Aaron Unger

Haus Dead Ambassador
Mallius Odium
Ashen_Ring
Ageless
OG 2020
Dog Adopter
Vampire Scholar
Old World
Harbinger
Jan 31, 2018
28
43
28
Hello friends!

We at Apocalypse Studios believe one of the Core Pillars of Deadhaus Sonata is the community! We strongly believe that we work for you... the community! As such, we feel it is our duty as your stewards of the game to be as transparent and forthcoming on information as we can while we develop DHS. That said, DHS is still in very early development...Really early. While we have worked very hard to get to a point where we felt comfortable enough to share DHS with you, we still have a long way to go. That's where you come in! Your feedback is important to us. How the community interacts with DHS can and will have a direct impact on the development of DHS. Hopefully that road we travel Is together as a community has a lasting and meaningful impact on the way we make and play games.

Anyways...back to the good part. Later this month Apocalypse Studios will be hosting one of our first interviews with Jack Lindsey, of Exclusively Games! As such, we cordially invite YOU, our community, to field questions about Deadhaus Sonata that you would like to hear answered in Jack's interview! Offerings to Lord Ch'sebur'gah will not curry you anymore favor than normal. Well... Maybe.
 
Awesome! I have some questions I've already asked in the "Ask Away!" thread that I will link to here.
Others have also made some questions there that might be useful for the upcoming interview.

  1. Will players have to unlock each class individually or are they all unlocked straight from the beginning?
  2. Do you have any plans to introduce lag compensation in the game? As a South American player who had smooth experiences when playing with both Russian and Japanese players lag-free in games with good net coding, I'm very appreciative of thorough latency technologies.
  3. How big are the hordes of humans we will be fighting against? 100? 300?... 1,000 enemies at the same time?
  4. Can we expect some verticality and ingenuity in our character's movement capabilities? (Climbing, flying, phasing, grappling, teleporting, etc.)
  5. Will there be achievements or challenges in the game?
  6. Will there be stealth mechanics?
  7. Can we expect voice commands, pinging, VOIP and/or other communication mechanisms in the game?
  8. Is this going to be an open world game or will it be instance-based? (Open maps or closed mission sessions)
  9. How customizable will the characters' skills, attributes, fighting style, and visuals be?
  10. Will there be interactive portions of the scenarios? I.e.: traps, gates, bridges, ladders, pickupable objects, hiding spots, etc.
  11. Will there be gameplay advantages purchasable with real money?
  12. Will there be a way for Free 2 Play players to unlock premium/real money items, be them cosmetic or not, through dedication alone in-game?
  13. Will we also get to fight the undead? Perhaps in the PVP mode?
  14. How will Deadhaus maintain the player's fidelity? Will it have episodic content, will it be the most amazing undead experience ever, will it be sports competitive, will it have tons of content to unlock, or maybe something else entirely?

And I'll make some more questions below:

  1. Many asymmetric games met their doom or were short-lived in great part because of their very nature, especially in regards to balance. Evolve and Nosgoth are two very good examples. What will make Deadhaus Sonata thrive where others have not?
  2. What are some of the greatest lessons you learned in your previous games?
  3. In Deadhaus' Welcome Package video (now captioned!) you mentioned playing a ton of Cthulhu Wars. How did Cthulhu Wars serve as inspiration for Deadhaus Sonata?
  4. Can you give us an example of how players will be able to interact through Twitch, or otherwise, with the game/players?
  5. How does Apocalypse plan on letting the community be a part of Deadhaus' development?
  6. What sort of missions and challenges will players face in Deadhaus Sonata?
  7. Where does the "Sonata" from Deadhaus Sonata come from? Why is it named like this?
  8. How will Deadhaus mix co-op and narrative-driven design together? These are often very distinct features from different, separate genres.
That is all for now. I'll edit and add more questions when I come up with them.

Good luck with your first interview! 🦇
 
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I was wondering about the loot system. Will you get all your weapons from enemies, or will there be some crafting? If there is crafting will it be like crafting with most games where you gather resources and craft items at a bench? Or will it be like crafting recipes in Path of Exile?
 
@Golden Xan pretty much covered a lot of what I would have asked :D but i'll ask a few in here just for the sake of questions to ask. i'll keep it simple and direct :)

1. How much of Eternal Darkness will make it to the game (Body part selection combat hits, Magic, Camera System, Sanity system...)?
2. Will there be Crossplay among the different port versions of the game?
3. Will the Human A.I. heal themselves and use other harder tactics at higher difficulties?
4. Has the Amazon Lumberyard engine been a challenge or Breeze to work with?
5. Will Cats play a role in the game (healing, virtual pet, companions)
 
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1. One of my favorite parts of Blood omen was how visceral the combat and magic were. Will we see anything on the same level as blood omen's flay, font of putrescence, or impload?

