I’ve often said the journey of a thousand miles begins with character creation, and in the case of the Pandaren demo at BlizzCon that’s a very limited beginning. Since female pandas are currently just male pandas with labels over their heads that say “I’m a Girl”, the only real option I had was deciding my Monk’s name….the panda came to life in the Pandaren starting zone of The Wandering Isle, so named because it’s built on top of a gigantic turtle. The first thing I did was type ‘/dance’. Sadly, nothing happened.

One of the things that will be most startling is that there isn’t an auto-attack.

Where other melee World of Warcraft characters can simply click on an enemy to automatically begin attacking, the Monk can only initiate an attack by using a skill or ability. It feels odd at first, but later in the demo I began to get skills that helped shed light on the reasoning behind the choice. Around level four or five I earned a darkness-fueled kicking skill that replenished a point of dark power if I killed an enemy with it. That’s a task made much easier when you don’t have to worry about an auto attack futzing with your rhythm. I imagine Monk players will be extremely busy during combat as they get up in levels; at least the good ones will.

The quests feature a distinctly Asian flavored backdrop and includes zaney quests like chasing monkies, herding bunnies and generally rolling around like a Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. With the Chi resource, Crescente writes that the first 10 levels feel similar to a rogue but once you hit level 10 you get to choose whether you’ll be a tank, healer or dps. Blizzard has stated that when you go into healing mode your Chi will turn into mana and vice versa. In addition to choosing your spec at 10, you’ll also be choosing whether you’re a Horde or Alliance.

Source: Kotaku

• 1 M3 Stuart Premium Tank
• 1 day premium access
• 300 gold

Here is the official description of the tank:

The first US light tank that saw extensive service in WWII. The M3 Stuart has reasonable armor for its class and the upgraded 37mm guns are fast and accurate. Speed and stealth are the keys to survival for light tanks and the M3 excels in both.

The giveaway is a straight-up first-come-first-serve deal and the codes for the promotion is available from our Facebook page over at facebook.com/TheMMOGamer!

Instructions on how to redeem your code once you have received it:

1. Follow the link to the game’s website.
2. Press Play button to register the new account.
3. Fill in all the necessary information, type the code you have received in the field “Invite code”.
4. Validate your account by replying to the confirmation letter sent to your e-mail.
5. Download and install the game client.
6. Launch World of Tanks and enjoy your bonus content!

* The invite code is valid only for the registration of new World of Tanks accounts and cannot be used for existing accounts. The Invite code is single-use only.

**The invite code is valid for EU and NA servers

Topics include the decision to bring Gods & Heroes back from the dead, differentiating yourself from a crowded online gaming market, and why the game may turn out to be more like Battlefield 2 than WoW…

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: To start us off, can you tell our readers a little about  Heatwave Interactive and what you do there?

Anthony Castoro: My name is Anthony Castoro, I am the co-founder and CEO of Heatwave Interactive. We started Heatwave right at the beginning of 2007 by bootstrapping the company.

We did some consulting with MTV and some other game companies to fund our activities, but after 6 months or so we realised we needed more capital to do what we wanted to do, so we went out there and raised $7.5 million from a venture fund called Syncom Venture Partners in the D.C. area.

We really started the company to address a couple of things. Firstly, my partner Donn Clendenon, who co-founded the company, he is a long-term entrepreneur with a lot of success and several exits, and he had done online games.

I had started a game company directly out of college and learned a lot, but I didn’t have success with that, so I wanted to go into the corporate world and find out what it took.

And over fifteen years I learned a couple things: one, it’s really common for game companies of all sizes to get started with a project and not know why, not have good reasons for doing it, not have the resources to do it, not have the right plan.

Online games in particular are very powerful things, and the nice thing about them is they don’t have the same economic issues as console games, they have a long tail, if you do something even for a small group of people you can do very well.

EVE online is a great example of it, as was Ultima Online what, thirteen years ago now?

We started the company with that in mind, and also, the really great games are popular enough that they can make mainstream new IPs very successful.

Everything we do is also cross-media, it’s designed to be a television show, be a movie, be a comic-book. Not that we’re going to focus on that but you just should, there’s no reason not to do it.

The MMO Gamer: What drew you to the Gods & Heroes IP in particular?

Anthony Castoro: I had seen Gods & Heroes as a publisher when I was at Codemasters, and we all thought it was  pretty interesting.

I actually knew one of the co-founders, Chris McKibben, because he had been the general manager of Origin Systems back in the day when I was a lowly QA guy. Actually, I think when I started as a game designer at Origin he was still there.

I was interested in it because it’s fantasy, but not high fantasy, it was mythology. That was a niche that hadn’t been addressed, and everyone knows Roman and Greek mythology, so I thought it was a really smart move in terms of what product to make in this very crowded market.

I was really sad when Perpetual went under, I think it was a really cool idea, they had some issues obviously, but everyone has issues, and if they’d been able to figure those out I believe it would have been a very popular game.

The MMO Gamer: One of the really interesting aspects of Gods & Heroes when details first started circulating was the idea of the player controlling one hero and a squad of mythological allies.

What are your plans for that aspect of the game?

Anthony Castoro: I think the Minion System is here to stay, and if anything it should be blown out a little bit more. Since that idea came out there have been other games like Grado Espada, and to some degree Star Trek Online had minions, but I agree, in addition to the setting the Minion System was one of the biggest unique things.

That and some of the things they were doing with the combat. They hadn’t quite finished figuring out what was going to happen with combat, but the finishing moves and the tandem combat action was pretty cool.

We’re definitely focused on the Minion System, ideally making it more important and more fun. I think they have the basics there, and that will be a good place to iterate.

There are other things we’re going to do that will change it a little bit. Heatwave has a mass-market appeal take, so some things we’ll do with the IP, if you go to the website you can even see, the one little piece of art we’ve got there is in a different style, a little more dramatic, a little less clean.

There are some small things, overall, the look and feel of the game is still good, pretty competitive, but the characters themselves I think need some work, so we’ll probably do some work on the models and the customization available there just to make sure it stands up for a couple of years after its intended release.

The MMO Gamer: So what hard data can you give us in terms of release dates and monetization models?

Anthony Castoro: Our goal is to release it in 2011, but if there’s one thing people know about this business it’s that you have to release the game when it’s ready.

We’re spending a few months right now playing the game – it’s running in the office – getting to understand it, what the tools are, what kind of shape they are in, bringing in some former team members and a lot of new people.

We’re going to spend at least three months figuring out what we’ve got before we start talking about how we’re going to get where we’re going to go, doing some market research, and then we have to figure out if we can get the game into open beta twelve months later, what we can keep, what we can improve, and what needs to be new.

That also includes the business model. Subscription versus free-to-play with microtransactions is a big question, and ideally after we do some homework and we see how the audience feels we can make that decision.

I think free-to-play is far more viable than it was even 12 months ago, and so when you’re forecasting eighteen months in the future that might be the case but if you’re going to do a free-to-play game it has to be good, it has to be designed for free to play.

So that’s all a big consideration for us given the time. DDO has done it with some success and they’re probably a really good model of how to do that, they’ve done a really good job.

Continued on next page…

Updated 2: More photos from Day 1 added. //Siam

13:30: First batch of photos from Steve. //Siam

In an extensive half-hour long interview the three discussed how BioWare’s traditional role as a storytelling company is making the transition to the MMO world, and their attempts to capture the look, feel, and flavor of a single-player RPG within a genre which is anything but.

An epic storyline that doesn’t involve killing rats? Heroic, action-packed combat? Living out your Han Solo fantasies (or Princess Leia fantasies, if you were into those gold bikinis) you’ve had since you were a child?

This was the way Star Wars: The Old Republic was pitched to my very skeptical ears. I walked into the demo expecting something along the lines of WoW with lightsabers. I walked out picking my jaw up off the floor, and scrambling towards the nearest PR guy to find out if there was someone, anyone, available to talk to about what I had just seen.

As it turned out, there was. And I could scarcely have picked two better people to interview if I had been given the run of the entire company.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you both please introduce yourselves and tell us a little about what it is you do at BioWare.

James Ohlen: My name is James Ohlen, I’m the Studio Creative Director, and Lead Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Daniel Erickson: My name is Daniel Erickson, I’m the Lead Writer on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The MMO Gamer: Now, I just sat through the demo, and I have to tell you, I was very impressed by it.

I was impressed, primarily, with the storytelling aspects of the game. I’m sure many people would agree that storytelling has been a major neglected factor in the MMO genre over the years; where the story in most games can be boiled down to why Farmer X wants you to go kill ten rats.

Obviously, BioWare is a company steeped in storytelling tradition. But, just for people who are complete novices to your games, could you talk a little about the philosophy with regards to story that’s going into The Old Republic?

Daniel Erickson: Sure. Really, we tried to take the same storytelling traditions we’ve used in the rest of the games. A Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game is exactly what it sounds like. It’s just a role-playing game that you’ve taken, and allowed a lot of people to play in a large social space.

We always talk about the four pillars that create RPGs: You’ve got exploration, you’ve got progression, you’ve got combat, and you’ve got storytelling.

When we said, hey, we’re going to do our first MMO, the obvious one to talk about first, even though none of the pillars can stand without the rest of them, and none of them are more important than the rest of them, we’re talking about story first because story is the delta. It’s the thing we’re doing that other people have not done.

We’re approaching it the same way we’ve always approached storytelling in games, which is that you need to have a heroic, unique experience, with choice that affects what you do.

In fact, the MMO has given us a place to actually be able to do more unique storytelling than we could in an RPG, normally.

Baldur’s Gate is a great example. With Baldur’s Gate you had a huge, epic story, it’s awesome, but guess what? It’s a fairly every-man story. Because you might have rolled a Druid, and somebody else might have rolled a Warrior, and they had the exact same story, right? We had to make it work for everyone.

Because we did all class-specific stories for The Old Republic, we’ve allowed ourselves to basically make, “Knights of the Old Republic: The Smuggler,” its own game. Everything in there, when you’re playing a Smuggler, you feel like a Smuggler.

The adventures are crazy, and madcap, and you’re flying by the seat of your pants, and there’s romantic stuff, and you’re spouting off crazy one-liners, etc., etc.

Then, when you’re playing as a Sith, it’s a completely different game. Everything is from that perspective, you come from a very dark world, you’re on Korriban, you’re dealing with Sith politics, you’re dealing with some very, very dark people who are allowed to do anything they want.

It completely changes the way we do storytelling.

The MMO Gamer: From a design standpoint, how do you handle heroic storytelling in an MMO?

In your standard online game you might walk up to a quest NPC, see a guy right behind you, and know that he’s getting the exact same quest you are to do whatever the heroic thing you’re doing is.

Do you have to segregate players, emulate the single player experience within an online world to make them feel as if they’re the protagonist, as opposed to just one player out of hundreds of thousands?

Daniel Erickson: Well, we kind of showed that in there. When you saw the piece on Hutta, one of the things you might have noticed is that the main room where his people were that he was going in and out of, there was a visible barrier there.

We can’t go into how it all works, but we didn’t want to separate the player base. We definitely are not a… there have been some MMOs that are basically instanced games with common areas. We didn’t want to go there.

What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you’re going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself.

Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you.

But you probably don’t want a thousand people there, especially if a fight’s gonna break out, because it wouldn’t really make sense.

But, most of the world actually holds it together pretty seamlessly. One of the things we do that makes it much easier, which you saw in the game, when you go into conversation everything else drops out of the world.

So, when you’re in there, we can do things while you’re talking to the NPCs that aren’t necessarily being represented to the rest of the game world.

James Ohlen: Plus, you don’t have to put up with when you’re talking to your Sith lord somebody coming up and doing the /grind dance right beside you. [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: That happen a lot in internal alpha?

Daniel Erickson: Oh yeah! [laughing]

James Ohlen: [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: I imagine that would be slightly immersion breaking.

James Ohlen: Yes, it is.

But, what you saw right in there had the working system. It’s basically a staged system. When you start up a conversation, everyone is on their stages and they’re able to play all of their animations, say all their lines, it’s very cinematic.

But, it still works within the confines of the public zone. What you saw in there was in a flashpoint, which is instanced, but that could also have taken place, and looked just as good, had it taken place in a public area.

The MMO Gamer: I also couldn’t help but notice during the demo the very Mass Effect-like branching conversation system.

That’s something very rare-I don’t want to say unheard of, because I’m sure there’s probably some obscure Korean MMO out there that’s done it before-but, I’ve certainly never seen it done on this scale in a Western title.

