Denis Dyack: Today’s Gaming Medium Is Multiplayer; Deadhaus Sonata Leaning Heavily on Twitch Integration

May 11, 2019 at 01:00pm EDT

Earlier this year we covered some preliminary details about the new project by Denis Dyack, Deadhaus Sonata, now in development at Apocalypse Studios. It's a free-to-play multiplayer action RPG where you pick the side of the undead against the living, as suggested by the title, and you'll also get to choose what kind of undead depending on your playstyle inclination as showcased in the trinary archetype system below.

Trinary Archetype System (Classes)

The Sacred Trinity of the Necroliberatas

The Material Realm

The Realm of the Physical.  Metal, Stone, Flesh, and Bone. Master these and you will become a monster among men.

The Essential Realm

The Realm of Spirit focusing on the power of essence and cognitive sentience.  This realm is the home of the soul and Elder Gods where ancient artifacts exposed to extreme traumatic event nexuses forge into sentient beings.

The Magickal Realm

The Realm of Magick focusing on the power of True Names.  The closer to the truth you get the more powerful you become.

Denis Dyack, known for his work on games like Eternal Darkness, Too Human, and the first Legacy of Kain title, spoke about this new project during the latest IGN Unfiltered podcast.

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Dyack confidently said the gaming medium is now centered on multiplayer and in that regard, there's also the ever-growing phenomenon of watching games on platforms like Twitch. Deadhaus Sonata will, in fact, be tightly integrated with Twitch to create a new breed of live narrative experience.

I'm going back to my roots with this game and going back to the roots of what I was talking about earlier with Legacy of Kain. Not from a perspective of trying to remake Legacy, though I think the Legacy of Kain community could really use some love in that direction and so we're going to try to provide that. But really, when you talk about the medium, today's medium is wholly different from back when we were on the PlayStation one. So today's medium is multiplayer. And a lot of people are watching games more than they're playing. So if you look at Twitch as an example, you have more people watching League of Legends games than those watching the Super Bowl, so you have a lot of people watching as they're working and stuff. So imagine if we integrate this medium into a game, take that medium and take advantage of it. That's what we're trying to do with Deadhaus Sonata and we're trying to do story that really pretty much is ignored with multiplayer games. So we're wanting to take a narrative approach to this and at the same time, we want to integrate storytelling into this medium where the audience can participate. Imagine, back in the day, when you're sitting in a group play 2000 years ago, you actually had agency, that's where 'thumbs up or thumbs down' comes from, if a character would live or die, the audience could participate in that. And then the actors would take it from there. With Twitch and these new mediums that we have, we have audience participation. Imagine making a game around that medium. That's what Deadhaus Sonata is about.

Deadhaus Sonata won't be crowdfunded, as the developers have managed to secure funding through private investment and traditional publishing. Powered by Amazon Lumberyard, AWS and Twitch technology, the game is being developed on PC with plans to launch it on consoles as well. There's no launch window yet.

About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.

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