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SEED - First Impressions - Page 2/3

When we finally got to the SEED booth we met up with Nis Haller Baggensen, the Lead Programmer for the game as well as Jan Roed Thastum, the Art Director at Runestone.  With the questions we had prepared, there were no two better people for us to talk to about SEED.

The interview started with us getting an overview of the game itself. The two described the game as a sci-fi MMORPG that is distinct in the marketplace because it is completely non-violent and stresses RolePlaying and Cooperation.  The objective of the game is twofold.  The short term goal is to survive on a crashed ship on an alien world, while the long term goal is to do something about it.  What the final solution turns out to be, is purely up to the player community.  They have left many possible solutions open, repairing the ship and leaving Davinci, terra-forming the planet or bio-engineering themselves to better cope with the planets current environment.

SEED was produced by Runestone because they thought the market needed something different.  The two made it very apparent that they understood their game would be a niche game.  Nis stated that the Runestone philosophy for SEED was ‘To create a game with everything for somebody rather then something for everyone’. 

To accomplish the goals in Seed, players must group together into rings (Guilds), must learn repair and crafting skills, and become politicians.  Repair skills are important to keep the ship running.  Crafting skills are required to create new parts to use to repair the ship.  Political skills are critical to gain control of the machines used to craft items with.  An election is held weekly to determine who gains control of which machines.  The politics in Seed not only involve the players, but the NPC’s in the world.

We then discussed the graphical element of Seed, which is very distinctive.  All over the convention we had heard comments about the graphic used in Seed.  They are completely unique in the MMO market today, and have piqued a lot of interest. Jan fielded our questions about the graphics, clearly please to hear that we and others were appreciative of the style.

The graphic development of Seed started over 2 years ago, when they started development on the game.  They wanted to select a distinctive style for the game and preferred a gritty comic book style. They had seen the game “13” and believed they could take the style one step further.  They wanted a very 3D style comic book look that still appeared very much like a printed 2D comic image. They were very aware that this style would make it possible for them to produce a visually appealing game that would not date as quickly as photo realistic style games. 

One thing that was brought up during the interview that really caught us was the willingness from the Seed community to play in a role playing environment.  The example that was given to us by Nis actually started off as an ingame error that had one of the NPCs stuck in an elevator due to a glitch.  The community actually started up ingame efforts to save the NPC stuck in the elevator (knowing full well they could do nothing), and made an excellent RolePlaying experience out of something that would have been a genuinely annoying glitch in any other MMO.

Since the community and roleplaying content in Seed seemed very strong, it was an obvious question to ask about planned ingame events.  Nis responded to us with specific information on the intention of Runestone to develop new content based on player decisions ingame.  If the majority of the Seed population decides to work towards terraforming the planet, then you will see developments on that front, and if the majority of the players want to enhance themselves genetically, then new content and designs will come out for the players.  From a coding standpoint, the Runestone team seemed very excited about allowing players to run their story for them, and decide what amount of effort was needed in specific content.