Gamescom: Ankama part 1

As far as I’m being told, at the E3 in 2004, Ankama had an extremely small stand in the very back of the expo. Located in France the company had 50 employees and were working on an MMORPG called Dofus. NiSuTe felt some kind of connection with the company and in the next five years we remained close contact. I am a Dofus player myself. Dofus keeps growing and growing and growing. But seeing this enormous stand of 200 square meters went beyond my wildest dreams. The company has almost 450 employees now and keeps getting bigger and bigger.

The stand was actually the first time that the audience could play a version of Dofus 2.0. Although only Incarnam was available, some people could play for 30 minutes long. The staff of ankama was present to ask questions to, and players could talk to their favourite moderators.

Dofus 2.0 is an audiovisual update which improved all music/audio and graphics/Interface. The update will be available in a few months and all characters will be imported to the new version at that point, so nothing gets lost. At this point Dofus is available in 8 languages which will be expanded to 11 in the future. 35 million people play the game, it’s the #1 MMORPG in france and is in the top 5 of best MMORPG’s worldwide. There is also a game called Dofus-arena where battling is the main purpose.

The story of Dofus takes place 1000 years before the events that occured during the times of a new era called Wakfu. Wakfu isn’t just a MMORPG. It’s an enormous story that it being told by a tv-series, trading card game, manga, game and so on. All this together makes it a great market in france and will be expanded to other countries as well, germany being first.

The best thing that Ankama brought to us on the gamescom is their new coöperation with Microsoft. Islands of Wakfu as it’s called will be taking place 1000 years BEFORE Dofus, and has a little explanation about the beginning of it all. The game will be available through Xbox live arcade. The game is being played by 2 characters. I can be played by one person, but the mode for 2 players is much betters and requiers a lot of coöperation. We had the chance to play the game for a while, and I got to say, it’s really amusing to have this kind of adventure/mission style of game, Ankama style. The game will have a great storyline telling a lot about the previous world. The game is planned for release in Q4 2009.

As you can see, Ankama keeps improving everything they do. Ankama doesn’t use external companies for evything they do; everything happens in their own studio and that makes it a special company. Be sure to check out what they bring, and stay tuned for part 2 of this coverage. It will be an interview done with Samuel, one of the creators of dofus. In the meanwhile, check out some of these pictures we made during gamescom.