‘Demise’: The Little Legacy RPG That Wouldn’t Go Away

The addiction begins…

The story began, for Decklin, (the Twisted Dwarf), in early 1997. Shortly after returning from a stint of several years playing with real trains in Belgium and the U.K. while based in Canada, the above-mentioned humanoid found himself in San Francisco “by the bay”. With time to kill between night shifts the old dial-up was primed and a search of game sites led to a link to a demo download of an intriguing ‘old school’ rpg called Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol and a Beta version of its offspring Mordor 2: Darkness Awakening.

Over the next few years the Twisted Dwarf lurked in the shadows of the game forums as Mordor 2 went through several iterations, briefly morphing into “Infinite Worlds” before the Gold version of its public release as Demise: Rise of the Ku’Tan in late 1999 and early 2000.

Decklin became more involved with the players via the forums as the original game developer David Allen went through a number of corporate identities during this period. VB Designs in the early days, then briefly with Interplay during the Infinite Worlds transition and then with Artifact Entertainment who ultimately released the Gold version in co-operation with Marv Heston of IPC Software. Allen’s involvement with Artifact Entertainment was relatively short-lived however and after leaving A-E he formed a company called Pharaoh Productions which published a ‘competing’ download only version of the game.

Unfortunately, all the various corporate shenanigans resulted in the game sites and forums periodically ‘disappearing’. The community of players managed to keep a significant portion of technical issues, findings and FAQ’s more-or-less together but eventually the community divided between players who preferred the original A-E version and those who followed the somewhat incompatible Pharaoh Productions version.

As a few more years went by, the split between the original developer and original publisher, then between various partners, was clearly damaging the game’s prospects. Allen himself shifted his attentions to Horizons, all but abandoning Demise. Decklin, with aid from other Demise players, helped preserve some of the original archived forum records and set up alternate forums as places of contact when the ‘official’ forums were unavailable. A long standing Alpha Tester of the original game provided a copy of the Master Server which was subsequently run from Decklin’s Domain servers after the official site went down. The original boxed set was still available from IPC Software and Decklin’s Domain helped in marketing both Mordor and Demise: RotK boxed sets, eventually purchasing the bulk of the boxed sets of both titles from IPC Software. When David Allen subsequently offered the Intellectual Property of Mordor and Demise for sale, Decklin’s Domain made an offer and completed the purchase of the worldwide rights from MakeItSo LLC by the end of December 2005.

Unfortunately, by that time, the original game had been hacked by individuals based in Slovenia and the Netherlands, and it became widely available on bit torrent sites – this single criminal act made it virtually unsellable. In a period of six months where barely 20 legitimate copies of the download version were purchased world-wide, each of a few of some sampled sites showed several hundred copies of the hacked game had been downloaded. This kind of despicable theft included on-line exposure of the games encryption and decryption and multiplayer server encoding and decoding.

How Ascension came into being…

When the Mordor and Demise I.P. was transferred, an expansion known as Ascension had begun. In 2006 it was barely out of the starting gate and after the change in ownership the original players involved were finding real life getting in the way of fun, so Decklin at that time had to take over the development. Although many of the fundamental elements have been retained, Demise: Ascension, on release six years later, has become far more of a Volume II than an expansion of the original.

Within Ascension, the original game and dungeon remain essentially intact however the geography of the surrounding land has been expanded to the North and East. The playable area has more than doubled compared to the original game and the storyline has been fleshed out and advanced with ten major Quests that begin after the original Missions have been completed.

In hindsight, it might not have been a wise decision to continue the bug fixing and expansion development in the same programming languages as the then existing game, namely Visual Basic 6.0 and VC++ 6.0. It took much longer to complete work on the new dungeon-scape and to fix certain long-standing bugs than first thought. Ascension was in Alpha testing for more than four years and was only released to Open Beta by March, 2011.

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PLAYABLE DEMO OF DEMISE: ASCENSION

To claim your Demise: Ascension demo, you simply need to head to the following page: decklinsdemise.com/IGMdemo

Once there enter the following code into the “Promo Code” field: QRH-2732874972-GNGM

Now fill out the rest of the form with your information and then click the button at the bottom to request your demo.

NOTE: The demo will last for 30 days or for 21 ‘plays’ before expiring.
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Under the Hood…

Demise was designed in a 45 x 45 cell format with a little more than 30 levels. Ascension incorporates that original dungeon in its South West quadrant and is in a 90 x 90 x 36 format at the present time. For those of you who have played the original masterful role playing games such as The Bard’s Tale Series, Might & Magic, Wizardry and the TSR Gold Boxes you will be familiar with doors that require keys, game areas that only open up as the game progresses through its storyline, occasional puzzles, Non Player Characters and other Gizmos – the original Demise: Rise of the Ku’Tan had none of these.

Ascension, on the other hand has all of these and more. Music was especially commissioned for the game and the composer Troy Sterling Nies has composed more than thirty minutes of new music, many pieces are associated with and written for specific areas in the expanded game. The Quiet River in the North West, the Devil’s Kitchen in the North East and Erik’s Folly in the South East are three of these. The first time a player enters these areas, the theme music for the area will play and then be added to the playlist.

Ascension dungeon design is significantly more ‘3D’ than the original. Taking a few cues from the original game, the areas to the North, North East and East flesh out the surrounding open countryside, with plenty of surprises in store. Changes to code allow for the design of areas that require specific guild membership or a specific item or companion in order to pass through – in addition to doors being locked (or unlocked) once certain storyline events have been completed. Once outside, there are streams where the current can knock you off your feet, windy ledges where you could literally be blown away and sometimes some very unpleasant areas for the inexperienced adventurer.

Demise: RotK was already well balanced and significantly complex. The character you create to play has a choice of three alignments, nine races and twelve guilds. There is a comprehensive magic system and twenty different classes of monsters set against you.

With Ascension increasing the number of monsters to 600 and with more than 600 items, considerable work was expended in re-balancing monster characteristics in the deeper portions of the dungeon and particular attention was paid to a thorough review and revision of weapons. The monster fighting system is also revised, not necessarily a benefit to the player’s character however…Ascension’s monsters fight in more realistic ways, for all magic users cast only when they are able and no monster will waste a cast or a breath attack if you are out of range.

Unique in many ways, Ascension is also, as with the original game, playable solo – or in a multiplayer mode, on a home network or over the internet. A game server is included and you may play on your or another server with up to 15 friends.

And some of us meet again…

The Demise community has been around now for over ten years, and the hope expressed in 2006 that the players from both the Artifact Entertainment and Pharaoh Productions camps would return to a common playing field seems to have been realized during the Open Beta and Pre-Release of Ascension. Helped in part by the addition of a character importer that converts player characters from either old format to the new, we have had several hundred old friends return…but sadly, not all.

Chuck – a long-time steady Demise player – sent me an email the year before last explaining that he had a terminal illness and asking if I could send him a preview copy of Ascension. I was wrestling with an annoying debugging issue at the time and it was several weeks before I had a stable build. I emailed back to give him the good news. I got a response the next day from his son to tell me his father had passed literally hours before my email had arrived. If any of Chuck’s family read this: as requested, Asgardel is ‘in the game’ and he plays a significantly helpful role.

More information on Demise: Ascension can be found over on the game’s official website.

This was written by Decklin (the Twisted Dwarf) for Issue 21 of The Indie Game Magazine, which can be purchased right here.