Questions
by Cody “Micajah” Bye and Jeff
“Ethec” Woleslagle
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Answers
by Matt Mihaly, CEO and Creative Director of Sparkplay Media
The massively multiplayer gaming market is an extremely crowded space
and getting even more claustrophobic as the years go by. Games and game
developers come and go with increasing rapidity, and only the chosen
few who make solid financial decisions and stand out from the crowd
ever make it to their own launch. So when the Ten Ton Hammer staff
heard about a game featuring all “anthro” races, we
were intrigued. The game’s name is
href="http://www.eartheternal.com/">
style="font-style: italic;">Earth Eternal,
and we had
the opportunity to sit down with Matt Mihaly (CEO and Creative
Director) at GDC ’08 to discuss Earth Eternal and the
fundamental features behind the game.
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href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/27412">
src="/image/view/27412/preview"
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style="font-style: italic;">Earth Eternal will
play like your traditional MMORPG.
Ten Ton Hammer: Could you
describe Earth Eternal
to all those gamers that may not know what the
game’s all about?
Eternal is really part of suite of products that are going to be
connected via a common identity and currency. This includes the MMO
(Earth Eternal),
instanced areas (like Habbos in Habbo Hotel) called
Groves, and other social areas. href="http://www.eartheternal.com"> style="font-style: italic;">Earth Eternal
will be familiar to
players of games like World of Warcraft, where you kill monsters to
gradually advance your character.
We went with anthropomorphic characters. This isn’t a furry
game, even though I’m sure people will obviously use the MMO
for their own devices. The games has 16 races to choose from, and in
this regard we really went for breadth rather than depth in making this
decision. What I mean by this is that each race won’t have
their own starting areas or their own custom animations. But our races
will have unique heads, feet, hands, and tails, so players will be
different in the way they appear. Players will also be able to
completely recolor many different clothes, armors and weapons.
Weapon location is also an important customization aspect in style="font-style: italic;">Earth
Eternal. Players can choose to have their weapons on their
sides, hips,
back, and more. We just strive to give players more customization, more
than what a typical MMO would give. It’s one way that
we’re trying to distinguish ourselves in a market where
we’re such a small fish.
After that, it’s fairly typical MMOG gameplay. You have your
dungeon crawls, player versus player combat, faction system, anything
you might find in your typical MMOG.
Ten Ton Hammer: How will
the server system be set up in Earth
Eternal? Will players need to
communicate before they make their characters to insure that
they’ll be playing with their friends?
you’re playing on really isn’t all that important.
You’ll always have the opportunity to play with your friends
and migrate to different servers when you choose. You can even switch
from PvP to PvE servers whenever you want. We just wanted to give
players a little more freedom than what they’re currently
used to.
Ten Ton Hammer:
Aren’t you worried about messing up the server economies?
we really think of the economy as an aggregate rather than for each
individual server. Auction houses will be cross-server; we really just
want to remove the idea of a server.
Ten Ton Hammer: What are
you going to do with the new money that you’ve recently
received from investors?
mainly allows us to do more. It allows us to make a more robust combat
system and really expand areas of content that may not have been as
fleshed out without that extra money. Mainly it’s going
towards development and hiring people to make the game stick out more
from the crowd.
money is going to be a full time job, but I think they were all liars.
It’s more like three full time jobs. *smiles*
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Earth Eternal Game Page.
