Moon Beast have released a pre-alpha demo for their action-RPG Darkhaven. You know, the one from the former Blizzard North devs, which harkens back to Diablo 2 while stirring in a dynamic world and terrain destruction reminiscent of Minecraft. I did a big interview feature about it. Now, you can play a very early build and decide whether I've been quaffing the Kool Aid.
There’s an unpredictable “Necropolis” event in Darkhaven that will slowly turn the entire world undead. It generates a Lich sarcophagus that spills a sickly wave of gloom, rolling across the procedural map to clog player waypoints and fill the alcoves with bony minions. Let the gloom thicken for long enough, and in theory, there will be nowhere safe for your character to spawn. A true apocalypse. You can transfer your character to a freshly generated world, but you might encounter something even harder to dispel: a volcanic eruption, rising floodwaters that breed Lovecraftian fish creatures, a sweeping ice age. Worse, you might encounter several apocalypses at once.
An ARPG "unlike any other," spearheaded by a handful of former Diablo 1 and 2 developers? That's a prospect that I'm sure will make loot goblins everywhere sit up and take note. Well, that's what the team behind Darkhaven is setting out to achieve. Shaking up the action RPG space with a procedurally generated world featuring an unprecedented amount of environmental destruction and evolution for the genre, hopes are understandably quite high. Despite only being revealed at the end of January, a new "pre-alpha" demo for Darkhaven has just hit Steam, so you can already go and see for yourself how developer Moon Beast Productions is getting on.
Read the full story on PCGamesN: Former Diablo devs aim to shake up the ARPG space with Darkhaven, and you can see how they're getting on in its new demo
