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 hard to dispel: a volcanic eruption, rising floodwaters that breed Lovecraftian fish creatures, a sweeping ice age. Worse, you might encounter several apocalypses at once.
“It’s almost sort of our version of campaigns,” explains Moon Beast’s Erich Schaefer, who you may also know as senior designer, art director and writer for the very first Diablo. “We will introduce new events – we will release with a bunch, I hope, and then we will keep making more. They will modularly fit into your world, as we make them, since we procedurally grow the world as you explore. Almost like Minecraft, when they introduce a new biome – we can do that with these events.”
Darkhaven players will be able to pop into each other’s worlds to boggle at and battle these calamities. To stave off annihilation, you might need to put the game’s terrain deformation and building systems to the test. Continuing the Minecraft parallel, Darkhaven allows you to destroy or excavate much of the landscape; indeed, it may be tricky to avoid demolishing walls and gouging out craters, when using more explodey spells. A basic tactical application is chopping through stone to get the drop on some cave goblins. But Moon Beast are also hoping players will rework the geography more comprehensively, raising earthworks or digging moats around settlements.
All of this is a somewhat hypothetical characterisation of an extremely work-in-progress action-RPG, based on conversations with Moon Beast and a lot of playtest videos. The developers are planning a Kickstarter for Darkhaven, and as ever with Kickstarters, there’s the risk of being swept away by frenzied blue sky thinking. Still, I do think Darkhaven could have legs.
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It’s certainly channelling some maxed-out CVs. Schaefer aside, Moon Beast’s members include Phil Shenk, lead character artist for Diablo 2 and art director for its expansion Lord of Destruction, and Diablo 2 programmer Peter Hu. All three are alumni of Flagship Studios, founded by disgruntled Blizzard North staff in 2003 to make Hellgate: London, with Hu and Schaefer later co-founding Runic Games, creators of Torchlight.
Like Hellgate and Torchlight, Darkhaven trades heavily on its Diablo DNA for marketing purposes, but it also has a bone to pick with present-day Diablo. With its lich lords and lava flows, it’s an effort to rejuvenate the action-RPG in the face of what Shenk calls the “overengineered” progression and stultifying polish of free-to-play and F2P-influenced games, like Diablo 4.
Hu and Shenk founded Moon Beast around four years ago, with Schaefer joining a little later. “We knew we wanted ultimately to work on ARPGs,” Shenk tells me over videocall. “And one thing that Peter and I had worked on at Flagship – and this was mostly Peter’s baby, after Hellgate shipped – we were pitching the idea of this very moddable ARPG. And at the time we were thinking it would be like a side-scroller, Maple Story kind of thing, but it’d be an ARPG and you’d be really able to mod it to be whatever you wanted to be. That didn’t take off, but we never really lost sight of that idea.
“It led to something that was more – we don’t call it a sequel to Diablo 2, you know, but it’s heavily inspired by the things we were thinking about after Diablo 2, and Lord of Destruction,” Shenk continues. “We were playing Ultima Online at the time, Erich especially was playing a lot of UO, and we kind of fantasised about the idea of this really open sandbox world with ARPG gameplay. That didn’t really happen – Diablo 3 went in a different direction. But that was another thing that was kind of informing what we wanted to build. So that kind of led us to prototype it, the procedural world generation, and that’s about when Erich started getting excited about it.”
Schaefer had been lurking in Moon Beast’s Discord for a while, offering advice. “They showed me this prototype,” he recalls. “I don’t know if it had the land destruction in there, but they were showing me that you could play the game and use the editor, and they’re like busting holes in the walls. And I was like, that’s got to be part of the game almost, that looks like a fun thing to do – it almost looks like the character’s doing it.” Nonetheless, Schaefer was reluctant initially to get involved. “I told them this was the hardest game in the world to make, as we were talking about it, and it still is. But I think we’re finally getting over the crest.”
To begin with, Darkhaven wasn’t really an ARPG as we understand the genre today. “There was barely any sort of progression in the game,” Schaefer says. “And then we sort of panicked because we were talking to a lot of investors, and they’re all like yeah, this game looks cool, but what’s the game? So we had to step back and took about a year, just pursuing the ARPG style with the loot, the levels and the skill trees, that sort of thing. And then once we got that into pretty good shape, we brought back in all the elements [from the prototype] that were sort of lurking in there – the destruction stuff. And we had a good enough base at that point to be able to riff on it and really make it part of the world.”
Given the explicit links to Diablo 2 here, I’m intrigued to know whether any of Darkhaven’s moving parts were being actively considered by original Diablo developer Blizzard North, back in the early noughties. Shenk and Schaefer don’t recall making any formal pitches, but Shenk does remember bandying around vague concepts for “a Battle.net town, you know, like a more persistent hub, that you’d be able to spawn dungeons off of, and maybe some of those dungeons and wilderness areas would become persistent”.