That obviously adds a great deal of flexibility to your storytelling ability, but how much is it adding to your development time?

It must increase the work involved in every quest line exponentially over the standard “go kill ten rats.”

Daniel Erickson: Well, the development of it takes a lot of time. The actual planning… we have thousands, and thousands of pages of just documentation before we ever start writing, literally, because trying to understand where all the quests are going to go, trying to actually think non-linearly takes the biggest part of it.

People who have been trained to write in that fashion, it doesn’t a whole lot longer than it might to write a really good screenplay, for instance. Obviously it takes a lot more time than it does to write, “Hey, go kill ten rats.”

But, BioWare has always put this sort of storytelling first. We started working on this, and started hiring in writers and training people in doing this basically before anything else happened.

James Ohlen: To give you an example, in your standard MMO you have a single person doing the quests. He writes it up, he scripts it, he places it in the world. It’s one guy.

But with us, we have a writing team, we have scripters who script it, we have designers who are very good at doing all the cinematic angles and all the animations… so we basically have three times the size of the team for implementing a quest.

And yes, the quests are a lot more intensive than in other games.

Daniel Erickson: And again, this is a place where one of the interesting things that you can’t do in an MMO comes in… There are some challenges, about movement, and how you get people through the space, and things like that.

But, there are so many places like the example I made of, “Hey, we just get to write a Smuggler story!” Where we’re actually getting to do better storytelling and role-playing than we’ve ever gotten to do.

And the biggest one for me, and it’s one that people stop and think about it and then the realization hits them: No save button.

We have choices that affect your entire game, and your storyline, and what’s going to happen and how people see you, like the choice you saw earlier today. I don’t know what you guys decided in there, whether you killed the captain or you didn’t…

The MMO Gamer: [gives a thumbs down]

James Ohlen: [laughing]

Daniel Erickson: So you killed the captain. If you had spared the captain, you know the pods that come ripping through the walls? He knows about those. He’s not some junior officer. You don’t go down that path at all if you spare the captain.

As soon as those pods come, he’s like, “Oh those are terrible, get away from those, we’re going to do this…” the whole adventure goes on a different track.

But you can’t reload and find that out. You get to actually do what everybody says they want to do… but really when we play RPGs we always save and are like, “Oh wait, no!”

You actually get to live, and die, and watch all of your companions and everyone else treat you from the choices that you make every day.

The MMO Gamer: So then, how in-depth are these stories?

Is it just the next evolution of “Go kill ten rats,” where the guy tells you to go kill ten Smugglers, and then when you get back he gives you some flavor text and tells you to go kill twenty Bounty Hunters before sending you off to the next quest area?

Or, is it a true BioWare-style RPG, with a continuous storyline advancing with you from beginning to end?

Daniel Erickson: It is a story that advances as you advance, with several smaller stories that go on, as well.

One of the ways I always like to talk about it is if you think about the actual Star Wars saga: There are complete pieces that end, and then a new piece begins.

There are several different characters: There is Luke, whose mentor has died, and he’s going to Degoba to train up, while Han is being chased by a Bounty Hunter. But, they are all coming together to do the larger story as well, if that makes sense.

And absolutely, we have story arcs, and we have real storytelling with beginnings, and ends, and places to say, “Hey, that was great, and time has passed, and things have changed. By the way, here’s that quest that happened twenty hours ago where you totally forgot you screwed that guy, coming back to bite you in the butt, now how are you going to deal with that?”

James Ohlen: Well, have you played any BioWare RPGs?

The MMO Gamer: I’ve played just about all of them.

Daniel Erickson: Then you pretty much know what to expect, at that point.

James Ohlen: Just imagine, it’s pretty much essentially if you’re playing the Bounty Hunter, you’re playing a BioWare story. So, with the Bounty Hunter, like what you saw in the demo there, that starts up, you have Braden who is your mentor, and he’s giving you your initial quest, and then things go wrong, because things always have to go wrong in a story.

Then you continue on that world, and eventually you have the chance to escape the world of Hutta, because it’s kind of a scummy world, and you get to go into the wide open galaxy, and all sorts of other crazy stuff happens.

The Great Hunt, the initial quest, becomes an integral part of your initial story arc.

It’s a continual story, with characters that you’re meeting, after you meet them, they’re still a part of your story. You meet companion characters that can adventure around with you, and you can romance, and befriend or betray.

Daniel Erickson: Basically, as far as choice and complexity, it is as deep and as complex as anything we’ve ever done. Even if you’re just playing the Bounty Hunter, that piece itself, just playing the Bounty Hunter, would be multiple times larger than it would if you had just been playing one of our normal RPGs.

So that’s multiples of “KOTOR: The Bounty Hunter.”

Then, when you finish that, you say, “Hey, I’m going to roll the Smuggler,” because you saw that cover system and you thought that was cool, and then…

James Ohlen: You get a completely different story with a different voice.

Daniel Erickson: Not just a completely different story, but when you switch between factions, every class has their own story, but when you switch between factions there is not one piece of repeated content. Period.

Not one line of VO, not one character, not one quest. Totally different from front to back.

Because one of the things that, as James put it, it was one of those decisions that it really would have been more economical to be able to share quests. But then, how do you get Darth Vader to go do Luke’s quest?

The MMO Gamer: Well, that brings up all sorts of issues.

If you have five friends, and they’re all playing different classes, do four have to follow around one while they do the Smuggler quest, and then the Smuggler has to help the other four while they do their quests in turn?

And would those other party member just be standing idle by the sidelines?

Or, can you become actively involved in the storylines of other characters?

Daniel Erickson: If you go back to the Star Wars analogy, it’s pretty much dead on.

If you want to let Han go try to pay off Jabba by himself, there he goes.

James Ohlen: Or you can go with him.

Daniel Erickson: If you want to go with him, and be part of his story, and…

James Ohlen: One of the things our Lead World Designer is always doing, because he plays all of the MMOs in a party…

Daniel Erickson: He’s mister multiplayer guy.

James Ohlen: So, whenever he’s setting up the worlds, he’s very conscious of the fact that all the points of interest for the different class stories are set up in such a way that the flow of your party, you’re going to be able to move around the world in such a way that you can still stay together easily.

Plus, there’s activities to do like for example, if you’re going to help the Smuggler, and you’re a Jedi-I can’t talk about the specific Jedi class, but there will be Jedi-there’ll be activities for that Jedi to do while the Smuggler is doing his quest, that will help him out.

Daniel Erickson: Yeah, they can actually help him out and accomplish his goals.

One of the things we always talk about is we are trying to cover multiple camps…

The two big ones are the MMO players, who may not care about story at all. A lot of the people, for example, who played Baldur’s Gate to death were not story people.

They were people who liked the D&D combat, you know, and especially on their second playthrough they were like “Groooaaaaaan.”

And we’ve always known that those people have to be comfortable there, as well. If they want to form guilds, and have groups, and go after the best loot, and run around together… we have to make all of that available, we never want to take that away from them.

At the same time, if you are a big BioWare fan, and you love the single-player RPGs, this really is the RPG forever. You can play through this game, your actual story mode to the end, all of your characters, single-player. You can play solo all the way through if you want.

Then you can stop, and you can reload, and you can play another BioWare game, all the way through solo, totally different content.

The MMO Gamer: You just uttered a very interesting phrase I don’t hear often when talking to MMO developers: “The end.”

Of course, that is the one thing all BioWare games have in common: They come to an end.

In The Old Republic, when you’ve reached the maximum level, will there be that point where the story that’s been building up since level 1 reaches a climax, and you finally get to face down Big Bad Guy X who’s been antagonizing you the entire time?

And then, after you kill him, the credits roll with a message saying “Stay tuned for the expansion, kids!”?

Daniel Erickson: The Star Wars movies were based on the old serials. So, you had a story told that would have a cliffhanger, then you’d have the resolution to that, and then you’d have a whole new cliffhanger at the end of the next episode.

If you think about the original trilogy, you have Star Wars, you have Empire, you have Return of the Jedi. And Return of the Jedi was the absolute culmination of the stuff started off in the original movie.

However, because George Lucas is awesome at licensing stuff, and can make money in other mediums, the adventures of Han, Luke, and Leia then continued in novels, and comic books.

You actually had in some ways Episodes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12…. 602…

All: [laughing]

Daniel Erickson: So, yes. In our initial release, we’re going to have Star Wars, Empire, and Return of the Jedi, in a way. We’re going to have our first movie trilogy, and then we’ll add on extra movies.

Since Star Wars is already built to support that kind of storytelling, I think it’s going to work out really well.

It’s extremely important to have the satisfaction of completing things. A BioWare story has never been a hamster wheel. We want you, even within there, long before you get to the end level to have completed whole storylines, to have put that to bed, to know what’s going on.

And you know, maybe one guy got away, he’s going to come back later and you’re going to deal with that. But that piece is… you’ve won the day for a little while. You and your companion characters can rest, breathe easy, take some time off.

And then hey, we start a new adventure.

The MMO Gamer: So then, what happens after the main storyline has ended for those other people you mentioned, who may not even be interested in the story in the first place?

I assume you don’t just tell them, “Well, that’s it! Reroll a Smuggler, play the game again, get the new story!”

Daniel Erickson: Absolutely not. One of the things that we’ve always talked about, because the end-game is incredibly important to a lot of MMO players, if that’s your game, great. That’s going to be there waiting for you.

If you want to do raids, if you want to do the whole end-game stuff, if that’s what you’re excited about, great.

But there’s also a ton of other content waiting for you, if that’s not what your game is about.

James Ohlen: With the end-game we can’t get into too much detail. We can say that the title of this IP is Star Wars. There’s lots of opportunity for conflict, conflict that doesn’t end.

We are going to have the stuff that allows you to continue to play the game. But, if you’re a player like myself, and I think Daniel here is similar, I’m the kind of guy who gets to the end level, and then I’m either going to play a new character, or I’m going to wait for the expansion to come out.

When I play most MMOs, like World of Warcraft, I get to the highest level and then I stop until the next expansion comes out, because I just don’t like doing the end-game activities.

However, there are a lot of guys on our design team, like Damien Shubert, who is our Lead System Designer, he is like the master of raids. He knows all the raids, he’s been through every single one of them, he’s part of a raiding guild.

Daniel Erickson: Our Associate Game Designer, as well, James’ right hand, is also the guy who’s like all the end-game stuff, all the raids, super excited about it.

James and I both tend to be people who look at it, and dabble at it, and go “Oh, cool, hey there’s a new dungeon!” and then after that, it’s like, “Well, what can I see that’s totally new?”

But we definitely want to accommodate all of those different sorts of players.

The MMO Gamer: [to James] I feel as though I’ve been neglecting you this whole interview, talking about story the entire time.

Is there anything that you, personally, would like to talk about?

James Ohlen: Hm… what to say about the game…

Daniel Erickson: He’s going through his list of things we’re not allowed to say. [laughing]

James Ohlen: I don’t know, for me, this is the dream Star Wars game. In my mind, once you play this game, [redacted]… well, I can’t really say that, I guess! [laughing]

We’re creating the ultimate dream, you’re going to be able to play every single fantasy from Star Wars you had as a kid. If you love your Boba Fett action figure, and you have the Slave-1 ship, and you want to be that guy, you can be that guy.

If you had the Millennium Falcon like I did, and you were like, “I dreamed all my life of being Han Solo and travelling the galaxy,” you can be that.

If you were a Luke Skywalker fan who always wanted to be a Jedi, you can be that too.

If you love Darth Vader, and you wanted to run around the galaxy and crush your enemies, you can do that, too.

All of the heroic characters from the movies, you can play in our game. And you can have an epic story that evokes the fantasy of those characters.

And it’s all done with high quality, cinematic, movie-like storytelling. So you have full voiceover, and great camera work, and emotionally engaging characters.

It’s essentially that you have Star Wars movies based on your favorite characters that you get to control how it unfolds. That’s kind of my dream.

The MMO Gamer: It was mentioned during the demo that even the combat is trying to be tuned to reflect more of that “heroic” tone. That you aren’t out there fighting rats and bunny rabbits, but you’re engaged with numerous humanoid opponents at once.

James Ohlen: I’ve always had a hard time enjoying myself in combat in MMOs. Mainly because I’m kind of an action/violence junkie, I like my fast-paced action, I like to be cutting enemies down by the boatloads.

