The Chronicles of Spellborn official site has been updated with their latest Artistic Developer Journal.  This week to focus is on their gaming influences, the little details, and how they make the game fun.

Last weekend, our lead art Jelmer and myself where strolling around through the Outlands. Playing for well over a year, we had both only just become eligible to enter World of Warcraft’s expansion. Anyone who’s played Wow towards a high level knows that after a certain point you walk into a dungeon, do something there, then walk into the same dungeon again to do a little more and you repeat the process a few times. The end-game routine has definitely set around this point in the game, but all of that came to an end and the Outlands re-invigorated our passion for playing WoW. The setting and the quests, the creatures and the difficulty made the game a lot of fun to play again. As we where killing a few monsters on our third or fourth quest, suddenly a big head rose from behind a hill, increasing in size as it came towards us….those Fell-Reavers are a sight to behold indeed. Given how (comparably) ancient the technology used is, they know how to set a mood and atmosphere far better than any “shader” effect could ever hope to achieve.

Playing games that are fun, makes me want to do some work for Spellborn… That’s just how it works with me. It doesn’t matter if it’s Mercenaries or The Darkness on the console or World of Warcraft. So after our evening’s play session and a good night sleep, Saturday was devoted to playing Spellborn and doing a little “fun” work for it.

After finding my old character whipped I had to go through the beginners quests again, which took me a two to three hours of playtime to get to level 3 while having a few good laughs along the way.

Read the full journal here.