look like there are plans for a Kickstarter campaign (which again, I’ve been very much not into on the gaming side because of the sheer amount of rug pulls/scams that have occurred). Only recently did I actually fund a campaign (Pixelfed) but that was because it was an already shipping product (mobile app, open source server, web based sites); the Kickstarter was for additional funding to extend its development including that of the ActivityPub ecosystem. I ended up pulling that pledge though (as noted in the writeup).

The actual demo will give me a better idea of what I think about Darkhaven going forward (I guess the fact that I am even writing about it, says that is has piqued my interest to a degree).

As I began playing it again, my old ARPG self became immersed in the game where even my ARPG OCD kicked in (that is, the need to explore every part of the map in order to lift the fog of war).  The old school progression mechanics (stat and skill points) while simple, felt like a nice (and nostalgic) change considering the type of games I’ve been playing in recent times.  Oh, and the whole offline play (more so with the GOG version where it is DRM free) is nice since I could leave loot on the ground (if both my character and pet inventory became filled) and knew it would be there in my next resumed play session.

The completeness of Torchlight II reminded me how they were starting from scratch with Torchlight Frontiers; well I was reminded of that when the next day, I resumed playing in Torchlight Frontiers, and wondered where the tabs on the side of the screen went since I wanted to check was in my pet inventory (screen below).

I ended up wasting several minutes looking through the settings to see if I had inadvertently hit some key that toggled them off and kept trying to click my pets icon at the top right; I ended up going back to town and my fort to figure out why I couldn’t view my pet inventory.  I ended up giving up.  It was only later when I resumed playing my Engineer in Torchlight II that it hit me that I was getting that part of the UI mixed up.  In Frontiers, the pet inventory is a tab in the characters (I)nventory as opposed to the Pet Panel tab that is on the left side of the screen in TL2.

The point that I realized after the fact is that Echtra has managed to really keep the feel of the franchise the same (to where the older version messed with my mind this way) even though we’re seeing only a small part of what Frontiers has to actually offer during this alpha test phase.  Movement and combat are two critical aspects in ARPG type games and Echtra has that part down (what needs to be worked on is impact especially for the better skills including ultimates).  Hopefully the actual world environment will follow since the frontiers aspect doesn’t have the same feel of the massive zones in TL2.  I’ve seen the public areas refresh with a new layout but generally speaking, the map has this linear sort of feel to it (plus it lacks a fog of war component).  Again, this is still in closed alpha and we’re not seeing a lot of things they’ve designed but haven’t pushed out for play testing yet.

Runic Games other co-founders (and also former Blizzard North veterans) Travis Baldtree and Max’ brother Erich left back in 2014 to form Double Damage Games.

Gamasutra lists these two position openings as of October 31, 2017:

Source: http://jobs.gamasutra.com/company/echtra-games%2C-inc.-172543

http://forums.runicgames.com/discussion/71632/an-announcement-from-marsh-lefler