Blizzard’s engine technology at the time of Diablo 2 didn’t really allow for this, however. “It was sprite-based and so we didn’t really have any ability to do building,” Shenk continues. “We could have placed houses and stuff, but it just wasn’t really set up to to move forward with that.”
Darkhaven’s verticality – you can jump and scramble over hills and boulders, rather than being chained to a flat plane as in many RPGs – may also owe something to early ideas for Diablo 3 (which had an infamously troubled development, eventually launching in 2012 several years after Blizzard North’s closure). “I do remember an early Diablo 3 Blizzard North version,” Schaefer says. “There was a lot more height going on in the maps, and monsters were throwing these fireball things, they’d kind of arc through the air and go down into a canyon.”
Darkhaven’s map destruction also fulfils one of Schaefer’s hopes for the original Diablo. “[The first game] especially was inspired by playing XCOM, which featured destruction of the map,” he says. “You could light the buildings and the trees on fire with your weapons, and they were random and procedural, which we kind of used to inform Diablo 1’s maps. But I always wanted to be able to destroy the world in these games, and that’s why I was really psyched to see this prototype.”
To me as an armchair designer, the addition of Minecrafty terrain-sculpting to an action-RPG sounds like madness. How do you balance the game to ensure that players don’t either absolutely sabotage themselves or fashion wildly over-powered builds? How do you get your Swords of +5 XP Per Kill in a row? Shenk acknowledges the concern, but also argues that we don’t have to think about ARPGs this way.
“If you can go anywhere, if you can jump up on top of things, and swim over things, and there are only soft barriers, and if the world can be destroyed – that’s so different than most ARPGs that are out there,” he comments. “But as we started playing with itemisations and skills and level progressions, we introduced that ARPG gameplay, we found that it just naturally fits.”
Why? Because ARPGs are supposed to be about trying things out, not just making your stats go up – “taking chances at difficult encounters, and coming out of them and using your skill and making the meta decisions about the things that you find. And that can happen on any stage, even this chaotic stage where the world is falling apart around you.”
In broad strokes, Moon Beast are pushing an idea of the ARPG that is less constrained by the balancing expectations and economic priorities of live service games. Hence Darkhaven’s emphasis on ‘bold, expressive’ gear over the kind of incrementally better lootable you find in games that want to become a habit.
“If you’re trying to make sure that players, when they meet a certain boss, are going to be challenged in a very predictable way, then your options for loot are much more limited,” Shenk says. “Whereas if you don’t really mind if a player can figure out how to get OP with a certain build and blow through the content – like, I remember Diablo 2, certain things would happen, synergies would happen with a build that we didn’t predict, and we would nerf them or we’d change them, but try not to take the magic away from it.
“And if you’re also not really concerned about a leaderboard during a season, and one build getting overpowered – that [thinking] comes from free-to-play. They just want everybody to feel like they got their money’s worth.” Darkhaven will get online updates, of course, but Moon Beast don’t want to tweak and pad the loot tables relentlessly.
“In terms of the quantity, to me the loot feels much more like Diablo 2,” Shenk goes on. “There’s common items, but common items can have magic properties, and you might find one that is really, really good in just one specific way, and that’s worth holding onto.” In general, he wants Darkhaven players to avoid fixating on damage-per-second: “that was my big problem with Diablo 4. It’s like, ‘okay, that’s better DPS – I’ll take it’. Instead of ‘oh well, this item gives me plus two to my crow skill, so maybe I’ll hold onto that, even though it’s doing less damage.”
That exhortation to hold onto things also applies to the world of Darkhaven, as volatile as it may be. Where Schaefer is excited by the idea of letting everything go to the zombie dogs, Shenk is more enthused by the idea of a geographical record. He wants each map to be a live document of your feats and failures.
“I don’t feel like it’s fun to just flatten your world, but it is fun to see the things that you do have a real impact,” Shenk says. “And then to see them recover over time. One of the stories we’ve used in pitches before is that when your world is a thousand hours old, you should be able to walk around and see the scars of every battle that you fought – the Necropolis event that you thwarted and now there’s ivy growing over all the ruins, and this town that you tried to rebuild that then got burnt later on. The world becomes its own story.”
It makes for a nice way of thinking about Darkhaven in general. This is a game wandering among the pristine temples of latter-day ARPGs, looking for an opportunity to strike the earth and recover the restless bones of Diablos gone by – even if it means screwing up the meta and setting the horizon on fire. Read more on Steam.
