DracinMorte announced

Gregory Johns writes in to tell me about DracinMorte, a gothic 3D action RPG in development by Mad Labyrinth Studios.

The premise:

The story revolves around the main character who is a Necromancer King that runs one factions of many in the underworlds. The other factions band together and remove him from his throne leaving his powerless and near death. The souls that he cares for being a king and a necromancer save his life and offer him aide throughout the game. He now has to forge new alliances with new undead summons, who are your companions throughout the game, as he fights to regain his throne.

Design-wise, it seems that the lion’s share of the thought lavished on DracinMorte so far has been focused on skill systems. Skills feature Diablo 2-style “synergy,” in that points put into lower-tier skills will still effect marginal improvement in higher-tier versions of that skill. Disarming traps gives you materials that can be used in crafting, and quests will have branching paths based upon dialog choices–and certain dialog-focused skills, such as Sense Motive, will give you more options in that arena.

The game can be played in both first and third person modes. The pre-alpha combat demo mostly just shows it in third person, however:

Dracinmorte is on Kickstarter; the developers assure me they’ll be sticking with development (albeit much more slowly) if the campaign fails. Given the game’s enormous $120,000 funding goal, I think it’s good that they have a Plan B in place.

Mad Labyrinth hope to have the game out for Windows, Mac and Linux by late summer 2016. In the meantime, you can play the game’s pre-alpha demo to try it out yourself.