So, what's this all about?

Dawntide is an innovative new freeform MMOG being developed by Working as Intended, an independent studio based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Dawntide is in the Beta 2 phase of development and we are accepting tester applications at our Beta Center.

Dawntide is designed with one main thought in mind: People play games with different motivations, and want different things out of the games they play. As a consequence, the market for games has developed in a very modularized way: there are games that let you turn your mind off and relax, games that provide different kinds of challenges, games that focus on socialization. Dawntide incorporates all these elements into a game focused around a world in which the players are the driving element and the builders of a new civilization.

Features

We believe the best way to make that reality is to give players the freedom to define their character through their actions, and promote social interaction and interdependence through the game features. When players are encouraged to form realistic societies, many more different meaningful roles become available for the player to engage in at all times. This doesn’t mean that solo play isn’t perfectly viable – only that any kind of play will have the greatest rewards when your opponent is another player.

Dawntide achieves this by creating end goals that require the participation of all player types to complete – from carebears to griefers. Players in Dawntide can create their own cities, even forming nations with their own army and armada. The game gives them the opportunity to create and enforce their own laws and establish government, as well as it gives other players the opportunity to break those laws and overthrow those governments – at their own risk.

Beta Development

Throughout Beta 1, which launched on August 1st and ended with the launch of Beta 2, we received a lot of feedback on just about everything in the game (as well as half a thousand bug reports). Overall, people were happy about our graphical style and seemed to love our crafting system. The combat system was considered slow and unwieldy, however, and most people found the game very inaccessible and difficult to get started on. There were also a number of crippling crashes and performance issues.

Based on this, we overhauled the interface and increased our emphasis on performance improvements, which massively improved the smoothness of the game. We also rolled out revised combat mechanics and updates to our crafting system based on tester input, which especially helped the opinion of combat a lot – we hope to see much further testing of this in Beta 2. The crashes and crippling performance were fixed, and we adopted the idea of World Bosses to the design plan.

Read more about beta development in the Beta Center.

Final Words

From constructing ships and cities to creating a trade empire or fighting in, or perhaps even leading your own army, Dawntide’s features and world provide a large number of opportunities and ways to play an MMO.

Above all, Dawntide is developed with a clear vision of making a fun and enjoyable game. We are committed to making every activity in the game something you primarily do because it is inherently fun and enjoyable, not because you may get a carrot for doing it in the end. People do not play games to endure tedium, they play games to be entertained, and MMORPGs are no exception.

We hope to see you in the beta, and for further information, we welcome you to join our forums.