Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

by Cody “Micajah” Bye

In the realm of free-to-play games, no publisher is more respected than K2 Networks. With a full stable of well-localized games and an adherence to the free-to-play model, K2 Networks epitomizes most of the things we look for in a free-to-play publisher; they have a variety of free-to-play games in multiple genres, all of the games are translated and localized well, and they work hard to crack down on gold farmers and spammers. Really, it’s all anyone can ask from the free-to-play provider.

Phil and Cody give the thumbs up!

One of the more recent games to fall into the K2 fold is Red Stone, a top-down-view fantasy-based MMOG that’s trying to bring in players that fell in love with games like Diablo, Baldur’s Gate, or Fallout. It’s reminiscent of an older style of gameplay, but it still functions according to the precepts set by modern day MMOGs. It’s an interesting premise and one that could work for K2.

Since we’ve spent so much time at Ten Ton Hammer discussing Sword of the New World and what that game has brought to the Western market, I decided it was time to take a look at a different K2 game coming out. Red Stone was my target, and I sat down with K2’s Phil Maurer to learn what I could about the game. With all the hub-bub of a conference going on around us, we found a quiet spot in the press room and talked, in general, about what Red Stone was all about.

“Red Stone is a low system specification MMORPG that went into open beta about two weeks ago [as of the time of the interview],” Maurer said. “It’s free-to-play like all our other games and will support an item store. We may throw in some other goodies to help people out that will be available in the item shop.”

At this point, I interjected and asked Phil what sort of items would be available in the store, whether there’d be anything that would greatly enhance a player’s ability to advance in the game. “There won’t be a +5 Sword of Troll-Slaying,” Phil said. “There’s nothing that you can buy that will make you that much better than anyone else. There are temporary buffs and things like that; they may give you a slight edge, but nothing extreme. Definitely nothing game breaking.”

Getting back to the play of the game, I asked Phil to continue on our first line of thought. “It’s kind of a throw back to retro gaming,” Phil said. “It’s a third person, isometric style of game, meaning you look down on the player character and his environment. It’s a huge quest-driven game with a lot of levels, but strangely no grind. Sometimes you see 100 levels listed for players to advance on, and it’s quite difficult to get to the top. In Red Stone, we simply have an insanely big quest system that’s been integrated into the game.”

Personally, I know Phil’s a big gamer, so I asked him just how much fun he’d had playing the game. “It’s honestly a lot of fun,” he answered. “I didn’t believe how many quests there were until I actually played the game. The graphics aren’t along the same lines as a next-gen console platform, but there still is a lot of detail put into the game. You don’t see repeating textures or tile work that often, so it doesn’t detract from the gameplay that much. It’s really just this cool, fun throwback sort of game.”

“It’s a lot like taking one of your older RPGs, like Diablo, and putting it into an MMOG type environment,” Phil said.

A shot of some Red Stone action.

General gameplay may be all well and good, but I know that the Ten Ton Hammer readers are really interested in the nitty gritty. What are the character classes like and what will draw people to the title? “The character classes are very interesting,” Phil said. “It revolves around shape-changing, so you’ll always have two different forms available to you. It’s really engrossing, especially when you throw the story into the mix.”

It seems like story is the big draw for players these days, and I asked Phil what the story in the game was really about. “It’s a lot like the Usual Suspects,” Phil answered. “It’s a very involved set of quests, very story-driven. There are a lot of quests for players to explore, and it’s definitely very engrossing.”

To me, it’s always interesting to find out where games originally come from – or at least which markets they are the most popular in. “Red Stone is really big in Japan,” Phil said. “There’s just a bunch of really new and interesting things that we’re doing in the game that nobody’s every done before. I don’t know what’s been said, so I don’t want to reveal anything, but it’s really cool.”

With the standard information and a general preview of Red Stone finished up, I wanted to see if K2 had any sort of plans for the upcoming months concerning their upcoming products or anything that they might want to announce for their community.  “K2 has some really interesting thing coming along that we’re going to be announcing very shortly,” Phil said. “We are going to continue with free-to-play and we’re going to push that on all of our games.”

But what about Sword of the New World? Why was that game initially not free-to-play like all the rest? “Sword of the New World was a hybrid, and we wanted to try that out to see how it worked,” Phil said. “In the dissection of it, we may have done it differently, but we certainly didn’t intend to go down that path originally. I promise that that was not our plan to begin with.”

“It really came down to a lot of discussion with our user base and some things we were seeing on our side,” he added. “We figured out we could make money doing it the other way, so we made the switch. It’s been going really well.”

Thanks again to Phil Maurer for taking the time to sit down and chat with us! We had a great conversation and even had a couple of drinks after the lights had gone down in Austin. K2 Networks is growing, and I can’t help but see great things for the leader of the free-to-play gaming market!

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