Back in February, we covered an upcoming but low-key crossplatform MMORPG called Haven by an indie studio called Unleashed games, whose star-studded dev team includes (among many others) World of Warcraft luminaries Irena Pereira and Brian Birmingham. At the time, we noted that there wasn’t a whole lot of info on the game available yet, except that it would emphasize and social co-operative gameplay as the “win condition,” built by a company that sees its “project more as a guild than as a corporation.”
In any case, the team has pumped out kind of a lot of videos since then, both behind-the-scenes and playtesting with gameplay. The videos show off more of the game’s UI (traditional), art style (painterly cartoony), and combat gameplay (classic MMO questing). It’s giving me a cross between Crowfall and Wizard101 and Asheron’s Call, somehow, although at one point the dev testers are totally fighting shiny murlocs, and at another you can watch them building town structures together – a structure that includes a built-in quest NPC and quest.
The most recent video from the team, which rolled out this morning, features Pereira talking about how the first year of development has gone; she says that the game’s showing at GDC earlier this spring has kicked off conversations about investment and publishing as they seek both.
“We know that there are a ton of parents out there that grew up playing World of Warcraft and EverQuest, and they want to play a game like that again, and yet there’s not a single game on the market that really feels like that,” Pereira says. “I know that our graphics are clearly stylized; we are not going super high-end/Unreal/hyper-realistic. That is an intentional choice. We are going for a video game that feels like you’re playing in a 2-D animated TV series. We want to be able to have a fantasy that feels like it can appeal to both adults and kids because that’s our primary audience: gamers who have kids that want to play cool dungeon runs and go on adventures with them.”
