Moon Beast Productions, a studio founded by Blizzard veterans, recently unveiled its first game, Darkhaven, an action-RPG with a procedurally generated and destructible world. The team is led by Erich Schaefer, one of the creators of Diablo and Torchlight, artist Philip Shenk, and programmer Peter Hu, who previously worked on Diablo II. The developers describe Darkhaven as a "sandbox of chaos" where players can not only explore dungeons but also literally destroy the entire world.
In a conversation with Rock Paper Shotgun journalists, Shenk and Schaefer touched on the state of the genre and, in particular, Diablo IV. According to Shenk, the problem with Diablo IV, like many modern ARPGs, is that they are "too carefully constructed": for the sake of smooth progress, balance, and audience retention, developers avoid any manifestations of chaos. This approach, he believes, kills the very "magic" for which players loved the early installments of Diablo.
"They're trying to design everything too perfectly and precisely—and as a result, magic, experiments, and unexpected things just don't arise. You have to allow for a little chaos."
Darkhaven, on the other hand, is consciously built around unpredictability. To the point that the game world can be completely captured by the forces of evil and destroyed. In this case, the player loses and starts over in a new world, while retaining their character.
Separately, the developers spoke about post-release support. Moon Beast does not plan to compete with Blizzard in terms of the scale of expansions and cinematic campaigns—the studio does not have the resources for this. Instead, the team is going to release small modules and events that organically integrate into the procedural world and increase replayability.
Darkhaven does not yet have a release date. The game can be added to your Steam wishlist.
The video is available at the following link.