MMOs are very slow-paced, it’s you versus one enemy, and you hit him fifteen times until he dies. That’s something we’ve consciously moved away from in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

You’re fighting against multiple enemies, the action is fast-paced, there’s a lot more animations going on.

We’ve gone out of our way, we hired a combat designer who had a huge amount of experience with fighting games, who really knows the secrets of making your combat abilities really feel powerful.

That’s something I think has really been missing from the MMO genre: Combat has always felt like an MMO, not like other games.

Daniel Erickson: There’ve been a couple MMOs that have attempted it, but none that have really broken through the big pieces.

The MMO Gamer: So you hope to break out of that mold of “Press 1 to cast Fireball, wait, press 2 to cast Frostbolt, wait.” Rinse and repeat?

Daniel Erickson: And preferably to get rid of the “Fight one guy for a minute and a half, then sit down and eat bread.”

James Ohlen: The thing is, I don’t think we’re revolutionizing combat. We’re just trying to take… we want to appeal to MMO fans who like the strategy and tactics involved in MMO combat, where you have the different character types, the guy who’s a tank that jumps into battle and everyone focuses on him while you have your ranged DPS guys.

We still want to have that.

We also want to have a game that someone who’s not great at first person shooters, who doesn’t have great hand-eye coordination, who doesn’t like that kind of game style can still play. We just want to take the MMO combat and make it much more fast-paced, and make it feel much more action-packed.

And it’s really simple decisions, like fighting more than one guy, having a lot more animations in combat, having things like combat music being a big part of it.

There’s all these subtle things that as you layer on to combat it becomes what you saw in the demo in there.

It’s not revolutionary, it’s just a whole bunch of evolutions that have brought us to that point.

The MMO Gamer: The danger there, and why most games go either full FPS or “Press 1 for Fireball,” is you run the risk of trying to take the middle ground and in the end appealing to no one.

How do you address that?

James Ohlen: We test. We are very much about testing our stuff.

We bring in cohorts of people, MMO fans, we sit them down and we have them play our classes for like the first eight levels.

Then they fill out forms, they give us feedback, we videotape them, then we take a look at it.

So far, MMO fans, they sit down, they get into the game the easiest because the controls have the typical WASD drive scheme, and you have an action bar at the bottom where you can switch your abilities in an out, and use them with the num pad or click on them with your mouse.

It’s something that any MMO fan is instantly going to be able to pick up and be able to use.

We also have, most of our combat team consists of people who are very familiar with the MMO genre. So it’s not like, I don’t think we’re going to have any problem getting MMO fans to like our combat system.

Daniel Erickson: Very rarely have I ever heard anyone who was into MMOs say, “You know what I really like about the combat? The fact that it feels slow.”

James Ohlen: I can understand some of the concerns. It’s been very difficult, and it’s taken a lot of effort to get our combat system right.

It’s a very complex system. You’ll notice when you get into a battle, there’ll be classes with lightsabers deflecting, and we have to have all sorts of animation blending, and state managers, and all sorts of tech that allows the characters to do what they do when they’re in combat.

It’s much easier to just say “I’m going to play this animation when I attack something,” but we didn’t want to go down that way.

[said in a joking tone of voice] So we just got boatloads of money and we did something else! [laughing]

At this point we were asked to wrap things up.

The MMO Gamer: I like to end my interviews on a more philosophical note, as opposed to “What is your game, when is it coming out, and how many exclusives are you going to give me?”

So, why do the both of you make games? Why did you get into the industry, why do you get up every morning, go to work, and do what it is you do?

James Ohlen: Well, since I was ten years old I’ve basically played role-playing games. Pen-and-paper role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons, I played it, and played it, and played it. It was my life.

It was basically my dream to create role-playing games for the rest of my life, and luckily, I was able to get in at BioWare on the ground floor, and now I get to live that dream, building worlds.

Daniel Erickson: James was the lead designer on Baldur’s Gate 1. He’s been around a long, long time.

James Ohlen: Role-playing games have always been my life, essentially. I’m a giant RPG nerd, and I love the idea, what gets me off is, helping to create worlds and stories that people love to play through.

Daniel Erickson: I’ll take a little bit different tack on that, and I’ll answer “Why did I come to BioWare?”

I was actually working for a different company, and I was playing Knights of the Old Republic.

I decided to go down the evil path, to see what it looked like, and I did something-and fans of the game will understand-I did something with Mission that made me feel real empathy, and regret.

Which was a completely different emotion than had ever been imparted on me from a game. I pushed myself away from my monitor and I was like, “Whoa! I can’t believe I just did that!”

And then, there was this glee, as I was like, “I can’t believe I just felt that about a game!” I realized at that point that we were at the cusp of real emotional storytelling in games, and I had to be there.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, well thank you both very much for joining us, we appreciate it, and we hope we can do it again some time.

James Ohlen: Great, thank you.

Daniel Erickson: Thank you, sir.

Stay tuned to The MMO Gamer for additional coverage of Star Wars: The Old Republic in the days and weeks ahead.

In the meanwhile, you can visit the game’s official site at http://www.swtor.com for additional information and pre-release discussion boards.

Now in its second year, the interview covers a few of the changes that have been brought about as a result of the CSM’s suggestions, as well as some of the potential pitfalls that such a system invites.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: When you first told me about the Council of Stellar Management last year, I was picturing either the game turning into a banana republic, with a new president every week, or a dictatorship where one guy goes on eBay and buys ten billion credits to bribe everyone.

How has it been working out?

Petur Oskarsson: It actually has been working out quite well. And buying ten billion to bribe people, sure, you can do that, but there is no guarantee that they will actually vote for you. They might accept the money and just cast a vote for someone else.

Valerie Massey: Have you ever seen anyone do something like that?

Petur Oskarsson: Well, yes. One guy was actually asking me if he could do that. And we said, sure, go ahead. But there’s no guarantee that they will actually vote for you. So, you can spend your money on that, but it might be for nothing.

Valerie Massey: Did he try?

Petur Oskarsson: Yeah, I think so. I think he was trying to distribute PLEX for votes. That’s a pretty bold move.

Ned Coker: That’s an expensive move!

Valerie Massey: [to me] Do you know what PLEX is?

Petur Oskarsson: It’s game time that you can buy in-game. So you can play the game, and then make enough in-game currency, and you can actually pay the subscription fees with it. So you never actually have to dish out real money, if you’re clever.

Ned Coker: Yeah. You buy a game time code, and then through our web site can change it to in-game items, and sell those on the market or through the contract system. It’s sort of supply and demand. In some areas it might be more expensive or less expensive in others.

Somebody can pay their in-game currency for that item, and they can redeem that for 30 days of time, whereas you get in-game currency. So you can pay, basically, 35 bucks for two codes and then get about 250 million to 500 million, or whatever, in-game currency.

It fulfills a lot of peoples’ needs that really want to engage in that sort of thing. But ina legal, legit way. So, it’s been going really well, a lot of people really like it.

Valerie Massey: I can’t think of another game that does it, so that’s why I brought it up.

Petur Oskarsson: So, we’re now heading into the third elections in May. Each council is only for 6 months. So it’s the third, it’s been going on for a year.

I did some numbers checking and the council has brought up 128 topics for CCP. And out of that, nine have been denied. The rest has been either injected into a backlog, or if it was already in the backlog it has been given an added prioritization.

The MMO Gamer: Morbid curiosity, which ones were denied? Free ponies and rainbows for everyone?

Petur Oskarsson: Nobody actually thought of asking for that.

The denials were mostly because the players simply didn’t understand the technology behind certain things.

So, they were simply were asking for features that either were technically impossible or extremely difficult to implement. I mean, we could do anything. But do we want to spend a year of development time changing the entire sub-structure of EVE just to get that done?

What became apparent in the elections and the candidates running was that people seem to vote based on play style, not based upon group allegiance in-game.

The MMO Gamer: So the hardcore guys voted for the people who campaigned on a platform of, “I’m going to make everybody get ganked harder”?

Petur Oskarsson: Yeah, and the loot guys voted for the PvE players.

I mean, we thought we would see more group-based voting, but that didn’t happen either. Not yet, at least. One of the sitting council members now was talking about, when they came to Iceland in January, forming a political group, not based on in-game allegiances but on play styles.

And I don’t know if she’s already done that, but that was her intention, at least.

Continued on next page…

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little about what it is you do at Simutronics.

David Whatley: I’m David Whatley, the President and CEO of Simutronics, which means I don’t get to do much anymore. People just kind of come to me and tell me to sign things at this point. I’m also basically the chief architect of our technology, so that would be HeroEngine at this point.

The MMO Gamer: HeroEngine is, of course, the reason why we’re here. Unless, of course, you’d like to give me some world exclusives on Hero’s Journey, in which case by all means, feel free!

If not, the reason I’m personally interested in the HeroEngine is because I’m an old MUD guy, as I’m sure you are.

David Whatley: That’s how I got my start!

The MMO Gamer: Those were the days, let me tell you.

David Whatley: They were, but it’s still the days for us, we still do it. We’ve got three sides to our business, one of them is still the text-based game stuff. It’s about a quarter of our revenue.

The MMO Gamer: And now you’re trying to bring some of that MUD flavor back into MMOs?

David Whatley: Not just the MUD flavor, but the technology that we used to give it that flavor, the fact that the game can be evolving while you’re playing it, because it’s all live and collaborative.

The MMO Gamer: You know what would really win me over? If there were a little check box in the settings for “Text Only Mode,” and it just went to a blank screen with white text that said things like, “You are standing in a green, verdant field. There is a tree. Obvious exists are East, North.”

If you guys could pull that off… game of the year award, right there.

David Whatley: From you! [laughing] I will hold you to that.

Well, back when we did GemStone and Dragon Realms, we created those with what we called the Interactive Fiction Engine, and it allowed us to get GameMasters in there working, hundreds of them simultaneously, collaborating.

When we started working on Hero’s Journey we wanted that same sort of thing happening, which is why we created this whole HeroEngine business.

The MMO Gamer: Right, as we were talking about during the demo, I got the feeling that this is sort of the second coming of Online Creation from back in the day.

Could you talk about the thought process that led you to come up with a system that’s so different than the standard MMO development cycle?

David Whatley: You hit it right on the head. It comes from our MUD background. We used to do text-based games, starting 22 years ago.

Those games were first launched on online services like GEnie, CompuServe, a little company called America Online back in the day, Prodigy, and then eventually rolled out on the web as that started to take over. This was actually pre-internet.

And these games featured an engine we called the Interactive Fiction Engine, which allowed us to develop games with a team of what we call GameMasters, which are basically independent contractors or employees, depending on the situation, that work for us, but they tend to work remotely, from home.

So they would login to the game, but unlike the players, they had tools to build the content in the game. And that stretched from just expanding the terrain of the game, of course we’re talking text here, but also the actual gameplay and the mechanics.

The quests, and experiences, all of these things were under control of the GameMasters. And they could provide real-time interaction with the players, through events, festivals, just appearing in the game under some guise whether it’s a creature that they’re role-playing or as a god-like being, the GameMaster could manifest themselves as anything.

And they could do these events and build the game and do all this stuff, and do it continually, so that games like GemStone and Dragon Realms, the amount of content in them is just staggering when you go in there.

We wanted to take that same concept and apply it to the graphical MMOs; the World of Warcrafts, the EverQuests. They have tools, and they have great tools, but they lack the ability to rapidly develop and apply those same tools that exist in the development process to the live environment. That’s what I wanted to do, and that’s why we created HeroEngine.

The MMO Gamer: Did you set out originally with the intention of licensing HeroEngine to others to create their own titles?

David Whatley: We didn’t originally intend to create HeroEngine as a technology platform for other people, it was supposed to be just for us. In fact, it was supposed to be the enabler of Hero’s Journey. Hero’s Journey was only going to be the kind of product we wanted it to be is if we could do this sort of thing, if we could apply this GameMaster approach, this rapid development approach.

To do that, though, we had to use tools that simply didn’t exist. We went out and evaluated a lot of things, but at the end of the day there was nothing even close to what we had in our heads, the way we liked to work.

So we just rolled up our sleeves and said we’re gonna build it, and if it takes us five years, it takes us five years. Being a bootstrap company we had the luxury of making that decision. So we started working on Hero’s Journey. We created these very fast processes for building content, building out worlds, scripting the behavior of everything on the client and the server, all in a live environment that’s always up and always running, switching back and forth between development and play instantaneously.