2. Is this title in any way a bit of a spiritual successor to blood omen and somewhat of a "what could have been"?
 
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I notice Warframe (I think it’s warframe?) is talked about a lot in the discord. Will you be taking inspiration from that model?

Warframe is a free to play looter co op game
That’s still going strong
 
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1: will there be gore?
2: and will you able to do a cool finisher on some NPC's?
 
what you did
You still haven't added that video to your signature?? I highly encourage it; if you do, I will add this to mine:


Questions, eh?

I've been meaning to ask this question, but so far it didn't feel right. Let me take a shot at it now.

It's cool to see that you have perks now that folks can buy into to get some headstart in-game currency and other perks when the game releases, and even cooler to see people buying into it! The adopt-a-cat drive is, albeit only tangentially related, a nice thought and very welcome as well.

Denis, you have been criticizing people in the past for judging a game before it comes out. Or making quick decisions on whether they like a game based on another person's opinion. I tend to agree with the idea that previews in this day and age are problematic, if not easily bought and manipulated. Early access can have its share of problems as well.

In that sense, do you see any problem with pre-purchasing a game before you know what's in it? Is it not like buying the cat in the bag - or worse, the cat in Schrödinger's hypothetical box? Or do you think it's fine if people think a game is worth the money before they have their hands on in, and it's only a problem when people prematurely decide that they don't like it?

Which brings me to my core question... you have repeatedly stated that the game will have a unique and completely different / surprising concept for monetization. So far, little more than that has been made public, apart from the game not being pay-to-win. Leaving aside that "pay-to-win" can be a very specific and subjective definition, and that big players in the industry have repeatedly betrayed us by first saying "no lootboxes", "only cosmetics","no microtransactions", then later patching them back in after a couple months, what do you think are the reasons for people to buy a founders' pack now, with promises what they will not be able to use their purchase for, yet little verifiable information about what it actually is that they're getting?

I know that there are details about how much money the purchased bones are worth. Unless you have a possibility to exchange bones back into money, this piece of information is missing the key ingredient of "what will I be able to get for it." An in-game purchase worth $5 USD could give you a new reticule skin in one game, or in another, a character from your favorite video game as a new fighter, including a new stage themed around him. How do we know what 50 bones will get us?

I'm also intrigued by being able to see lore, flavor texts, and even fully interactive 3D renders of particular perks that founders will get. Yet again, a description of a character or weapon does not tell me whether I would enjoy using that particular thing in the game. I am very excited about the idea of world-based storytelling, asymmetric gameplay, and the notion that DHS will bring story to a multiplayer game in an entirely unprecedented way. I am not worried about Apocalypse's ability of releasing a great game. Still, precisely because it is something unprecedented and not very well explained, is it not impossible for me to estimate whether I will personally enjoy interacting with this world?

I regrettably have not played Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, nor have I played Too Human. I regard Eternal Darkness as one of the best games I've ever played, and I've been disappointed by most multiplayer games I have played. The information I have about DHS does not seem to indicate to me whether or not I'd enjoy playing the game at all. I know you don't want to give away any secrets or non-final stuff, which makes total sense. On the other hand, I'm wondering why I should make a final purchase of something that's not final, nor do I know what the game will turn out to be when it does go gold.

Please do not take my question the wrong way. I have been with the community of Precursor Games, Quantum Entanglement Entertainment, and now Apocalypse for some time. I've come to respect you as a very smart, insightful, polite, critical (yet humble), and passionate human being, with lots of excitement for storytelling, engineering, science, and game design, always aiming to excel. You've overcome some less-than-optimal things that happened in the past, and you've always been looking forward. I am very excited to see what the future of Apocalypse holds.
 
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I been following this game for some time and do have few questions. But I think my main one at the time after seeing the alpah is will there be a form of rock paper scissors element to combat or something else to make combat challenging and not just braindead hacking and slashing for gear to then hack and slash better.

Meaning will the game have opponents that are strong/weak to certain types of damage, making it optimal to carry a few different weapon types or spread out skills to either be balanced or to chose some skills to specialize in, thus making
Combat more in depth and making classes shine while in group play? Such as slashing, bludgeoning, fire, and things of that nature. So even if you are more geared towards slashing and bleed damage you would still have to put some thought and planning in case you fight things that heavily resist those damage types but are weaker to something else like piercing or fire. Especially if the game has higher difficulty challanges or dungeons.
 
