After Wakfu: The Guardians, players tackle the resurrection of a forgotten Ankama game: Dofus Arena. The “Returns” project has also just completed a first “alpha” version, challenging the test servers!
DOFUS Arena returns in 2022
Forgotten but not by all, Dofus Arena is a purely PvP MMORPG developed by Ankama, released in closed beta in 2006 then officially in 2010. With gameplay still turn-based, it took a different view of Krosmoz combat by allowing the player to control multiple characters. An important focus was also put on the constitution of teams with different classes led by “the coach”.
Despite a small community, the game lacked popularity and closed in 2014. By ignoring nostalgia, Dofus Arena blamed the blow of a concept arriving too early in the industry and its unsuitable economic model, drifting on the P2W towards its end. Nevertheless, its latest version remained very popular and was the subject of many requests for return, to which Ankama remained more or less closed depending on the live.
From Ashes to Arena Returns
In the video game industry, the resurrection of a project is not always well regarded and depends greatly on the company concerned. For Ankama, the community was able to observe a rather positive behavior via Wakfu: The Ashes Guardians. Indeed, the return of another MMO dead and buried, went from a simple tolerance to an official relay very recently, giving a boost of motivation to another team of fans. The official account of Dofus on Twitter was quick to relaunch the machine.
Obviously, Dofus Arena Returns had already existed for a few months. A small team was indeed organizing to set up a game server. If it encounters technical challenges, the return of the MMO seems already well underway.
Recently we jumped on something we thought was difficult, secret!
Aristocat, team member Dofus Arena Returns
How is the return of an MMO going?
Bringing an online game back online happens on two major fronts: the customer and the waiter. The development teams do not have access to the source code and only have lines to analyze to speculate whether it will work on a player’s machine or the response from Ankama. By looking at the network frames, an important work of deobfuscation takes place.
Recall : A client is the application on your computer. A server is a program on another machine, remotely.
Unlike Dofus with its “Swiss cheese” engine allowing almost easy decompilation and reproduction after so many years of existence, the developers of Returns are starting from afar. Everything is to be done, including utilities to convert, for example, proprietary file extensions into usable objects. Fortunately, they can be based on work from Wakfu. Indeed, if Dofus Arena does not share its code in any way with the MMO from which it partly takes its name, it is much closer to the little brother, both with a Java client and similar elements.
In short, it is not enough to make 4 commands in a terminal to bring back a game. It is a question of recreating a “false server” so that the client, slightly adapted, communicates with it. In a way, we could call it a “private server”, but with a much nobler purpose. The Returns team even rejects the term, attributing it instead to the counterfeiting of games still in production, such as Dofus 2 or Retro. Thus, it guarantees the absence of microtransactions, such as Wakfu: The Guardians – Ashes.
Our goal is to offer a free and open Arena Confrontation server, for nostalgic players (including us), in order to be able to replay this game that has marked us so much. […] This project is non-commercial, based on a game that has been abandoned and without updates for almost 10 years, it’s a fan project for fans.
Dofus Arena Returns team on their Discord server
Crash test session
All this did not prevent the return of Dofus Arena a few days ago. To test a very first alpha of its server, the Returns team offered a “stress test” from October 16 to 18, 2000 to assess the performance of the code developed. A great opportunity for players to rediscover the latest version of the MMO, cut in 2014 even when the Masqueraiders were still in development.
Despite the absence of certain features such as combat, the partial grand reopening was a success. The players are there and the server has survived, giving a positive balance to this nostalgic experience.
However, no opening date is currently known. The Dofus Arena Returns project remains in its early stages and will continue its development, particularly in terms of relationships. Indeed, the developers seek to establish a link with Ankama, in addition to a simple tolerance, in order to perpetuate this rather unexpected return by the community.