Dreamfall
From TLJwiki
We're extremely happy to announce that hell has indeed frozen over, and that preproduction has finally begun on the second chapter in The Longest Journey saga!
With this announcement, Funcom put joy into many a gamer's heart as they finally announced the follow-up to 1999's adventure hit The Longest Journey. Originally codenamed TLJ:Static, it was later announced as 'Dreamfall: The Longest Journey'.
Dreamfall departed from the point-and-click interface of traditional adventure games, and was termed a 3D action adventure by the company, using German developer Spinor's Shark3D graphics engine. Originally slated for release in mid 2005, the release date for Dreamfall slipped, and localized versions of the game for PC and XBox were released slowly over the course of the second and third quarters of 2006. The North American distributor of the both versions is Aspyr Media. Additionally, Funcom produced Norwegian and English versions of a limited edition of the game for PC, with alternate packaging, an EP containing the four tracks from Norwegian artist Magnet and an artbook. (The orchestral soundtrack was later released separately, available from the Funcom online store only.)
Tornquist has also started an indepth analysis of the development of Dreamfall on his blog, known as 'Dreamfallen'.
Given the circumstances at the end of Dreamfall, there have been many rumours about a sequel. According to comments by Ragnar Tornquist, Dreamfall was planned as part of a larger arc, which is in turn part of the TLJ saga. This was confirmed on the 1st of March, 2007 with the announcement of seed funding for the episodic Dreamfall Chapters.
Dreamfall content is allowed at the wiki, however, try to keep The Longest Journey topics specific to The Longest Journey - keep them clean of Dreamfall-related material. Dreamfall entries may reference back to The Longest Journey, but entries about The Longest Journey need to stay as exclusively about that game as possible. Use title headings to divide the content.
Starting points:
Joan D. Vinge's Dreamfall (1996)
Dreamfall is the third novel in Joan D. Vinge's 'Cat' trilogy, beginning with Psion (1982) and followed by Catspaw (1988). The series follows the character Cat, a street dweller from the Human Federation's hub-world of Ardattee so-named due to his deep green eyes with slitted pupils. After a life of somehow surviving day by day Cat discovers that he is a Psion gifted with telepathy, a genetic quirk bestowed by his being half Hydran (of which his eyes are another legacy). The Hydrans are a race of aliens who possess the full array of psionic powers (telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation), and whose civilisation passed its apex before Humans reached space. Already in decline, the Hydrans have since been all but wiped out by the Humans. They live in reservations at best and squalor at worst, and cannot fight the Humans as they have evolved an unfortunate psychic feedback connected to death that makes any killing a murder-suicide. They are so genetically similar to Humans, however, that cross-breeding is possible. The offspring always possess some psionic ability.
The dreamfall of the title concerns the subject of Cat's research in the novel: now trained as a xenoarchaeologist he travels to the Hydrans' homeworld of Refuge to study the elusive "cloud-whales". These creatures were left to the Hydrans and Humans by a race long-gone called the "Creators" by the Humans, and are flocks of millions of hive-minded creatures that float across the skies within clouds. These psionic beings rain the detritus of their thoughts - called "dreamfall" (like 'rainfall') - which collects in dense, chemical-rich reefs on the landscape.
The similarities between the 'Cat' trilogy and both TLJ and DF are many. Cat grew up in the subterranean slums of Ardattee's capital Quarro called, as the new city is literally built on top of it, "Oldcity": much like Oldtown, the Magic Ghetto of DF where the Azadi's unwanted are quarantined. Like April, Cat has (SPOILER) lost his psionic Gift after suffering mental anguish at the end of the first novel.
