Arokhs Lair – A Drakan fan site

I just heard Surreal Software has been closed back in June by its parent company Warner Bros with employees being split up and moved to other WB studios Snowblind and Monolith. Their games that were in development have been cancelled with ‘This is Vegas’ being the biggest loss. Of course this definitely means no Drakan 3 so to those people who keep emailing asking if there is a 3rd game, sorry there isn’t. The only thing that might happen is the former surreal staff leave WB and set up their own studio and make a similar game although in the current economic climate this may not be for a while. Rip Surreal and good luck to Stuart, Alan, Heron and others that worked there. If any of ex surreal employees read this please visit the forum and say hello.

Someone dropped me an email recently to say he has found a workaround for no music when running the game on Vista. The fix can be found on the tips and help page. Thanks to S. Kobold for this.

Also a Drakan fan under the name of Wan Dragonica sent me a link to some fan art hosted over at deviantart. It’s not possible to put it on this web site so here is a link to it. Drakan-Arokh-Rynn-130054506.

Finally, it is now 10 years this month the game was released so a massive get together is being organised. A lot of the old players will be there so please check the forums and the event calendar for more information on the upcoming multiplayer event. There are a couple of threads where you can talk to old friends and new. If you can make it and Drakan works on your current PC, please come along!

Please go to www.drakanbonded.com for further information and to register your participation in the tournament.

I have now been able to get some more web space to host almost all Drakan files. Single player levels were previously hosted on my ISP web space, they have now been moved to this server. I am still restricted to the same amount of bandwidth so I will see how this goes. Multiplayer levels are hosted on my home server and will hopefully be moved to this server next month for faster downloads. Bookmark http://levels.arokhslair.net which will redirect to wherever files are hosted eliminating the need to update bookmarks if server / web site is changed.

Due to the demise of planetdrakan.com some levels and Drakan files listed on this web site can no longer be downloaded. Andrey’s server also seems to have a problem unless the password has been changed. With his server now being the only place where most Drakan files are hosted this is a problem. I have some single player levels on this web site but due to bandwidth & webspace restrictions I am unable to host much more than this. I will look at updating the links / password for Andrey’s server and the possibility of hosting more files later this week.

First post of the year as there hasn’t been much to post about in the drakan community but however things are picking up. A couple of indie developers are looking into making dragon themed games and Shelim who did the 445++ patch (below) has made a Drakan themed classic scrolling shoot-em up where you fly a dragon against an onslaught of other dragons over a sieged town. For more info please see this post on the forums.

Testing of Shelim’s unofficial 445++ patch has been completed and final tweaks to the code have been made so this is now being released to the Drakan community. Some undetected bugs / problems may be present so if any are encountered please let either me or Shelim know over on the forums. Please do read the installation notes thoroughly before reporting problems.

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Shelim over on the forums is working on a couple of patches for Drakan single player. One fixes the crashing experienced with geforce 6 / 7 / 8 series graphics cards on Windows XP on some systems and the other fixes the crash when exiting Alwarren. The geforce crash fix has already been released but its still undergoing testing and the Alwarren crash is still in development but should be available soon. These will be ready to download from this site as soon as testing is complete. Up to now players had to start the game in developer mode to get around the crashing at game start up and had to download a save to get around the Alwarren problem. These patches however will probably invalidate your existing saves so you will have to start a new game. I need to confirm this…

Many thanks to Shelim for his hard work for the Drakan community!