Multiplayer and hardware support

[FS] How close are you to completion? What are the remaining hurdles?

[SD] We're very close. Internally we should be finished at the end of May, but then there is usually another two weeks before it ends up on the shelves. The only remaining hurdles are to balance the single and multiplayer games, and to fix bugs.

[FS] How will multiplayer be handled? In-house matchmaking service? Zone? Kali? Gamespy?

[SD] We're leaving it pretty open-ended. We're going to have master-servers, and we're working to try and get Gamespy support. Drakan already responds to the standard Gamespy query protocol, and of course it runs great on a LAN, too.

Two big problems

[FS] Will the game include 3D sound? A3D? EAX?

[SD] YES! We fully support both EAX and A3D. I personally think our sound design is one of the best of any game out there. We have almost 50 MB of just sound effects! Our engine can efficiently handle that much because of a new caching system we've developed. Almost every sound in our game is 3D, so if you have a 3D sound card, you'll hear some amazing 3D effects.

[FS] Any 3Dnow! optimization? SSE? Do these optimizations do much in the way of performance boosts?

[SD] We're working with AMD to get 3Dnow! support, we're not yet sure how much of a performance increase we will see.

Now it's one big problem

[FS] Are you worried about comparisons to Tomb Raider? Attractive Female Heroine, 3rd person, etc. You even have a real life model for Rynn.

[AP] Yes and no. Yes, because the only similarities between Drakan and Tomb Raider are that they both have female lead characters and they are both 3rd person. Beyond that, Drakan is a completely different game. After playing Drakan for five minutes you will realize that we focus much more on action than Tomb Raider. Drakan is set in an epic fantasy world that has a history and realistic locales. This is what really separates Drakan from other games. Drakan feels less like a game and more like a living, breathing world. We accomplished this by integrating all aspects of gameplay into the environment. Our traps and puzzles do not feel arbitrary they logically fit into game environment. Plus in Drakan you can get on a dragon and fly around and roast baddies.
[SD] Yeah, try THAT in Tomb Raider! Also, I would add that our controls are almost exactly like a first-person shooter (fast-action), and differ a lot from other 3rd person games.