The website of Eurogamer has released a preview of MMORPG Wakfu.

The details are as below:

Ankama Games has a reputation for being quietly effective. So much so that there's something almost virus-like about the way the French developer has insinuated itself into the online gaming world. But no-one's coughing up blood and dropping dead in the streets, coming down with a case of the Ankamas is far more likely to see you spending precious hours clicking away at whimsical and lavishly-illustrated browser-based MMOs that prove enduringly hard to turn off.

Dofus Kamas, Ankama's first title, surprised almost everybody by netting exactly the kind of regular subscriber numbers that you don't expect from a gentle, watercolour-styled game with some obscure character classes and nerdy, turn-based combat. The only people who don't appear surprised are Ankama themselves, who are now busy transforming their company into a cross-media giant although presumably a very artful, quietly effective giant.

With comics and cartoons in the pipeline, Ankama is also readying a new MMO Wakfu. Due for release later this year, it's a testament to the success of Dofus that when beta keys became available in June, there was a very polite and Gallic scramble to get hold of them. Not a pre-release scrum of Conan proportions, perhaps, but Ankama are presumably paying a fraction of what Funcom are when it comes to overheads.

Wakfu takes place in the same world as Dofus, but shifts the timeline a thousand years into the future, when the landscape has undergone many cataclysms, and people have evolved to a point where they're only marginally better at coming up with names for computer games. The plot concerns Ogrest, a powerful ogre who's gathered together the six Dofus, magical dragon eggs, if memory serves, of the first game, and flooded the world with tears as he pines for his lost love (a bit rich, seeing as he killed her in the first place).

Sure, it's pretty now, but how will it look when the crew from Something Awful have planted trees in the shape of Mr T everywhere?

What this means in game terms is that the world map of Dofus Kamas has now evolved into five islands. "The first island alone is the whole Dofus game world," explains Reynald Francois, Wakfu's lead designer, who added that gadding about in boats will now play a limited part in the game. The feature's still being worked on, however, so there's no word on whether there's the option for naval combat later down the line. Fingers crossed.