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

Mark: We got one of our internal artists to crank that out, and we’re really happy with the way it turned out. The statistics work, and it’s suitably obnoxious in its size. It really DOES look like it weighs ten tons. When you see your character swinging it around, cleaving with it, knocking monsters back, and stunning with it, you definitely get the sense that this thing is not a Styrofoam or cardboard weapon at all.

Mark: No…it is THE Ten Ton Hammer.

Mark: We don’t restrict items based on class or anything like that, so anyone could use it. But I do think Fighters and melee-oriented players will find it a lot more useful than a Mage or a Ranger might. Rangers obviously love their bows. Mages are going to be looking for stat bonuses that boost their class appropriate selection, and the Ten Ton Hammer is giving Agility and Strength.  They’re certainly more Fighter-centric attributes.

Mark: It is going to be a Mythic drop; the rainbow-colored items in our game. It is going to be a little harder for folks to find it, but when they do they’re going to be very, very happy about it.

The weapon is definitely going to stand out. I can’t wait for the first person to find it and see the item link in the market channel for people to click on. One thing to note about that - we were actually able to put a little blurb and a link to TenTonHammer.com into the actual item description. Players will be able to go straight from Dungeon Runners to TenTonHammer.com.

Mark: Yeah! I mean, you [Cody] were at the press meeting and mentioned how “it’d be cool if there was a Ten Ton Hammer in the game!” That pretty much sparked it, honestly. It was one of those off-the-cuff ideas that really worked out well.

And that’s really how our team works. We don’t bog ourselves down with the need to work off these really specific schedules and instead we mainly have this “grab bag” of ideas and features that we’d like to implement. People will then go and volunteer for the ideas that really catch their interest. Those folks will bite off what they think they can chew to get into a Chunk and that’s how we roll.

Often, midway through developing a Chunk or a build, we have these other ideas that we can squeeze in because we have such an effectual way of developing the game. The Ten Ton Hammer really emerged in a similar fashion; people just thought it’d be cool to include one in the game.

Mark: The big thing in store for Chunk #3 is the ability for players to make posses. Other games like to call them guilds, but we like to change things up a bit around here so we’ve moved forward with the idea of calling these groups posses.

We may have other names that we’ll use, but that’s our working name for the system right now. Everybody seems to dig it.

Mark: We liked the idea of allowing players to build these large groups in the gamespace, just like you have in other MMOs. Along with the posses, we’re also overhauling our current social window to make it much easier to group, see people by their level and where they are in the world, and join groups instantly from that window.
 
There will also be lots of new quests for players to go through as well.

Mark: When we first put it out there, we’re not going to have that sort of content posse-specific content. We need that sort of stuff in the game, but we want to get the initial feature in and let the gamers play around with it and give us some feedback on how to improve the system. After that we’ll start putting in posse-specific content in the upcoming builds.

Mark: In the next build, along with the Ten Ton Hammer, we will actually be introducing the first summoned unit – Chill Bill – into the game. We have a bunch of new skills associated with summoning up Chill Bill.

There’s also a late holiday quest line that will pop up in Townston involving another snow man. His name is Shivery the Incorrigible Snowman, and I urge you to go talk to Shivery. His quest line is fun, but it will go away in a month or so.

We’re also going to be improving our waypoint system substantially from what we have been using. There’s a new item called the waypoint compass that basically allows you to return to the beginning of any level that you saved this waypoint compass at. Before, you could return to any dungeon you just left or an exact area using the waypoint scroll, but the waypoint compass basically allows you to save off a dungeon that you always return to. This is particularly handy if you enjoy farming a particular monster or are looking for that one interesting piece of loot. It’s not saving off that particular instance, but it will allow you to always return to that level until you use another waypoint compass.

So players now have three distinct options to return to: the last dungeon door they went through, where they used the waypoint scroll, and the level they saved using their waypoint compass.

Mark: Download Dungeon Runners and go find a Ten Ton Hammer!

Would you guys be interested in seeing Ten Ton Hammers in other games? Let us know on the forums!