Alt+Games - Check Out Esenthel, a 3D CRPG Project

Four months ago I wrote about the CRPG project Esenthel in the old Alt+Games blog. Today I went to check out what has happened in the project since that time.

It seems that the team has been very busy during last Autumn and around the holidays: They've released new versions of their demo as well as the game engine, and added a lot of stuff to both. I'm going to check out the newest game demo (as well as try out the included editor) and I hope you do too. In the meanwhile, as a part of the archiving project, here's the old article I wrote on Esenthel on October 2007. You can download them from the game's website .

Esenthel is an ongoing project to create a 3D computer role-playing game in the vein of the Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind, Oblivion). The game is being developed by an independent group of developers and game enthusiasts. While the development is still on-going (and I suspect that the final product won't be released tomorrow) the group has released the newest (at the time of the original article) demo of the game in the beginning of October. The demo consists of a short dungeon crawl and is essentially a concept and technology demostration.

The demo consists of a short, plotless dungeon crawl consisting mostly of fighting. At this stage it is purely a playable tech demo, as the fighting and dungeon ramping gets boring after a short while with no larger plot or meaning to it.

The question marks concerning Esenthel at the moment are the usability and intuitiveness of the user interface and the gameplay content. The development team does not have a dedicated lead game designer at the moment, a fact that gets me at least a bit worried about the future of the game. Will the game remain as a tech demo and a copycat of the prominent commercial games of the same genre or can the team develop something innovative and ground-breaking into the game that the entertainment games of the same genre can not provide? This remains to be seen, but judging from the technological and audiovisual quality displayed in the demo, there's lots of promise there. I hope that the developers can put as much polish to the game design aspects of the game too. I for one will be monitoring the development of this one with some expectations.