Daggerdale: The Future of D&D Games?

What's in the game now are four selectable characters: the human fighter, the elven rogue, the halfling wizard and the dwarven cleric.

Ha ha. The dwarf is unique because he has a Chinese accent.

Ha ha, he doesn't. Those are the playable characters. You can choose to have multiple fighters, you can choose multiple wizards.

We streamlined the characters by marrying the class and the race together. But once you've picked your character it's entirely up to you how you want to develop that character through feats, additional armour, weapons, powers... There are three levels of powers.

Oh extremely important. The way that we have our Dungeon Master set up... Loot is basically everywhere. You're able to pick up loot through performing quests, engaging in combat in enemies and just general exploration. The idea of moving the player forward through micro rewards is one of the things that happens through the entire experience.

Right now we don't have that as a focus in Daggerdale. The game, being the first release, is mainly focused on co-operative play, which is the hallmark of Dungeons & Dragons.

You will be able to carry characters forward.

Once players are in the game world they're free to chat and trade items. There's a trading system that's in there; a merchant system that you can go to different towns, different areas and talk to different merchants and NPCs and pick up allies as you go along as well. The world is living, breathing and there's an economy there as well.

The player will be doing a lot of different things. Much like a lot of great tales it starts of small but it quickly blooms into something much much larger than players thought. Players start in the Mines of Tethyama amidst a group of dwarfs - a mining town that's been left to decay due to goblin raids.

The beginning part is players trying to get an understanding of where they're at, trying to get a bearing of what their main goal is - basically thwarting the evil Rezlus and his masterplan. But the very first thing is this town of dwarven miners being a shambles and players have to immediately ally themselves with these people and solve their problems, boost them up and help them through.

NPCs can join the group at specific points of the adventure.

Daggerdale should be out spring time.

Not at this time. Largely that is being planned out by Atari.

Yep! We are right now preparing a demo level that can be downloaded and players can get a taste of what it's like.