While at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, News Manager Keith Cross had the opportunity to speak to the folks from Lockpick Entertainment about Dreamlords: the Reawakening, an MMORTS that is waking people up to a relatively unexplored branch of the MMO genre.

One of my first interviews at the GDC this year was with the team from Dreamlords. Dreamlords is one of those games that it's good to pay attention to if you're a fan of MMOs because it's doing something different from the mainstream that will probably make it into the mainstream a few years down the road. If you're unfamiliar with Dreamlords, it's a fantasy MMO from independent Swedish developer, Lockpick Entertainment. If you're wondering what sets Dreamlords apart from the rest of the pack of fantasy MMOs, it's a real time strategy MMO.

So far, developers of MMORPGs and virtual worlds have made up the bulk of the developers who have capitalized on making games in persistent online worlds. As the MMO genre grows and diversifies, many games have found success beyond the standard fantasy RPG. Fantasy is arguably less dominant every year, FPS style game-play is seeing a rise in implementation, but the realm of MMORTS is still more or less virgin territory. Now that I think about it, I don't see why the idea of MMORTSs is still an underdeveloped portion of the gaming market. The concept of transferring an RTS to an MMO space isn't really that complicated. The basic idea behind Dreamlords was explained by describing the formula for an RTS then adding a few MMO ingredients. In an RTS you start with nothing, you build a base, attack your enemies, and finish the game. On the next map you again start with very little, and lather, rinse, repeat. Lockpick wanted to shake up that cycle, so they added the MMO element of making the world persistent.

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