I never had any intention of creating a middleware company, but now I’m a middleware company as well…

We did all this and then we started showing Hero’s Journey around to various people as one does, and there were a lot of game developers out there, and studios ,that when they saw that, they said, “You know what, that’s exactly what we need for our next project, how do we get a hold of that?”

Continued on next page…

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who maybe unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us tell us a little about what it is you at Petroglyph.

Chuck Kroegel: My name is Chuck Kroegel, I’m the general manager and executive producer at Petroglyph Studios. We’re located in Las Vegas, Nevada and we have over seventy people working for us.

Currently we are working on three games. We’re doing an XBLA title, but we are also doing title by the name of Mytheon, which is a free-to-play downloadable game that’s micro-transaction based.

The MMO Gamer: Petroglyph was founded essentially out of Westwood expatriates after the studio was shut down, correct?

Chuck Kroegel: That is correct. Mike Legg, who was the programmer of Command & Conquer 3, Joe Bostik, who was the design director of Command & Conquer 3, and Steve Tall, who was the technical director… when Electronic Arts decided to move Westwood to LA, they decided that they wanted to stay in Las Vegas, so they stayed, and banded together to form Petroglyph, six years ago, now.

And so yes, expatriates from Westwood. Currently half our people are ex-Westwood employees, along with personnel from all disciplines across the industry. We’re lucky that we’ve been able to draw from this amazing pool of experience that’s paying off in big ways in our upcoming titles.

So, that’s our beginning.

The MMO Gamer: Tell us a little about Mytheon, for those who may have not heard of it. What’s the game’s backstory?

Chuck Kroegel: As the name would imply, Mytheon has to do with mythology. In our game, you are going to interact with the beasts of mythology as you know them. The Cyclops, and Poseidon, and so forth.

The game starts in the Greco-Roman era, as well as Egypt, and as time goes on we’ll expand throughout the whole world.

Something everyone has in common is they all have their mythologies, these beasts and these stories that have come to us through legends and folklore. All the nations of the world, they all have their own.

So in our game Mytheon, we can eventually fill the Earth in terms of being able to explore mythologies of all nations.

It’s an action/strategy game, with elements of RPG, and elements of RTS that people have to come to appreciate and enjoy.

The MMO Gamer: So, the heads of the studio are fairly steeped in RTS experience, and they want to bring this to bear on Mytheon?

Chuck Kroegel: That’s correct. In doing a real time strategy game there are lot of elements, a lot of plates to spin, so to speak, and we are applying all of our experience that we have to Mytheon to make that a very engaging, enjoyable, easy to get into game but difficult to master game in the real time strategy space. It’s not really an RTS, per say, but it is a strategy game.

It has some neat mechanics that we feel are new and refreshing to this strategy genre. But it is all very much in real time, so that kind of goes with our roots of doing real time games that have lot of energy, a lot of emotional impact to the things that you are doing.

Continued on next page…

To read a very interesting discussion on the topic, hit the jump for Steve’s interview with Live Gamer’s Andy Schneider.

For years, RMT has existed on the margins of the MMO genre, run by a shadowy and much-maligned network, loosely bound together in the minds of players by the epithet of “Chinese gold farmers.”

But procuring digital items and currency to sell to players with more disposable income than time has now become a multi-billion dollar industry, and publishers are beginning to sit up and take notice, looking to tap-in on this revenue stream by moving the sales out of the cold and darkness, and into their own watchful gaze.

This is where Live Gamer hopes to come in.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us, and tell us a little about what it is you do at Live Gamer.

Andy Schneider: I’m Andy Schneider, co-founder and president of Live Gamer. What we do is partner with publishers to offer legitimate real money trading of virtual items .

We’re currently working with about a dozen publishers. Among them are Acclaim Entertainment, Funcom, Sony Online Entertainment, GoPets, NHN USA, and several others, both in the subscription MMO space as well as the free-to-play MMO space, in addition to virtual worlds.

The MMO Gamer: When people hear that phrase, “real money trading,” their initial thoughts are probably of a dark basement in China somewhere, with men slaving over keyboards night and day, and some guy who whips them if they don’t meet their gold quotas.

I take it that’s not what you have in mind at Live Gamer. What exactly do you mean by legitimate?

Andy Schneider: Well, real money trading of virtual items has been around for more than a decade.

It started in the very earliest MMOs, if not back in the MUD days in a very grassroots sort of way, but then obviously got into a more opportunistic and nefarious industry.

When I talk about legitimate RMT, it’s about a publisher supporting the notion that people want to buy and sell virtual items for real money, and they have decided to proactively support that notion and give their player-base a way to do that.

This is within the terms of service of the games, within the end user license agreements, and moderated by a trusted party, Live Gamer, with everything totally transparent and authenticated.

That’s legitimate RMT, versus what most people think of as “gold farming,” which is obviously not supported by the game publisher.

The MMO Gamer: To be absolutely clear, what you do is sanctioned by the publishers, and you work with them? You are not a third party, working against the wishes of the people producing the games?

Andy Schneider: Never. We only create a marketplace with the publisher’s support, we enter into a contractual relationship with the publisher, and the publisher has affirmatively decided to support a sanctioned RMT marketplace.

It’s all player-to-player, our business model is a transaction fee. There is no concept of farming in our world, it’s one player selling a virtual item to another player, we facilitate the entire transaction, and make sure that we spot fraud, or farming, and shut it down immediately.

The publisher benefits, and more importantly the end user benefits; they don’t have to go to a black market outlet. They don’t have to risk having their credit cards stolen, or their identities stolen, or their game accounts stolen.

They don’t have to risk getting their account banned because they’re in violation of the publisher’s terms of services. In our world, because of the partnership, and because of the publisher support, we’re able to create a much better experience for all that consumer demand that’s otherwise been lost to the black market.

The MMO Gamer: How does this service work, exactly? Where does Live Gamer come into the picture of selling items?

Andy Schneider: It’s very simple. First you link your game account to your Live Gamer account. We don’t require you to give us your user name or password. We do it all through token identification.

Once we have that all set up, you can go and send an item or character to the Live Gamer server. We do that on a server-to-server basis, we pull all the metadata from the publisher.

So all these listings are completely legitimate and pulled right from the game server, there’s no misrepresentation. We pull the item in, and hold it in escrow while we facilitate the financial transaction.

Once there’s a buyer for the listing, we monitor the whole transaction from start to finish. We do a number of different screens and checks, and once we know that it’s an authenticated trade, we release the item out of escrow to the new player.

It takes the manual process out of the equation that most players are engaged in with the black market, and reduces the fraud considerably, which is good for players.

It also reduces customer support calls for developers and publishers, who used to be on the receiving end of a trade gone bad even though they had nothing to do with it. That is really how the system works. We provide the listing service, we provide the escrow, and we provide all the financial transaction.

The MMO Gamer: Isn’t there a concern that creating a legal outlet for selling things that were previously sold under the table is just going to encourage more farming, not less? That gold spam will just pick up and move from “Visit wowgold4u.com” to “Visit my Live Gamer account”?

Andy Schneider: The more legitimate transactions there are, the less need there is to go to the black market, hence the less demand there will be for gold farming.

We take things like fraud and gold farming very seriously. We’ve been very successful thus far in creating a legitimate marketplace and giving the consumers what they want, and redirecting them out of the black market, where they’re just feeding the gold farmer businesses, into something where the publisher, and the developer, and the designers have a say in what’s going on.

The MMO Gamer: To get down to the heart of the matter, RMT is one of the most divisive topics in the MMO genre. What abortion or Medicare would be to real-life politics, RMT is to MMOs.

What do you say to the players, or even the developers, who believe that this is not the way that the games were meant to be played, and that it offers players who make use of your service an unfair advantage?

Andy Schneider: You know it’s a great question, and before we started Live Gamer, we knew this would be the issue. So, we spent a lot of time trying to understand the motivation of game players. Why do they engage in RMT? What are the hot-button issues? Does it break the fourth wall or the magic circle? Does it create an unfair advantage for players who are buying items that are giving them a performance advantage?

We looked at what these motivations are, and certainly there are players who want to get a performance advantage. But, there are also overwhelmingly more players who play MMOs and engage in RMT for social reasons.

The social reasons might be one of they want to play with friends who are leveling up faster than they are and they want to keep up, they want to play the game again from a different character class or race perspective, or they want to customize their experience – so they want to go ahead and buy the items that make them feel better about their character.

There’s also the players who want to explore everything the game developer or designer has created, and they can’t possibly do it because they don’t have enough time.

In the end, all of these people engage in RMT because they don’t have enough time, but they might have more disposable income. And that’s the predominant reason why people that we see are engaging in RMT, and we certainly see all the arguments against RMT.

Continued on next page…

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is you do at KingsIsle.

Todd Coleman: My name is J. Todd Coleman, and I’m the Director of Wizard101 at KingsIsle Entertainment.

That means I basically own the creative vision, the schedule, and the move forward plan of Wizard101.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s talk about that creative vision, first. When and how did you first come up with the concept for Wizard101?

And then how did you go from concept, to prototype, to what we’re looking at now?

Todd Coleman: The original idea was mine. I kind of scribbled on a note pad a bunch of ideas for characters-for example I had an evil snowman. The reason is I can’t draw at all, but I can draw three circles, one on top of each other. [laughing] Then there were also things like a ninja pig and a cyclops, things like that, and I built a card game around them.

Then me and Josef Hall, who is our Technology Director, would sit and play the game and come up with new ideas, and that’s basically where the concept came from.

Myself and the other leads on this project came out of Shadowbane, and we took some time off and decided we wanted to take a look at the market and see what nobody else was doing.

There are a lot of people now coming out with the same kind of vision that we had back in those days, PvP games. When we started Shadowbane they were unheard of, but now there are tons of them, many people are trying to get in on that.

So we backed up and said, “Okay, what do we want to go after now? What is nobody else doing?” And we noticed that there were some MMOs that were being done for very young kids, like Club Penguin and Toontown and Webkinz, and they were cool games.

And then you had on the other side of the coin you had Warhammer, and World of Warcraft, and Shadowbane and games that really weren’t appropriate for kids.

We noticed there was really nothing in between. If I had a kid who was too old for Toontown but I wasn’t ready to throw him into Barrens chat, there really weren’t any good options.

So we went out to try and figure out, what did we think would be cool, or what do we think would be an interesting game? What would be suitable for that age group that we would also enjoy working on? We’d actually find fun?

And so it kind of ended up being a little bit of a mash up of Harry Potter, Yugioh, and the older Final Fantasy games all mashed together.

The idea of let’s take a collectable card game at its base, let’s build all the social structure of an MMO, and the overall immersive world aspect of an MMO, and then let’s tie that to a very approachable fantasy concept like a wizard school.

Obviously Harry Potter was a big influence, also Terry Pratchett, the Dragonlance series with their wizards, the idea of a wizard school was very appealing to us.

The MMO Gamer: Wizard101 is obviously a very big departure from Shadowbane. How did you manage to shift gears like that, from hardcore ganking PvP to cutesy wizard school in the 9 to 13 demographic?

Todd Coleman: Well, a big chunk of it was that we just wanted to do something else.

We had been living and breathing Shadowbane for 80 hours a week for five years straight, and we were burned out. By the end of it, we wanted to go find something that was more casual, something we could have fun with and if we wanted to invent a Samurai cow and call him Sam-moorai, that was okay. Nobody was going to care.

And so from that standpoint it was actually quite freeing to go from something where we took the IP so seriously, and we took the gameplay and the balance of the game so unbelievably seriously, to something that was just kind of light and fun that we didn’t have to try and kill ourselves with.

Also, Shadowbane was our first effort at doing a game at all, quite frankly, so we made a lot of mistakes, we tried to learn from those mistakes, so this was a chance for us to go back with a nice clean slate and start over technologically, design-wise, vision-wise and come out and say, “Here’s our vision. Here’s our goal. Here are the resources we need to attack that goal and we’re going to do it right.”

And if you get in, the one thing that we universally get praised on now with this game, even people who are like, “Well it’s not for me,” they give us lots of praise for the amount of polish that we put into it.

So we really set our vision, and set our goal, and we were ravenous about trying to stick to it and really achieve it, and I think that’s the one thing I’m probably the most proud of is how well we lived up to that vision.

The MMO Gamer: Moving on to the gameplay side, your description of Pokémon meets Final Fantasy in the demo seemed very accurate.

Combat is entirely a card-oriented turn-based system, correct? There is no traditional MMO type hacking, slashing?

Todd Coleman: Nope. No hacking. No slashing. None of that.

