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Dear Gameover fans, hi!
You are watching a video interview from a developing studio,
but this time we are not somewhere around the world as we usually do.
The reason we are not abroad, is because we have such a development studio here in Greece as well.
We are here, at the offices of Aventurine, a Greek based company,
with Mr. Tasos Flambouras who is the CEO and Founder of the company, am I right?
I am one of the founders and the General Manager of the company, not the CEO.
So General Manager and one the founders of Aventurine, a company that has been operating in Greece for some years
and has already given one game to all Greek gamers, the widely-known Darkfall, while also working on many other projects.
We have many things to discuss about Aventurine, I personally visited the studio a few weeks ago
and I got very excited with the people’s work and passion.
This will be the first part of a big tribute and we are going to focus on the company
and on you personally, then we will continue by discussing what exactly is happening here.
So, you got started from the US, did you?
Yes, yes.
And you have also worked for Microsoft, correct?
Yes, I have worked at Microsoft in various positions;
I have worked with many of Microsoft’s contractors, as well as Westwood Studios.
I have also worked at Interplay, doing publishing support and publishing tasks in general.
This totals around 15 years of experience in the gaming industry, not including the time I have spent with Aventurine.
The project began in 2003 with the creation of Aventurine and the relocation of our Norwegian partners and friends to Greece
and moved on to developing Darkfall full-time at the beginning of 2003.
Before we start talking about Darkfall, I would like to ask how come you decided to invest in such a big project,
because without revealing the amount, I know that a considerable sum was invested on the production and development.
You took the decision to come to Greece, a country that has no tradition in gaming development,
a country that doesn’t even support the local talents not just in gaming development, but in all levels.
It was a very big risk in my opinion, however, you decided to come here and invest.
What is your opinion about this? How did you come to this decision?
While I was working at Microsoft I was involved with a project there, a massive multiplayer game.
Through this I met a lot of people, and one of them was Claus, one of my current partners.
We were talking about a project that Claus was about to do. It was Darkfall.
We discussed if we could do it together, since we had been talking about it for a long time.
Claus visited Greece, and I met him with the other 2 partners I had already found in Greece, Zad Mehdawi and Spiros Iordanis.
We had already reached an agreement with Claus before we met in Greece, but in this meeting the deal was sealed.
We agreed to do something huge, the project was so ambitious,
that it sounded almost unrealistic that we all agreed that we can just go ahead and do it.
It was the beginning of a long and painful procedure.
When I think about it, I reflect on how much patience and strength it took,
not only to start the project but also to reach the point that we are now.
We probably had not realized the difficulties involved with the project back then
and this is one of the reasons we proceeded with it.
We are talking about an MMO, a very ambitious MMO.
Our target audience is hardcore gamers, just like we used to be.
We were playing exclusively in PvP servers for countless hours in the most difficult level;
we didn’t just play MMOs, but also First Person Shooters and other various action games, always at a competitive level.
We wanted to merge the competitive and immediate first person experience with massive multiplayability.
This is something that no one had attempted back then, because there were huge technical issues that had to be overcome,
in order for a player to be satisfied by playing an FPS in a massive environment.
Those who have played FPS games can be complaining about the lag they experience all day long,
imagine the scale of the complaints at a massive multiplayer game.
So, we started with the hardest target audience, a game concept that looked extremely difficult if not impossible,
a skeleton crew and minimal resources. We were about 11 people altogether when we started.
Despite of that, we really thought we pull this off.
The best part for us, but the worst regarding how difficult this would eventually turn out,
was that we had to develop the technology from scratch.
It had to be innovative in various parts in order to allow our vision to come forward.
We need to say that the game is exclusively produced by you, and that includes the graphics engine, the code, the game’s art...
Everything has been developed in-house.
Currently, for our next game, it is the first time we are using a middleware for the user interface.
We created everything from scratch for the first iteration of Darkfall.
I was going to ask you something else but this brings us to your next game.
You launched Darkfall and now you are preparing for the launch of a new game, right?
Yes, we are working on our next game.
What can you share with us?
The development of the new game started full-steam around two years ago
and we are very close to the finish line now, which we think is a major achievement on its own.
This is the completion of Darkfall; it is Darkfall 2.0 as we call it inside the company.
This is not the final name?
No there will be another name; we won’t be calling it Darkfall 2.0.
It started as a big expansion to the current game, but we decided to develop a new game instead,
a game that will deal with all the issues that Darkfall had because of the way it was initially developed.
We had to correct all of our mistakes, take into consideration all of our users' feedback,
take into consideration our own internal feedback, and make Darkfall what it would have been if everything was perfect.
We had to interfere many times in our technology over the years,
so it's a brand new modern game, a vastly different game than Darkfall.
But it keeps the same frame. It's an MMO, right?
Yes, it keeps the same frame.
Players of this new game will feel that they are actually playing Darkfall,
while everything in-game has been changed and improved.
The players are going to have an amazing experience.
I have too many questions in my mind, but the one that comes up now
is for the new Darkfall -which I guess you won't be able to talk much at this point-
is whether the new user interface will be friendlier towards new players.
Everyone knows that Darkfall was a hard game,
and that includes players that played Darkfall as well as players that didn’t,
a game for the most hardcore of them all.
Regarding the new game, are you planning to shift the balance
in the favor or a more casual audience, or keep the game’s hardcore appeal?
The game is still hardcore, it hasn't changed much in that aspect.
What has actually changed is that the introduction to the game is now much easier for the new user.
This change has happened because even hardcore players
want as many players as possible on each server; no one wants to be alone.
With the new game we try to gradually introduce new users to the world of Darkfall,
so that it’s easier for them to absorb the hardcore parts of the game.
It was very difficult to get into the first version of Darkfall.
After a player first spawned in the world, he was completely on his own.
The game was completely sandbox, which means that players had unlimited options
from which they didn't know what to do first, they didn't have a sence of direction.
Now we are trying to give new players that direction, while we still give them complete freedom.
We will give a direction on what players can do, what their options are
and how can they start exploring the world.
We highlight their possible options, so that their experience is much better than what it used to be.
All these changes were implemented due to feedback on the first game, right?
Yes, even the most hardcore players wanted some form of direction.