About eight months ago, I won the TCoS contest on MMORPG.com. The prize was a visit to the Studios in Holland where The Chronicles of Spellborn is being developed. I’m happy to report about my experiences with the development team.

After arriving in Amsterdam and traveling to The Hague I arrived at the TCoS Studio. Meeting all of the developers was quite fun and really opened my eyes to seeing all the aspects of the game from a developer’s side. You get a chance to see all the different work in progress aspects of the game instead of a nice finished/polished product at the end. It was also quite neat to be able to see one of the end game bosses which I look forward to playing against in the future. The developers showed me a number of the different areas in the game which look fantastic and with a lot of the finishing touches still being put in, I can only imagine what they will look like when the game is released.

One of the things that surprised me most is the work that goes into the design of the many creatures. One of the creatures, for instance, has 42 layers of sound that together produce one of the creatures sounds. The animations of the mobs were also quite interesting to see getting worked on and it really was apparent that some of these guys have a background in movie and cartoon animation.

I was also able to sit down with the concept artists from all aspects of the game. I was surprised to see that all designers share the same vision of what the game is to look, sound and play like.It is amazing to see how the concept art transforms into parts of the actual game without losing any of the drawn details.

In addition to all this I was offered to read one of the quest lines which I must say looks quite interesting and is very fleshed out with plenty of details and back story to keep the players occupied and wrapped up in the story.

In all it was a fantastic experience and really opened my eyes to a lot of aspects of the game that I hadn’t really considered before. Even more than before I’m excited to play this game having first hand experienced at what lies hidden…

See you in the game soon!

Samir ‘Ojisan’ Shamma

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