The MMO Gamer: Have you ever thought about branching into that at some point in the future?

Todd Coleman: Not really. We may add other activities, we totally have it within our sights to do other things so that if you want to have fifteen minutes where you log in and you’re not interested in going and dueling with our card game, we are adding other activities for that. PvP was one of those.

Housing is really the first activity that is totally separate. I can go have a party in my house. I can decorate it. I can invite friends over. It’s just a different experience.

And what you will see over the course of the next year, I hope, is that we’ll continue adding other adjunct game experiences, other types of play that you can do that add to the overall experience of Wizard101.

Continued on next page…

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those of our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us about what it is you do at Possibility Space.

Gage Galinger: My name is Gage Galinger and I’m the CEO and founder of Possibility Space. What we are doing at Possibility Space is trying to bring the free-to-play model to Western gaming, and we are building an original IP called Warrior Epic, which will be launching very shortly.

The MMO Gamer: I think that is a very important point to repeat, that Warrior Epic is an original title. I have to admit that when I first saw it, the initial impression was that it was an import title coming out of East Asia.

But, there is a reason for that. Could you talk a little bit about how the game is being developed?

Gage Galinger: Basically, the founders and management of the company all come from the Western game industry. We moved out to China to take advantage of a more efficient labor base so that we could have more creative freedom to do what we wanted to do.

One of those things that we wanted to do was make a free-to-play game that we wanted to make. That wouldn’t have been possible trying to do it from the US, because the funding requirements were too high.

So, while it’s true that most of our development happens in China, the game is original IP, and it is built for a global audience, it’s not the same vein as traditional free to play imports from Korea and China.

The MMO Gamer: Is there a dollar or percent value that you could affixed to how much it would have cost to have developed this game in say North America versus how much it’s costing you now to develop it in China?

Gage Galinger: I can’t give a dollar figure, but I can say that all in, the total budget for Warrior Epic is significantly smaller than anything that it would have taken in the West.

If I had to put a ratio on it, I would say three to four times more expensive to do this in the West than it would have been to how we did it in China, the reason for that is not entirely about labor cost, it’s also about efficiency.

There’s just certain advantages you can take advantage of in a different labor market than in the US, which is a very high overhead of operations cost.

The MMO Gamer: You haven’t experienced any quality control issues with moving operations to China?

Gage Galinger: You definitely have those types of challenges, it’s a give and a take. I’d say the efficiency and productivity of our crew in China is much, much higher than anything I’ve experienced in the West.

But of course there’s a cultural barrier to get over, there’s not so much a language problem.

Gaming is different over there; the hardcore player is more prevalent and more hardcore. So there are some cultural things that you have to get over in the game design, if there has been a challenge, that’s been the challenge.

The MMO Gamer: The game is micro-transaction based, and that’s something that has almost at 100% acceptance in the East, but not so much currently in the West.

During our conversation prior to the interview, you said that you didn’t believe that was something that traditional publishing companies could bring to the mainstream gamer. Why is that?

Gage Galinger: If you look in the game industry, independent studios are the fuel for pretty much all the creativity that goes on. The expectations of a major publisher are quite a bit different in the limitations that a publisher like EA or Activision works under are a completely different set of rules than an independent studio works under.

So, any time you are taking a major chance, it’s going to happen in the independent space. This is the fuel for the publishers, ultimately the publishers come in and they see what worked in the independent space and that’s when they move in, they move in when they know it’s going to work, but the pioneers are always independent.

I think you can look to the mobile space to see that. All the major publishers sat on the sidelines while the early mobile game companies fought it out. Jamdat emerged as the winner, and EA went in and bought Jamdat at any price. That’s pretty much what happens anytime there’s a new business model. The big players sit on the sidelines until the little guys fight it out and establish what works.

The MMO Gamer: Of course there’s always your point that Western titles cost three to four times as much, and there’s a certain hesitancy there to give the game away for free after investing so heavily in it.

Gage Galinger: I think that’s one of the reasons the model hasn’t taken off in the West, yet.

There’s been some early… and honestly I’m surprised to see how quickly people have responded to this. Much quicker than they responded to other paradigm shifts like mobile. Some of the mistakes I think that have been made in the West is that they’ve charged money for things players expected to be free. Or they’ve mixed models, like retail purchase and then item sales.

In a previous generation of the same game like a Tiger Woods golf game, the golf courses would have been something you unlock, in the next version it’s something you pay for, of course the user doesn’t feel good about that.

The free-to play-business, its more than that it’s just free to play, it’s a fundamentally different game design. If you are designing your game to be free-to-play, it’s not something you can retrofit two years into development, you have to designed the game from day one, otherwise it’s going to be hard to make it work.

Continued on next page…

Sitting down with a pre-announcement studio like Carbine is always an interesting experience. It’s only natural as a reporter to want to talk about their game. They want to talk about it, too, but they signed a piece of paper saying that they would be tortured and killed, and their family homes bulldozed to the ground if they spilled the beans too soon.

The trick, then, is to talk about their game, without actually talking about it.

That wasn’t going to be too hard, considering the fact that I knew next to nothing to begin with.

But I got educated, fast. Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: To get us started, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what you do at Carbine.

Chad Moore: I’m Chad Moore, lead creative designer.

Jeremy Gaffney: The fellow with the sultry voice is Jeremy Gaffney, executive producer.

Matt Mocarski: Matt Mocarski, art director.

The MMO Gamer: Have any of you guys ever read the book Atlas Shrugged?

All: Yes.

The MMO Gamer: Talking with you before the recorder started running, that’s the first thing that came to mind… John Galt came along and showed you the way, and then all of a sudden you dropped what you were doing and all ran off to Carbine-Galt’s Gulch.

I know you can’t talk specifics, but just generalities, what was this grand appeal? You guys have all worked on games before, what was the irresistible magnetism that drew you to Carbine?

Matt Mocarski: I’ll answer that.

Our lead concept artist, Cory Loftis, never worked in games before, but he is a visionary artist. His artwork completely sold me. I didn’t know who this guy was, I’d never seen his stuff. He’s not online, in forums anywhere.

His ideas are absolutely incredible, and this is early-on in the production process where we didn’t really have a solid IP, we just had ideas, right?

I think it’s safe to say we’re doing a science-fantasy hybrid, and there’s a lot of appeal to that.

I don’t necessarily like the purer science fiction… I think Star Wars is more of a fantasy world, but it has a sci-fi coating on it, its archetypes are based in fantasy. I saw a lot of that in what Carbine was doing.

There’s a lot of talent in the industry as far as concepting goes, but his ideas were like everything I ever wanted to do in a game but didn’t know how to express perfectly.

I know it sounds like I’m just doing the regular like, “Hey, everything’s amazing!” stuff like that, but really I’m being perfectly honest with you. I love the art on the game.

Jeremy Gaffney: Also, I think we have a very solid core team, and a lot of people want to work with them. We’ve gone out of our way to grab people who have done stuff that’s really impressed us.

Our lead designer is Tim Cain of Fallout fame, and he’s done enough cool stuff before that there’s a bunch of people who want to work with him.

Our art team is super strong, super strong lead. That attracts a bunch of people, just ask Cory.

Our programming team is really strong. We’ve got guys who have worked not just on Blizzard games, but also from EverQuest and EverQuest II, Vanguard… You name an MMO and we’ve probably got someone who has done a piece of it.

We’ve always just gone out of our way to get guys who have done the key bits of it, too. I guess I talk too much about that in detail, but it’s kind of a dream-team, which is nice, and having critical mass just attractive.

It attracted us, and part of it, I think, is just being with that critical mass, it’s the team we want to work with.

Chad Moore: When I came down to check it out, when I saw what they were doing, there were two parts that came into it.

One was the game itself looks amazing, and that was a big, big part of my decision.

The other part, as everyone was saying, is the team. There’s a lot of guys I used to work with at Troika Games, and Troika was all about story.

We really wanted to tell interesting stories, and figure out a way to tell those stories in the MMO space. I think there’s a lot of room for that.

For me, that was a big draw.

The MMO Gamer: Storytelling is one of those big fetishes I have, particularly in the MMO genre, and I’d like to get back to that in just a moment.

But, first… you mentioned ideas and ideals that attracted you to Carbine in the pre-production phase. I hear that from a lot of MMO developers.

The problem is, once the money starts flowing, ideals tend to fall by the wayside in favor of, “The guy with the cash says he wants us to make an EverQuest clone because that’s what he thinks sells. So, let’s forget our ideals and make an EverQuest clone.”

Have those ideals held steady, even after what was it-50 or 70 million dollars-has gotten involved?

Jeremy Gaffney: Having been an NCSoft exec, the one thing I can say would get NCSoft in our office kicking our asses would be for us to make a clone game.

You can love or hate NCSoft’s games, but one thing we’re not is a “clone” company. We’re a risk-taking company.

Whether or not we succeed or fail, any genre we tackle, we’re a company who is willing to take risks and put some big money down for those risks, which makes them a great company to work for.

That’s going to create some stellar successes, and I’m sure it’s going to create some stellar failures, going forward.

But it’s much more interesting to work for a company like that than one like, “Hey, let’s clone the last game, it was really popular, and clone games are so successful in our business!” They’re just not. A great way to fail would be for us to make a copy of WoW.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, back to storytelling, now. As I mentioned before, that’s a very red-meat subject for me and I like to argue with people about it, a lot.

I was arguing with Paul Barnett the other day, and his position was essentially that games are meant to be mindless, instant-on, always available entertainment… You can tell a story with them, but it’s supposed to be a game first. If you get a story out of them, that’s secondary.

It didn’t sound like…

Jeremy Gaffney: He probably said that at a very rapid pace, with his fists pounding on the table…

The MMO Gamer: Actually he was extremely cogent. I wasn’t expecting that, either. [laughs]

Anyway, based on your previous statements, I take it that’s not the philosophy you’re working under.

I’m sure you can’t get into specifics, again, because of the stealthy nature at the moment. But, could you give a broad overview of the philosophy toward storytelling you’re working under?

Chad Moore: What I would say about the genre, up to this point anyway, is that a lot of games have not taken a holistic view on storytelling.

I think that given the nature of persistent worlds, and how we deliver quests and the gameplay, you need to figure out creative ways to integrate storytelling into the things that you’re doing, not sort of a veneer that’s at the front end.

Like, you get a big chunk of text and a lot of lore that most people aren’t probably going to pay attention to because they want to get to the next quest.

So what we’ve been trying to figure out is, where are there interesting ways to tell stories while you’re doing something?

Not like standing here and listening to some guy go off, but integrating the storytelling into the actual gameplay. I think that’s really important.

The genre has evolved from the single player RPGs where people would sit around, and they’d read books, and they’d read every piece of quest text. That’s not the kind of thing that people get into from a storytelling standpoint any more.

We are trying to figure out ways to deliver interesting stories, not just through quests, but visually. We talk a lot about Fallout 3. They did a great job with their visual storytelling.

You go to a place, and without hearing anybody talk, you’d walk into a room. There’d be a little vignette, let’s say, two skeletons laying on a bed. That’s a story. It’s told through the world, without anybody actually having a quest bang over their head.

Those are the kind of things that we’re really trying to take a look at, and evolve storytelling in a persistent world so that it’s more core to the kind of game that we’re making.

The MMO Gamer: So, in other words, you aren’t of the little box three inches wide by five inches long telling you to go kill fifteen rats constitutes a story, school of thought?

Chad Moore: [laughter] Yes, I think that’s not the greatest way to tell a story.

The MMO Gamer: If you had your druthers, just what would be the greatest way to tell a story?

Chad Moore: [laughter] I don’t think that I can get into those specifics, right now.

Matt Mocarski: Just to add to that, just to add to how important it is for Carbine to tell a story in our game: We’re a new IP.

Nobody knows anything about our world. Nobody knows anything about our characters. There’s not ten or fifteen years of history of our franchise.

We don’t have anything to pull from. So when people play our game, we need to sell that. We need to explain. They need to understand our world, how this world works.

Whether through visual storytelling or literal text storytelling, we’re going to be presenting story across a lot of different ways to the player.

The MMO Gamer: We’ve established, I think, that you aren’t planning on making a clone.

But there’s a clone, and then there’s taking a hodgepodge of other features that have come before. You can do that very effectively, but it’s not the same thing as going out on a limb and trying something original.

I’ve put this question to Matt Firor over at ZeniMax, who are also making a spooky, can’t-tell-you-anything-about-it MMO, and I’d like to put the same question to you now: Is innovation in the MMO genre overrated?

