GC08: Hero’s Journey Impressions

Editor Siam Choudhury took a look at Hero’s Journey from developers Simutronics Corp and based on the company’s own MMO platform, the HeroEngine. Read his impressions of the game after the jump.

On the first day of GC08 I had the opportunity to see Hero’s Journey. The live demo was done by David Whatley, President and CEO of Simutronics Corp, the makers of Hero’s Journey and HeroEngine.
The demo started off by showing us the character selection screen, a fortress where the camera pans in an out of different rooms and areas to show you your characters, going through chambers and gardens. Although this doesn’t affect gameplay and some might think it takes too long to move between characters, I found it to be a nice detail.

Before picking one of the already created characters, David guided us through character creation. The character creation is very detailed but the UI for it looked unintuitive with David assuring me that the interface was being revamped to allow for more ease of use. Character generation offers the usual options but with enough sliders and options to keep even the most picky character creators busy. There are sliders for everything and even aspects such as hairstyle has been broken into several parts to allow for more customization. Additional customizable elements are makeup and facial details.

Another small but nice details was that not only doesn’t hair break out of worn hats and helmets, the hairstyle will temporarily change to one that fits the item worn, so a done up hairstyle would be let down when wearing a helmet for example.

In Hero’s Journey you can also customize your clothing extensively at character creation and your character can keep those clothes throughout the game as the game doesn’t force you to change your appearance by putting benefits on items. Hero’s Journey instead uses a system of “wyr”, tokens that can be placed into abilities, items and even guilds to enhance them further. When using them on abilities and spells, the affects of those spells and even the appearance can change. This system of wyr, David says, allows for improving their characters without forcing them to change their appearance. Wyrs can also be part of sets and if your character puts together a set of wyrs they will receive an additional bonus beyond that of the sum of the individual effects.

While David was running our female character through the world, he told me about the class system. It’s a dual class system where you first pick a role for your character and then pick a class from within that role, the combination of which will result in a third class which is the effective class for your character. There are three main categories, warrior, ranged and support and within each category are 3 classes.

The game also has something called player services, abilities limited to one per character which help other players. Examples of such abilities are lock picking and identifying. As no character can have more than one player service ability, the developers hope that these sort of player skills will encourage interaction between players. Locks will need to be picked in order to open chests and players with unidentified wyrs will have to have them identified by a player with the appropriate skill to be able to use the wyr’s effects.

The game overall has nice graphics and although not in the highest technical league, the game should be able to compete with games coming out this year or next with its atmospheric graphics and very nice particle effects. The UI of the game was also refreshing by being familiar without immediately reminding too much about the interface in World of Warcraft.

What seemed most interesting about Hero’s Journey, something that is more likely to interest players than either the number of classes or customization, is the branched quest system. The game’s quests can not only be completed, they can also be failed. The former will lead you down one path and the latter will lead you down another. Quests also involves options for the players, our demo character received a quest to deliver a crystal to an NPC and could choose between handing it over, refusing to hand it over and faking knowledge about said crystal. As we opted to not hand the crystal to the NPC, he summoned monsters and killed our character.

Hero’s Journey looks like a game with potential and since there is plenty of development to be done and still some time before the game is released; executive vice president Neil Harris told us that the game would likely hit the market around 2 years after it has found a publisher, something they were attempting at doing at this year’s GCDC.