On March 16th, the Ankama team will release an update to their turn based combat MMO Wakfu.  Last week MMORPG conducted an interview with Ankama while taking part in an exclusive playthrough of the new content for Mount Zinit Chapter 2.  The members of the Ankama team on hand for the demonstration were Jérôme "Azael" Echalar the lead game designer, Julien "The Turtle" Derveeuw lead developer,  and David Talmat the marketing manager. 

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The world of Wakfu takes place 1000 years after the events in Dofus.  While Wakfu is currently only an MMORPG in most of the world, in France Wakfu is a cartoon as well as a manga.  Sandboxers should rejoice!  Ankama hopes to capture your hearts.  The Ankama team aims to create the world as a background, and the tools to play with, but for players to drive their own individual stories.  One of the way players can have a major impact on the world of Wakfu is through the political system.  Recently France held elections and selected a new President.  To coincide with this event Ankama ran a special promotion inside the world of Wakfu.  In November the North American servers can also expect to see a special event tied in with the upcoming US Presidential election.  Wakfu is a free to play game with premium content only available to subscribers.  The ability to take part in elections is a premium service.  The reason behind this is twofold.  The first is that it would be too easy to make a number of free accounts and taint the elections, the second is the Ankama team believes that only subscribers should have the right to vote sense they have the most vested into the world of Wakfu. 

      
Exclusive First Look at Mt. Zinit Chapter 2 Boss

Free account holders have news to be happy about.  The team is hard at work on additional content for free to play players.  They plan to increase the content available on Astrub.  Also free accounts can currently travel anywhere in the world, even to the new Mt. Zinit areas, they just cannot take part in any of the battles.  You can get an exclusive first look at one of the boss encounters in the Mt. Zinit chapter 2 area at 17:20 into the video.  At 20:40 into the video you can see a new escort quest that will be added in Wednesday's content update.

Rogue Placing Bombs

Julien "The Turtle" Derveeuw also provided us with a nice demonstration of the Rogue class.  The rogue has a number of abilities.  The rogue is capable of medium length ranged DPS but they can also get up front and personal and do melee DPS.  The major characteristic that sets the rogue apart from the crowd, however, is their ability to place bombs on the battle field.  These bombs are set on a timer and have different abilities based on their elemental affiliation.  For example the Fire bomb does AOE damage while the Air bomb can does an AOE silence.  You can see the rogue in action at the 53:00 minute mark.