Jeremy Gaffney: I would argue no. Here’s why: When you look at the games that have come out, regardless of anyone’s opinion on any given game, it’s rare that one comes out that doesn’t at least have one cool new thing that hasn’t been done before.

Every now and again, you get a game that tries to do a whole bunch of stuff. The way in which your question is right, that innovation is overrated, is that if you don’t have a polished game, then I would say it doesn’t matter how much innovation you have.

If you’re going to do a half-assed job on the basics, then you can innovate all you want, you’re still going to drop a huge portion of your audience off a cliff. They can’t get into your game, can’t figure it out, kind of don’t like it, it kind of doesn’t feel right, you didn’t tune all your combat stuff right, and so on.

Step one is polish the crap out of it and make sure your game is well-tuned, balanced, and all that kind of stuff. It sounds basic, but if you’ve got deadlines looming down, you’ve got execs who are going to crack on your head if it’s not out by the end of your fiscal year… It’s very tough in that environment to do that.

It’s one of the benefits of being in a company where we have less of that sort of executive pressure. The game companies that succeed are the ones who do it right like that. You just have to. Now, you don’t want to ship in 2020 if you’re starting in 2005, but you have to take the time to do it right.

The MMO Gamer: Most developers these days seem to work with an eye toward keeping players subscribed for as long as humanly possible through the use of-to borrow a coined term-cockblocks, and other assorted timesinks.

Is that a wise approach? Or should the focus be more on fun? Let the player advance through the game the way they want to, and not worry about whether they’re going to be paying their $15 next month because they’ve seen everything?

Jeremy Gaffney: Here’s a theory on that that I’ll give you. We’re not big believers in timesinks. What we try to do, and we’re setting up again in its given area, or given quest flow, is really to tune it so that it’s on as opposed to tuning it so it’s going to suck up any amount of your time.

We want you to see this zone for as long as there’s neat, cool stuff to see in it, and then move you on to the next area. As opposed to, “Hey, we’ve got to burn fifteen more hours so we’d better give you a couple ‘Kill 500 Goblins’ quests.

The era of the straight-up grind is past. Now, one thing that games have done very cleverly that has disguised that quite successfully, is to give you…

The MMO Gamer: The quest grind?

Jeremy Gaffney: What the quest grind has become in our industry is, “Let’s give you a fair number of very simple tasks to do in a given area, where you’ve got to kill this bunch of goblins, and you’ve got to pick up these old rocks off the ground. You’ve got a trade skill, here’s a mining note you can hit.”

Even though each of the tasks is individually simple, they’re layered on top of one another, so that if you’re maybe not a very bright player, you can still make it through and do it in whatever order. It doesn’t matter.

If you’re very efficient, then you can figure out exactly the right order to do it in, so you’re twenty percent faster. If you are really focused on one area, you want to do trade skills and not the other stuff if you can avoid it all, you can play the game in that fashion.

It’s actually a very clever setup, but it’s also kind of the setup of the last generation of MMOs. While that worked great for the last batch, I think you really need to improve on that moving forward, in terms of having better quest depth and complexity, and having more quests where you’re doing unique things.

The MMO Gamer: Such as?

Jeremy Gaffney: One of our quest theories is that each quest should show you something new. Whether that be a new gameplay style, because we have a very clever scripting system which lets us do all sorts of neat stuff.

Is it going to show you a new style of gameplay? Is it going to show you a new area, a new art thing you haven’t seen before? Be able to have each quest give you something interesting. If it doesn’t have anything interesting, why do it? Why does the player want to do it, other than just getting their little bar to go up? That has been sufficient in the industry for a while.

If you do any quests beyond that string of very simple quests, it’s a pleasant extra, but I think you’re going to see more and more of that coming out as these games mature.

Chad Moore: I would just also say that since you’ve got such a huge user base now of MMO players, like Jeremy’s saying, they’ve seen all that.

There’s going to be an expectation from those people to raise the bar. We have just been attempting to do that on the quest design side, on the scripting side.

Having the super talents on our team always makes even simple quests look better. We’ve really, really attempted to increase the complexity of the quest and the mechanics to make more interesting gameplay possible.

The MMO Gamer: Back in the olden days, I’m sure we all remember the olden days, there weren’t that many quests to begin with. If you wanted one, you had to run around hitting “H” to every NPC you saw, in every town, until one of them finally talked back.

These days, you get to the little golden question mark, or silver exclamation point, or whatever the cheesy “I have a quest” icon is, and the quest grind has replaced the “just go out and find a camp” grind-but it’s still a grind in the end.

I guess my question is, when the hell are we going to stop grinding?

Jeremy Gaffney: Well, there’s grinding, and then there’s grinding. Grinding, literally, is doing the same thing over and over again. So, anything you can do within your quest variation to keep that from happening, keeps you engaged enough that it doesn’t feel like a grind.

One of the great things about the quest grind, when that first came out, was that you didn’t feel like you were grinding anymore, because you weren’t sitting in a field killing one monster over and over.

Now you’re being dragged off to go do whatever the next thing was on that little list on the side of your thing. You’re going to go to the next one, and the next one.

There’s a place for that, the same place as you expand it from killing fields of monsters into killing fields of quests. You still get XP for killing monsters, it’s just not become your focus anymore. Some of the elements of that are fun, and you want to carry those on. But, I think the era has passed where you can have that be your only way of doing things.

I’m a believer in advancement in a number of different ways. There are more systems than just killing stuff in the game, and there’s more systems than just following your quest log through a game.

Chad Moore: One of the things we’ve been really trying to innovate upon, which alleviates a little bit of that feeling of the quest grind is just how we deliver quests.

Really trying to break out of the “you go to a camp and there’s five quest bangs, that’s where you get all you content.”

We’re really trying to push the idea that you go out into the world and content comes to you in creative ways. I’m a big fan of not having to follow that same sort of real structured framework of “get quests here, backing them all up, go to the next place, getting those quests there, backing those all up.” I think there’s definitely room for innovation to be done, and we’ve been innovative on that front.

Jeremy Gaffney: At this point in the interview a bunch of NCSoft execs have rushed into the room, thrown a burlap sack over Chad’s head, and dragged him away screaming.

All: [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: So, are any of you guys role-players? Like polyhedral dice, thousand page rule book role-players?

Jeremy Gaffney: Were you to go into our conference room right now, you would see that we have two projectors. One projector’s pointing at the wall, on which we can show lovely PowerPoint presentations to get your funding and impress cool press people.

The other projector points at the table, so we can display maps for role-playing games.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, so that answers that question.

Matt Mocarski: I think there are like four games going on right now.

The MMO Gamer: Where I was going with this was, I was a hardcore role-playing nerd back in high school. I was the guy with the deck of Magic cards and the d20 dice in his backpack.

But, I never got the urge to role-play in a modern MMO. I did in MUDs, but once graphics came along-I mean, how can you role-play killing 15 rats? It’s not exactly heroic.

Do you think we can ever get that experience back, will there ever be an MMO-like yours, for instance-where somebody could get back into that pen and paper feel and find the urge to role-play in an MMO again?

Jeremy Gaffney: I think the things that helps that the most is when you see games that have more sand-box attitudes. The less that you’re on rails, the more opportunity you have to make your own decisions and that kind of thing.

One of the reasons you so rarely see interesting choices in MMOs is because it’s very expensive to have multiple tracks of content. If you’re going to do a game where you have the good to each side, and the good choice and the evil choice for any given quest and 14 different ways to solve it, you end up with a massive amount of content which half your players might never see.

I think that’s what kept the industry from doing a lot of that stuff. But over time, as you get more efficient at being able to make content, and you have better tools and scripting and all that sort of good stuff to do it with, I think you’ll see more of that.

We love-role playing ourselves and we love embracing it; we certainly plan on providing whatever reasonable amount of support for it we can, but simultaneously, we also know there’s a lot of players who don’t do it and have not touched it.

We really try and let everybody play in their own fashion more than anything else. But I think, overall, the industry is getting more sand-boxy, rather than less, and I think that helps that crowd as well.

That’s why you saw such a bunch of role-players in Ultima Online, since it’s a pure sand-box game in many ways, and that’s why saw so many evil creepers going in, pwning and looting said role-players.

The MMO Gamer: Ah yes, those were the days.

Jeremy Gaffney: Yes, I’m guessing which side you might have been on in that. [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: I was about 13 years old at the time, so that should make it a very easy guess.

Anyway, to your point, Ultima Online was, to corrupt the title, the ultimate sand-box.

If you wanted to you could go down to a lake, catch a fish, put it in a jar, take it back to your house, put it in your aquarium and feed it.

You can’t exactly do that in an MMO these days. You’re lucky if you can even get a house to begin with.

Is it just my imagination, or has there been a constant paring down of features since they hit a high-water mark with UO?

Jeremy Gaffney: I think a part of that is you went from 2D to 3D, generating assets got much more expensive.

Also, in UO, you could build a piano out of lumps of coal by stacking them just the right way, so that at a certain camera angle it looked like you had a piano in your room. That doesn’t happen any more in 3D.

It’s a lot tougher to give you those building blocks for people to play with. But there’s just some great concepts in there, too, that I think are worth revisiting, and I think the industry as a whole could learn from some of that freedom that you allow players to do.

UO was great with their whole housing system and their ability to decorate and give you a sense of ownership. That’s very powerful stuff and I’m not sure, really, that it’s been repeated yet.

There’s one thing, too, that’s very tricky about games, and these MMOs in particular, which is: they launch with a feature set, and that’s the feature set they have forever.

You play your game, you like it or didn’t like it, then you drop out after six months and that’s you vision of that game forever. The games that have managed to reinvent themselves and really add over time have been able to do a lot of that stuff.

Building your own base in City of Heroes feels awesome, it gives a lot of that power, and complexity and coolness, but it’s also very tough to get people to go back in and experience that sort of thing when they played the game, they’re only playing the new stuff that comes out.

A lot of depth in UO happened because they were able to do that over time, and extend that game over time when there weren’t a lot of alternatives to play, as opposed to now when there’s new MMOs that come out on a fairly regular basis to keep you distracted and keep you from seeing the neat stuff that gets added into a game.

The MMO Gamer: One of my other major issues as a player is the static nature of most MMO worlds.

In most MMOs, you could walk up to some NPC in the starting city, and get a quest to kill 15 rats.

Quit the game for five years, go back, and that same NPC is still there, in the exact same spot, offering that exact same quest to kill the exact same 15 rats.

How do you get past that stagnation? That feeling that everything is freeze-dried for years at a time?

Jeremy Gaffney: Those same NCSoft execs are about to run in the room with more burlap sacks.

There are some fantastic answers to that and I think games are way, way, way too static. The… and uh… yes!

Chad Moore: Go ahead and shut that off. [reaches toward voice recorder]

The MMO Gamer: Moving on, then!

Since I’m sure just about everything else I could think of is still off limits at this point, is there anything that you guys, personally, want to talk about before we go?

Matt Mocarski: As much as everybody wants to see it, we want to show it, but those are delicate things and they go through more people than the dev team.

If there one place where we’re going to have to shuffle around with other NCSoft companies, it’s how we release our announcements and everything.

We want to show it as much as you guys want to see it. Jeremy, and Chad and myself all want to talk about it because that’s all we do.

If we didn’t love it, we wouldn’t want to talk about it. We’re all excited about it and it’s not up to us exactly what we can say about it. I can’t wait for you guys to see it and I want to hear your reactions. That’s about it.

Chad Moore: I’ll take the burlap bag off quickly here. I think given the team that we have and a lot of those people have a lot of MMO experience, we just have some good insight to the places where the genre could use some improvement.

We have people that have done this many, many times before. I think that’s one of the coolest things about our team and about our game is that we’re really trying to push the envelope in those places that, probably most people would agree, need to be improved.

For me that’s the coolest thing about being at Carbine.

Jeremy Gaffney: Plus, we’re a whole company of gamers. We’re just making games we think ought to be made, and want to play, truth be told.

It’s a combination of being sure you don’t reinvent stuff just for the sake of being different and you reinvent stuff where you can really add something to the whole mix.

It’s a balancing act.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, thank all of you for joining us, we appreciate it, and we hope we can do it again some time.

Stay tuned to The MMO Gamer for more information as it becomes available regarding Carbine’s mystery title. In the meanwhile, you can visit the company’s official website: http://www.carbinestudios.com

This year, with GDC once again on the horizon, I decided to give The Mines of Moria a shot, in part so that I would have fresh material to discuss.

