A new game development studio has just announced its presence. Dark Vale Games, based in Carlsbad, California and composed of a number of former team members from THQ, Sony Online, LucasArts and others, is working on their first project. It is a new entry in the already pretty crowded PC free-to-play genre called Forge.
The fantasy themed game is supposed to be a hybrid of the PvP game style found in a lot of MMOs combined with the fast pace of a multiplayer first person shooter title. Players will have their choice of five "warriors" classes, each with their own special abilities along with some kind of ally.
Timothy Alvis, the COO/CTO of Dark Vale Games, states:
We’ve taken inspiration from some of the greatest pure shooters of all time, like the original Half Life and Unreal, and folded in the best parts of MMO PvP from games like World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot. The result is a multiplayer experience that is unlike anything else on the market, an experience people have been asking for, even expecting, and we plan to make it a reality.
You can check out a teaser trailer for Forge above this post. The game itself uses Unreal Engine 3 as its basis. Dark Vale is getting help in developing the title from two other studios, SuperGenius and Digital Confectioners. Forge will be released later in 2012.
Source: Forge website