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Do you plan on putting a queque system in place for group mission, so us solos can join up with others?
 
I've been meaning to ask this question, but so far it didn't feel right. Let me take a shot at it now.

A little bit late in my reply, but...
I think @derula 's observations are quite pertinent. Those are quite relevant concerns. I'd like to hear answers to those questions as well.
 
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Will there be a option for a offline solo mode? or do you have to connected for solo story mode due to how the netcode works?

I believe they've answered this before already (not that they can't say it again in the upcoming interview, anyway. That's a common question).
From what I've gathered so far, you can play by yourself in solo mode if you want to but you must be connected to the servers in any case. The game runs online all the time.
 
I actually thought of one more question.

We live in a world where making games is becoming more and more expensive. You need bigger and bigger teams of highly specialized people, working with gigantic toolsets that pile workaround on workaround, just to mask the shortcomings of polygonal graphics. 2D polygonal ("vector") graphics pretty much died with Flash - even the Flash games that do still exist are largely pixel-based. Currently, there are several proof-of-concepts demonstrating that voxel graphics / physics may bring back cheaper development costs without sacrificing the growing demand for a detailed and realistic look-and-feel - on the contrary, these projects seem to suggest that myriad of problems with polygons simply don't exist with voxels, and that the sustainability of the GPU race would suddenly become a very minor concern rather than the vital prerequisite it is now.

As far as I can see, there are multiple reasons why polygons still exist:

  • Currently, voxel graphics can't keep up with all of the same advanced techniques used with polygons. Not because these wouldn't work with voxels, but because they would have to be completely reinvented to work with the new technology.
  • The industry has brought forth experts for so many workarounds. Many years working with all the required advanced 3D rendering stuff have turned them into versatile masters of their craft. But virtually nobody has any experience working with voxels.
  • The AAA industry has a sort of tunnel vision; the only way they think they can make up for the higher development cost is by causing the gamers to spend more and more money. Investing in a new technology seems like a risk they can't possibly take.
Do you think that this view is very short-sighted? Will gamers eventually get sick of live service multi-player looter shooter games? Is the course that EA and others seem to be taking a one-way trip, and doomed to fail? Could the industry be running towards a new video game crash? Or is it the natural course of history that single player games just aren't selling anymore? Is it true that multi-player is secretly all gamers ever wanted and they just need to get used to them not being alone in their games? Are microtransactions and F2P the inevitable future for all AAA games?

Could you find truth in the following arguments?

  • Everything possible with polygons can be done with voxels, and at a lower computational cost. Polygon budgets would be a thing of the past, and games could suddenly do certain things very easily that seemed impossible before.
  • Bringing new, young people in to AAA development is a long and costly process now. They need to know so many different, non-intuitive techniques. Diversification is necessary, and therefore, more different people need to be hired. Voxel graphics are much more intuitive to work with, particularly when combined with laser scans and VR; once the tech is there, training new people will be comparatively cheap. Artists finally don't have to know advanced math stuff anymore!
  • With voxel graphics, we can once again have AAA games that don't need to rely on marketing and tricking people into spending boatloads of money on virtual goods. Creative people can be creative again, and make what they want to make without sacrificing their vision to maximize income.
This may seem unrelated to DHS and kind of following an agenda. So if you're excluding it for that reason, I can understand. However, Denis is known for talking unconventional concepts around video games, and I want to hear his opinion on this. Also, while DHS is no big EA sellout pay-to-win garbage, it's definitely clear to see that you're pursuing "new" forms of monetization. Recurring revenue seems to be a definite goal, and it would be interesting to know if the reason for that is a conviction that this is the only way to make a profit these days, or if it's just something you're doing this time for circumstantial reasons and might do differently for your next title.
 
Most important question, when is the tentative release date? Rough estimate will work. Thank you.
 
Most important question, when is the tentative release date? Rough estimate will work. Thank you.

There is a roadmap at the end of the Founders page that shows that the closed beta will begin at approximately March 31. Good beta phases can last between 6 to 12 months. I'd say that, if all goes according to plan, we'll be having Deadhaus on its release version by October 2021.

I'm not a developer though, this is just my speculation according to what they've shown us thus far and my personal experience.
 
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Hi...
If you are interested to play online games you can go here...
<link removed>

Hi there, I removed your link since it was off-topic (as was your previous message), if you think this was in error please PM me and we can talk about it :)
 
Hey! I have a question about the alpha or First age, What kind of NDA it will be under?
Will it be possible to stream privately via Discord to a friend or two?