This strategy worked out well. Rather than having to resort to griping of a generalist sort, as I have to with most of my interviews, I was able to hone my gripes for him to a fine-tipped point.

Of course, we did manage to squeeze in a few non-gripe related questions, as well…

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sitting here with Jeffrey Steefel, who is still the executive producer of The Lord of The Rings Online, so no need to reintroduce himself.

Let’s start off by trying to fill everybody in on where LoTRO is, as compared to last year. You just launched your first expansion in November, and had a major content patch, how has everything been going?

Jeffrey Steefel: Great! I mean, Moria has been awesome, everybody loves it. All of our players have gotten into it, we had a huge adoption of existing players. It’s also brought in a whole bunch of new players, which is what we wanted to have happen.

It’s won awards, all that kind of stuff, but bottom line is that we accomplished what we wanted to do. We set out to make it a place that feels unlike any other place anyone’s ever been in an MMO, just in terms of size and scale.

I feel like we really did that, and kind of getting that coming back from players, so that’s cool.

Moria came out in November, and just last week we launched Book 7 which opens up a lot of Lothlórien, an all new reputation faction, and a bunch of other things that we did to the game, including some things we did to the early part of the game.

For some of the new players coming in, we really streamlined the first 15 levels, so that players get pulled in much more quickly than they did before.

You know, MMOs and their audiences have changed a lot. What five or six years ago was fun is a little less fun, now.

The MMO Gamer: You also lowered the leveling curve in your last patch, how are players responding to that?

Jeffrey Steefel: Overall, I think really good. Change is always hard for some players, so there’s always people who feel like-

The MMO Gamer: I’m sure people who were already 60 were like “You screwed us over!”

Jeffrey Steefel: Exactly! [laughing] But I think overall it’s been good, and we tried to make it a nice balanced change across all the levels.

The work that we did in levels one to fifteen we’re actually starting to continue forward to some of the later levels, too.

So, some of the spoke-and-wheel quest dynamics that were in the game at launch, “go get it come back,” “go get it come back,” “go get it come back,” we’re trying to get rid of that and make it feel more like “I am going to find the thing I’m looking for, and succeed. The things that I need to continue on my adventure are nearby.”

We’ve learned over the last three years that there’s a difference between exploration and aimless wandering. So, we’re trying to do that as much as possible.

We also added a quest guide, which is in beta and in a few weeks we’re going to turn on for everyone.

You can turn it off if you don’t like it, but it basically gives you an awful lot of direction when you’re on a quest about where you need to go.

The MMO Gamer: On the subject of that hub-and-spoke quest system…

I’ve been playing Moria for a couple weeks now, and I was hoping that it would address one of the major gripes that I had with the game.

I brought up one of my other gripes with you last year, the size of the map, and that gripe I thought was addressed with Moria, you guys nailed the size dead on.

So, my gripe for this year is quests.

I had high hopes that you had learned from your past mistakes, as you said, the “back and forth, back, and forth, back and forth…”

But then, I started on the epic quest line that begins the opening of the door to Moria.

The first quest was to bring some guys their lunch. The quest after that was “fix our pickaxes.” And the quest after that was “move some rocks.”

I have to tell you, I was not really feeling the hero for quite a while.

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“Get ready to write fast!” a woman from the prior group warned us, and I soon found out why: The video we were shown consisted of various maps, concept art, and rendered scenes, overlaid with ever-shifting catch phrases designed to invoke myths and conspiracies from the world over.

I surreptitiously tried to take pictures of the screen when some of the better lines flashed up-not an easy thing to do when you have a full-size SLR-but was quickly chastised by Erling, Funcom’s product manager, that there were to be “No photos!”

A few of the lines that stuck out to me the most were, “Bees are the Key,” “The Great Eye is Watching,” and “The New World Order is Old.”

If those aren’t cryptic enough for you, try “EVERYTHING IS TRUE” on for size.

I’m sure that at least one of the people who sat through it managed to take down the entire laundry list, so if you’re so inclined, just search for any of those on Google and it should come up.

I won’t get into too much detail on what was discussed during the overview. When covering MMOs I find it’s best to abide by the old adage of “Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see.” I haven’t seen anything of the actual game, yet.

But, afterward, we each got to take turns interrogating Ragnar himself.

As he told us up front that they weren’t yet at the point of giving concrete details, I wasn’t going to waste our time trying to get him to come up with two dozen variations on the phrase “We are not prepared to discuss that.”

Instead, looking back on his career as a storyteller, I decided to delve into some often-neglected subjects in the MMO world…

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Funcom.

Ragnar Tørnquist: My name is Ragnar. I am both the creative director at Funcom, and the producer/director of The Secret World.

The MMO Gamer: Now, The Secret World you’re not ready to reveal too many details about yet, so I’ll spare us both and try to talk about a subject that hopefully we can get into.

It’s a subject that’s very near and dear to my heart, and I’m sure it’s one very near and dear to yours as well: Storytelling and world-building in games.

As a general overview to start us off, what would you say the state of storytelling in MMOs is in the present day?

Ragnar Tørnquist: I think most MMO games disregard the story, or see the story as just a way to explain quests.

I don’t think the genre has matured on the storytelling side-or I should say the MMO genre, in particular, because I do think that storytelling in games in general has become very strong and very interesting.

A lot of good stuff is happening with single player games, and everybody is putting a lot of focus on it. That hasn’t been true for MMOs.

I personally think that Age of Conan did a really good job on that in the early parts of the game. I think they put a good emphasis on it.

Of course, they still had the old symptom of the player being “The Chosen One” who is trusted to save the world.

The MMO Gamer: Well, that’s been true of most RPGs through the years.

Ragnar Tørnquist: It’s always particularly hard to get around that in an MMO, because of course that’s the natural way to create the game. To say, “You are the one. You have to go out and save the world. It’s all on you.”

But, in an MMO you can’t do that without it seeming a bit silly.

I play a lot of MMOs, and I always feel slightly embarrassed when the quest-giver greets me at the end and says, “You saved us, you saved us all! You are the chosen one! You are the one that’s going to set things right!” And then I see another guy behind me, I know he’s going to get the same greeting.

That doesn’t sit well with me.

The MMO Gamer: How do you go about addressing that problem, then?

Ragnar Tørnquist: I think we address it by constantly keeping it in mind. We don’t make the player out to be the hero, we just made the player a hero, part of the army.

We always acknowledge the status quo that is an inherent part of MMOs, and it’s a huge challenge.

Because what happens after you’re done, when you finish a mission or you’re through with part of the game? It sort of goes back to way it was, doesn’t it? We’re acknowledging that.

At the same time too, we hope to be able to do things in the long run which changes the world. I’m not making any promises here about that, but after launch I do want to make sure that the game feels like it’s evolving, that the world does change, that the story does progress.

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He asked if there was anything I was interested in. I told him there was.

“I would be very interested in doing an interview with you about the founding of NetDevil.”

I steeled myself for him to start shaking his head, or even worse, respond with the dreaded “I’ll have to talk to PR about that.”

Instead, he smiled broadly and said, “Sure! You want to do it right now?”

I did.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us, and tell us a little about what it is you do at NetDevil.

Scott Brown: I’m Scott Brown, the president of NetDevil, which means I don’t do a lot of anything anymore. Really my role these days is executive producer for the most part over all the various games.

The MMO Gamer: Way back, before you didn’t have to do anything, is going to be the focus of this particular interview.

You are one of the few people who has founded an MMO studio from the ground up, and maintained its success through the years while keeping your position as the head of the company-without being gobbled up and forced out.

I guess my first question is: How have you managed it?

Scott Brown: Well, “shoestring” is the answer. We had a web company before this, and we went through the learning curve of all the mistakes to make then, so we’ve always been careful.

We treat every cent as gold, grow only when we have to, buy a new chair only when we have to. You just have to live that way, it allows you to survive the tough times.

But we grew fast, faster than I would’ve imagined. We grew almost 50% a year. The first year’s not so impressive, when you go from three to five people, you know what I mean? But, it kept going. Last year about this time were about 80, 85 people. And now we’re about 125 people, so it’s continuing.

Every year we think it can’t possibly grow like that next year, and we just continue to grow. We’re lucky that even in as bad of times as it is, everybody wants an online game.

Whether it’s IP, or some game we want to make ourselves, there are a lot of people who want online games right now, so we’ve just been in a good space.

The MMO Gamer: The first hour of the first day, when you made the decision to found NetDevil, what was that like?

Scott Brown: Well, to be honest, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. So there wasn’t really one day to found NetDevil, I’d always wanted to make a game company.

Embarrassingly, I’d always just wanted to make games, and I couldn’t get a job in the industry. It’s a tough industry, as everybody knows, you face the chicken and the egg problem a little bit. The first question someone asks you when you apply at a game company is “What games have you made?” So it’s very difficult to get over that initial hump.

I just got lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. There was no planning, I won’t claim anything. We had built a company that was building educational software while I was in college, and happened to fall into business application training.

We had no vision for that, and in four years we were suddenly 100 people, it was 1997 in the tech boom, and we got bought.

I was only a small owner, I was basically the CTO, if you will, only because I was the engineer that had been there the longest. But I don’t know that it was the right title.

It gave me enough money to be able to quit, and the first thing I did, it wasn’t even a thought, was like, now I’m making our game company. That was it.

The MMO Gamer: That statement, “all you wanted to do was make games,” is a very familiar one. If you asked 100 different people at GDC, 99 of them would say that was why they got into the industry.

But, they would also give you 99 different answers as to why they wanted to make games in the first place. What’s yours?

Scott Brown: Well, I’ve always loved games. When I was in fourth grade, I was in a program at my elementary school called Leap. It meant that I got to go get computer time at the end of every day, and our school had just gotten these Apple IIs.

They took us into a room and they showed us Lemonade Stand, if you remember that game. It’s basically a game where you saw the weather tomorrow and you guessed how many things of lemonade to make, and if you guessed opposite of the trend and you were right, you’d make a whole bunch of money, and if you didn’t, you wouldn’t, you’d lose a lot of money.

And then they started teaching us BASIC, and that was it. As soon as I saw that I was like, this is what I want to do.

When I was early in college we were playing a lot of this game called Warbirds. And I’d played a lot of Battletech Online, and GEnie, some of those services that were out at the time, starting to use online games. And as soon as I played those, I was like, that’s all I ever want to do.

The MMO Gamer: What was the draw to online games in particular?

Scott Brown: Worlds with other players are way more interesting to me than anything else. So, that was it.

It was like, okay, that’s the kind of games we’re going to make. And when we started the company we were like, let’s go make the games that nobody’s making that we desperately want to play.

So maybe that’s bad, and maybe it’s why we’ve struggled, but we don’t do marketing analysis. Like, “based on these numbers, and this thing, this is the right kind of game to make.”

We make the games we desperately want to play that for some reason no one else is making.

At the time when we started, we did a little survey on some web boards and said, “What kind of an MMO that’s not being made would you want? What online worlds would you want?”

The number one answer was space, and the number two was cars. And so, JumpGate and AutoAssault, right? I mean, really it was that simple.

It was just like, “Yep, we want to play these.” There’s a bunch of people out there that seemed – not a bunch, I shouldn’t say – but, you know, rough polls showed that people seemed to agree that these aren’t made, and so we made them.

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The MMO Gamer: Could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us about your role at ZeniMax Online?

Matt Firor: Sure. I’m Matt Firor. I’m the president of Zenimax Online; we’re the online-development studio of ZeniMax Media. ZeniMax Media also owns Bethesda Softworks, so we’re kind of sister companies.

My role is the head of the studio; they hired me to make MMOs. That involves hiring people, designing a game first, and then hopefully games later.

The MMO Gamer: It’s been over a year since ZeniMax Online was announced. Can you give us an update on the progress you’ve made in assembling the team, setting up the company?

Matt Firor: In the last year, we’ve staffed upward of about – I think just about 40 people now, maybe a little more. We have a game design that we’re working on right now that has been cemented in the last year, so we know what project we’re doing now.

We licensed some middleware; we licensed the Hero Engine and middleware from Simutronics so that gave us a good start on content and art pipelines. So, we’re moving right along. Our biggest problem right now is finding people to work; we can’t hire fast enough; as everyone knows, you need huge teams to make these things.

The MMO Gamer: What sort of team are you looking at, eventually?

