Dolmen’s PAX East 2022 Preview has convinced me that the game is on the right track.
In December 2021, I had a chance to preview Dolmen, the upcoming sci-fi Soulslike game. I had quite a bit to say about the game, which you can check out here. Of course, that was just a preview as the game was still in development. A few months later, I had another chance to check out Dolmen at PAX East 2022. So, what’s changed? Well, quite a bit.
While one of the Massive Work Studio developers guided me through a playthrough of the latest build of Dolmen, I could tell that a few things were different. The UI was much cleaner than what I remembered from the earlier build. This also extended to the visuals of the game. Massive Work Studio has also added the ability to respawn defeated bosses, giving players the ability to fight those bosses repeatedly. When I noticed this, I stopped and thanked the developer for adding this. As someone who enjoys Soulslike games, this is something that we’ve been asking developers to include for quite some time. As for why this was added, I was told this was two-fold.
The first reason is that they received quite some feedback asking for this to be included. So they took this and used this to their advantage. Allowing players to respawn bosses to get items to craft boss weapons. The second reason is that they’re aware that players may want to perfect their ability to take down a boss instead barely defeating the boss by the skin of their teeth. This will let players practice mowing down bosses as much as they want. At the same time, getting some extra items as well.
Dolmen will also include a limited online coop. While games like Dark Souls let players join up to take down enemies and bosses, the session ends once the host or person who joins is killed. Being keenly aware of this, Massive Work Studio has decided to take things differently. Players will be able to activate a checkpoint. There, they can look for players to help take down bosses, and once the boss is defeated, that session ends. I did forget to ask if this session persists if the first attempt to take down a boss end fails or if it persists throughout. I’ll update this article once I get a response about this from Massive Work Studio.
We also spoke about how far Dolmen has come and how passionate the team is regarding working on the game. They also did want to acknowledge that they are reading the feedback on Twitter and on YouTube (yes, they saw our preview), and they did want to remind everyone that they are not Fromsoftware. While they love and respect Fromsoftware, they stressed that they are a much smaller team and won’t be able to release something as polished as a Dark Souls 3 or Elden Ring. Instead, the scope of Dolmen is similar to that of Mortal Shell, which was also developed by a smaller development team, Cold Symmetry. Still, they want everyone to enjoy Dolemn when it releases next month.
To cap things off, a new boss that wasn’t shown before PAX East 2022 was available to attempt to take down. I say attempt as I was told that no one has been able to take the boss down.
While it was easy enough to make my way to the boss, taking it down was a completely different story. This boss possessed a 360-degree swinging attack and the ability to charge into you, doing massive damage if it connected. I tried to take this boss down a few times, and while I started to get the strategy down, I found it was hard to concentrate on both the developer who was tossing lots of great info at me and the digital monster who was beating me like I owned it lunch money. After which, I decided I’ll wait until I could play Dolmen in the comfort of my home. That way, I can yell and scream without embarrassing myself.
Dolmen releases for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on May 20, 2022.
