TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Mark Kern: We've put a tremendous amount of effort into building a great team this past year, and I'm happy to say we're just about complete. We really believe that great games come from great teams, so we took our time and grew the team carefully and with an eye towards each person's unique contribution of talent and personality to the “tribe.”

This past year we've also focused on getting our tools and technology in place. We're developing what we feel is the next-generation of MMO servers. An MMO's server platform is really the heart of an online game, because it contains all the logic, and drives all of the gameplay. We think of it as a platform much more powerful than any single PC or console out there and we want to harness that power to deliver new types of online game experiences.

Kern: You ask an interesting question. To be honest, I think people are starting to get tired of hearing about the number of new studios claiming Blizzard lineage. I'd much rather you look at our entire staff lineup. We have great people from Blizzard, sure, but we have many more from all over the industry ... key people who've done great things at BioWare, Oddworld, Xfire, nVidia, and who worked on successful, established games like Mass Effect, Tribes, Dungeons & Dragons, Legend of the Five Rings, EverQuest, Quake 4, and so much more.

Ultimately, though, it's really all about the game. It doesn't matter where you're from if your game isn't any good. Every member of Red 5 Studios has the passion to produce something great here, and we want to show you what we can do together as a team.

Kern: We love the graphics quality of the Offset engine, but we knew going into this project that no matter what engine we licensed, none of them were really set up to run an MMO. Offset is an extremely flexible engine and it's built to accommodate our changes and specific, unique needs. The fact that the Offset team was local was an added bonus; it's been very easy for us to work together.

We've actually ended up with a highly customized version of the Offset engine. For example, we've written our own terrain rendering system, editors, UI systems, networking layers, AI, etc. We've even reorganized the main render loop to be specific to our game, and implemented our own skinning system to allow us to draw large numbers of players on screen. We've also integrated Natural Motion's animation system, Morpheme, for our character animation, and Havok for our physics. It's not unlike what Valve ended up doing when they customized the Quake engine for the original Half-Life.

The end goal is to be smart about what graphics features you end up using, because you definitely want to be able to have lots of gamers be able to play your game. Look sharp, be playable.

Kern: That sure sounds like a loaded question! Why can't you have both? I think the key is accessibility. WoW is a very accessible game for many reasons: the UI is extremely polished, the mechanics are introduced at a measured pace, and the rewards are easy flowing without being trivial. These things make the game very easy to approach. Anyone watching “over the shoulder” has the feeling of “hey, I could do that too. It looks like fun.”

But as you play, you begin to realize there is much more depth there than you thought at first. I'm not saying it's Go but you can certainly offer meaningful choices at the strategic and tactical levels. Combine that with a strong competitive element like PvP and you have something that will keep the core players engaged. That's our aim.

Kern: Michael Bross is our Director of Audio. He's won several awards for his previous work on Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath and Munch's Oddysee.  Michael has been working very hard to fine-tune our audio system with our programmers to deliver great sound.

Kern: I think games like Mass Effect demonstrate gamers are hungry for good storytelling. The problem is how to deal with it in the context of an MMO. Unless you instance everything, it's really hard to single out one player out of thousand, all standing in front of the same questgiver, and make that player feel like “the” hero. The other problem is presentation. Reading huge amounts of text to support a rich story is not very appealing to audiences these days. So that means you have to go record voice actors. But MMOs need so much content that its very hard to record audio for every quest and do it at the meaningfulness and quality level of a Mass Effect or BioShock.

I do think that there's plenty of room to improve the quests in MMOs from their current generic state. I would start with making the quests feel more meaningful and rich, and then work on the presentation and production aspects. We can do a better job of telling the story through our entire quest and quest actions, and not just with questgiver text at the beginning and end.

Kern: Yes! The core team is finally assembled. We’re still recruiting to fill a few positions, and are always looking for great talent. I am very happy with the team we’ve assembled.

Kern: Obviously its become much more expensive to develop a core gamer MMO these days. The amount of content, coupled with next-gen graphics, is just brutal. We've made a huge investment in tools and studio infrastructure to help us with that, but it's still daunting. Because of the challenges, I think you'll find that studios will start to explore new ways to use persistence and connectivity between gamers that require less content and focus more on interesting moment-to-moment gameplay. That means less grind, too, but it remains to be seen who's got the magic formula for this new type of MMO, and if it will keep people satisfied and playing long term.

Kern: Okay. We're getting close enough that I'll drop some hints! It's not a fantasy game. It has some elements of a sports game and has some great player vs player action. The whole thing is tied up in a very, very cool new world setting that is every bit as fantastical as the last game I worked on. Oh, and guilds become more important and more fun than ever before. If I said any more my next sentence would be interrupted mid-stream by a flying dagger ...

Kern: I know people are just waiting for something new and fresh...keep the faith.  MMOs are about to get a lot cooler, not just from us, but from everyone's need to evolve and make the most out of online games in new ways. We kind of hit a furrow after WoW shipped and stunned everyone. There was a scramble just to understand what had happened and why it succeeded, and the generation of games that followed were largely mimicry and clones. That's about to change!

What do you think of Kern's hints about the upcoming Red 5 MMORPG? Will they be able to take on the 800 pound gorilla in the market? Let us know on the forums!