Matt Firor: Not really sure totally yet. We’re probably going to have around 100 developers, and then there’s lots of other people besides that that every studio needs. And then, of course, after launch, we’ll need customer support and things like that. So it’s going to be a big place.

The MMO Gamer: Is everything going to be based in Maryland?

Matt Firor: ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks are in Rockville, Maryland, which is near Washington, D.C. We’re in Hunt Valley, Maryland; so it’s near Baltimore; so it’s a somewhat different area. All of the development will be done there, and probably at least some of the customer service.

The MMO Gamer: You’ve been in the industry for quite a long time. Ten or twenty years ago, where did you think things would be today?

Matt Firor: Twenty years ago in 1988 was my first game. Iit was multi-user; but it wasn’t online, because there was no online then. Ten years ago, we were more worried about graphics and making things look good enough for people to play.

We were also worried a lot about modem speeds, because broadband wasn’t that big as it is in the States back then. But, looking forward, we probably would’ve thought it would be where it is right now; we all knew it was going to be big.

But we were in the industry; the problem was all the other people that didn’t know about the industry. I easily could’ve thought that there would’ve been a game with millions of subscribers in 10 years from 1998; I could’ve seen that. I wish it was my game, though. [laughs]

The MMO Gamer: What do you think the next ten years will bring?

Matt Firor: I don’t think there’s going to be as much innovation in the next 10 years as there was in the last 10 years, because there were so many technological hurdles that had to be overcome. So now, I think, people will focus more on gameplay and actually making online games be games and not just technological exercises, which it needed to be.

But, now, it’s going to become much more focused on “What does the user want?”, not “What can we give the user?” So it’s a lot more development, like single-player games have been in the past, where a lot more thought is given to exactly who your market is, whom you’re going to appeal to, what’s the revenue model–

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The MMO Gamer: Could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us what you do at Star Vault?

Mats Persson: I’m Mats Persson, I’m the Creative Director at Star Vault and also involved in game design. My main focus is to keep the graphics quality and concept consistent.

The MMO Gamer: Could you tell us a little bit about Mortal Online? What is it about?

Mats Persson: Mortal Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that I believe is one of the first in its genre which is entirely in first person. Mortal Online is also a sandbox game as opposed to a theme park game. We want our world to be free and we want you as a player to do as you like. We have no levels and the game is entirely skill based. That’s about it, I would say, as an explanation.

The MMO Gamer: Could you tell us more about the sandbox aspect of the game?

Mats Persson: I would explain the sandbox versus the theme park [difference] as the theme park being based on you getting into the theme park and standing there in line, waiting for the attractions to open, waiting in line for your turn. Then you ride the ride and they’re fun, often based on a short theme of concept, a quest. When the ride’s over, the game is almost over, there’s not much to do in between the rides.

The sandbox game is based on you having the tools to do whatever you would like to do. Like for instance if you want to set up an arena and taking bets for fights? You can do that. Or do you want to be a horse tamer? Do you be a woodcrafter and sell your stuff through markets in game, that is also possible. The world is free for you to do whatever you like in a much wider aspect I would say, than in a theme park game.

The MMO Gamer: The game trailer says that it uses the in-game engine, what engine is the game based on?

Mats Persson: It’s based on Unreal Engine 3 together with Epic Games China with their Atlas system for the network and MMO engine.

We also collaborate with Growm for creating terrain, large scale terrain.

The MMO Gamer: Star Vault is a public company in Sweden. How is the development of Mortal Online being funded?

Mats Persson: It’s funded by private investors, just like any other public company. We don’t have a publisher and we’re not looking for a publisher. We want to be owned by ourselves and want to own our own product. We are tired of getting interrupted midway in a production or changing directions because some marketing guy somewhere decides that “Oh no, this graphical style is not the one that is popular right now.” So we want to take this product from start to finish by ourselves.

The MMO Gamer: So you are going to self-publish the title?

Mats Persson: Most likely, yes.

The MMO Gamer: How far along is the development of Mortal Online? Is there a release horizon?

Mats Persson: Yeah, we’re talking about releasing in Summer 2009. It’s actually hard to tell when Mortal Online’s development actually started. We started the final production of Mortal Online in 2007 but work has been done on Mortal Online for several years now. It was not until 2007 that we officially acquired Unreal Engine 3.

The MMO Gamer: Okay. The website talks about a very complex combat system with mounted combat and a skill based combat system. How would those work?

Mats Persson: We want the player experience to depend as much as possible on your own input and not by pre-scripted attack spawns. It’s a first person game and as such the combat has to be more [high] tempo; it will still be a bit slow compared to the bunny-jumping in other first person titles. It’s not an action game in that aspect but we have managed to keep a pretty high tempo in our combat. And we say that it is player skill based as opposed to character skill based meaning that the character can only evolve that much in [their] skills, it’s more important what you as a player brings to the game.

I think you could say that you have to find the right balance for your own playing style, meaning that if you’re more of a tactical player with good coordination, maybe you should go for a spell casting type of skill setup. If you want brute action from start to finish, then you could go for a melee combat, or stronger character build. A good action player will be a good action character in our game because the game is based on player skill more than character skill.

The MMO Gamer: We’re here with Marco Berhmann to talk about Entropia Universe. Could you please begin by introducing yourself and telling us what you do at MindArk?

Marco Berhmann: My name is Marco Berhmann. I’m the Information Director and also Community Director for Entropia Universe, this means I have one foot in the marketing camp and one foot in the development camp of Entropia Universe.

The MMO Gamer: We’d like to start off with a few business questions about MindArk. There was talk about an IPO, what is the status of that?

Marco Berhmann: It’s still ongoing and being evaluated, I don’t have deep information about what is going on with it right now. But I know it’s an ongoing conversation between MindArk the company and Credit Suisse, the bank who is holding it all together.

The MMO Gamer: What kind of effect would the IPO have on the company and the game in the future?

Marco Berhmann: It will supply us with resources in order to grow a lot and also [turn] us into a really big player on the market

The MMO Gamer: We spoke about this a year ago, about MindArk’s expansion into China with Entropia Universe. How is that going?

Marco Berhmann: It’s going well, [there are] a lot of things to do. We are currently developing the SDK kit, and our Chinese partners, CRD, are currently estimating how they want to pursue in detail with their endeavor. They have a more trade focus, and a more e-commerce focus using the Entropia Universe platform than an ordinary MMO like it has been used up until today. And things are moving along.

The MMO Gamer: What can you tell us about the implementation of CryEngine 2?

Marco Berhmann: It’s an ongoing process, our main workforce is working non-stop in order to get it ready, it will probably take a few more months but we’re getting there. And the test results are truly amazing.

The MMO Gamer: When can we expect the implementation to launch?

Marco Berhmann: I dare not say, but at the end of the year, hopefully.

The MMO Gamer: So, in our last interview a year ago, we talked about MindArk’s goal of reaching 150 million users worldwide with its expansion into China. What steps are being taken to reach that goal?

Marco Berhmann: Well, the first step is to get the CryEngine release up and running. And the 150 million [user] goal is a couple of years into the future. We expect 2-4 million [users] within the first 18 months of release of the Chinese portal planet.

The MMO Gamer: When will the first partner systems, portal planets, hit the game?

Marco Berhmann: Sometime during 2009, probably earlier [rather] than later.

The MMO Gamer: What can we expect from the first planets in terms of their gameplay, their focus? Will they differ from Calypso (Editor’s note: Calypso is the current game world/planet of Entropia Universe), the more regular MMO-type game?

Marco Berhmann: Currently we have three confirmed partners [who] are going to develop planets within Entropia Universe. We have about 10-15 more [parties] in discussion. One of the partners, called Creative Kingdom, they are doing a very much hard core MMO with story-lines and quests and so on.

And then the CRD, the Chinese partner, is doing the e-commerce point of view on the planet. And the third company is a media company in the US that has tie-in with Hollywood and broadcast networks and so on in order to get a more entertainment and media approach. So it is a great mix of various planets. I mean, once you have an avatar in Entropia Universe you can join any of these planets.

The MMO Gamer: It seems like the world of Entropia Universe is growing into more than just Calypso and the game and more as a platform for other people to create games in as well?

Marco Berhmann: That’s our vision. MindArk supplies a genuine platform that has been in development for 10 years, we have invested $40 million US dollars into it and it’s a secure platform for handling micro transactions and real cash economy systems, exchange rates and the artificial supply and demand system and payment providers.

Everything in the structure together with the CryEngine 2 development tools, so you get a complete package when you [become] a partner. The thing you need is a content development team and a vision of what you want to do with the platform.

The MMO Gamer: Speaking of CryEngine2, are there any worries that it will keep certain players out because [it is such a] high end game graphics engine?

Marco Berhmann: That’s something of a misunderstanding, because the CryEngine 2 has a lot of configurability, you can configure it to allow for quite an old system and it would still run. Of course it won’t get all the bells and whistles of the graphics engine but it should work.

The MMO Gamer: So you won’t need a Crysis-capable computer to be able to play Entropia?

Marco Berhmann: No.

The MMO Gamer: As a last question, is there anything we haven’t brought up that you’d like to highlight about MindArk and Entropia Universe?

Marco Berhmann: Well I think it’s pretty funny that we are sitting here now, 5 years after the release of a completely novel concept. Not many people believed in the business model that we use.

MindArk the company has been profitable since 2004. We’re here and have a platform in development and that we’re taking on new partners. Our vision is to present Entropia Universe as a three-dimensional browser.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us and we’re looking forward to hearing more about Entropia Universe.

I didn’t think I liked space-based MMOs, until I played Jumpgate Evolution at GC08. This impression is based partly on a demo of the game, as well as actual hands-on time as it was being showcased at the Saitek booth along with the company’s joysticks.

The presentation was given by Michael Rowland, producer for Jumpgate Evolution at Codemasters, while the gameplay was shown by Grace Wong from NetDevil using an alpha build of the game.

Michael talked about the basics of the game, mentioning the focus on fast-paced twitch combat, controlled mainly through keyboard and mouse, though joysticks may be used instead. The game’s class system is based around licenses, where different licenses give the player access to different equipment.

Examples of these licenses were space truckers or miners, which use different types of ships and other equipment to fulfil their roles.

Although the game is focused around combat, Jumpgate Evolution is making room for a player economy with mining and manufacturing being in the center. Different manufacturing plants found throughout the game world specialize in creating different items and players will need to find these to make use of them.

They also talked about the background story of the game, a lot of it written by Keith Baker of Dungeons & Dragons fame. He is most known for his work on the Eberron setting in which Dungeons & Dragons Online from Turbine takes place.

Factions are also said to be an important part of the game with different factions available within each of the three nations with a reputation system being based around these factions and the missions players do for them.

An interesting note on the mission system is that if several people enter an area where they have the same objective, they do not need to be grouped together to be able to share the experience points. Michael said this would cut down on spawn camping though one might wonder how exactly this will work so that only those who do the actual work gets the rewards from the encounters.

Later during my visit at GC Germany, I ran into the game being displayed at the Saitek booth. The game was playable and the system was hooked into using a joystick and thruster.

I’m not a huge fan of using them and I’ve avoided them in the past, but since the game rig was provided by Saitek, who of course wanted mainly to show off their products, I had to bite the apple and give it a go.

And I wasn’t disappointed.

I started off in the starting area with a goal to destroy several pirate ships circling debris. After stumbling around with the thruster and the joystick for a few minutes due to my inexperience I finally got the hang of the basics of moving and attacking. And the fun started immediately.

The combat in Jumpgate Evolution is fast-paced and from what I experienced in the early stage of the game, it is twitch based, meaning you shoot the moment you hold down the trigger/mouse button. Using the thruster and the joystick also created a more immersive environment during movement and combat as I flew around asteroids and passed space stations in my dogfights against the pirates.

The atmosphere and immersion the game provided was refreshing and I can say that I haven’t had either feeling recently when playing an MMOG.

What Jumpgate Evolution could use some more work on would be the UI, which seemed a bit cluttery to me, with unnecessary parts such as the large square area in the top left corner showing an animated rendering of whatever you have currently targeted. It might have some use later in the game or it may not but at a first glance, it simply added to the clutter.

In the graphics department, Jumpgate Evolution doesn’t fall in the high-end category and the producer explains that they don’t want to have high system requirements for the game. The graphics aren’t bad and the style fits the game well from what little I saw during my flights and short combat sessions.

Overall, I had fun playing the game even if it was only for a short time and I am looking forward to giving the game another go, making it one of the few games at GC Germany that piqued my interest.

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.