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

Hamlett: I think that the best way to explain it is to imagine that your Ship is your avatar. Like with games such as World of Warcraft or even City of Heroes you move your body around, complete quests and missions etc.  Instead of a humanoid body, your ship will represent you as a pilot.

Each ship is flown by one person and thankfully you just have to focus on how you fly and where you go rather than having to concentrate on whether or not an NPC crew stays happy. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve never been able to keep my Sims happy in any form. I’m rather glad that we’ve created the one person one ship scenario.  

So while there aren’t crews per se, you will have the ability to join a Squad (which is a guild in fantasy game terms) and there will be guild tools that are comparative to other [massively-multiplayer online] games.  You will also have the ability to play in wings (or groups).

Hamlett: While there has been some discussion on this feature, because all space flight is real time and in the hands of the pilot, it’s really hard to design and implement this so that it’s done right.  The team is determined to make sure that the game is a great game and the dual pilot scenario is just not something that we could insure would have the excellent quality and gameplay that we have come to expect from ourselves.  

It may be something that can be worked on in future releases, but it won’t be implemented for release.

Hamlett: I think that it scales well for both actually.  There are certainly missions and scenarios that work for both.  The battlestations that we’ve shown so far can be taken out by a wing of pilots, however as you go further into the game, you are absolutely going to want to bring a few more friends along. Also in terms of PVP, we want to plan out some HUGE battles. Those will be perfect scenarios for squads to take on.

Hamlett: We’re designing the game so that haulers, miners and crafters will have an integral part in the universe. The better equipment will come from crafting rather than drops and we are very aware that we have players who want to concentrate on hauling and mining as well. There will be plenty for them to do.

Peterscheck: This is a very tricky balance issue. In order to demonstrate why, we can take two extremes. Imagine you have 1 slot for inventory so each time you pick something up you have to equip it, drop it or sell it in order to pick something else up. Assuming the game has loot; this is very frustrating. Now imagine you have a bottomless bag and can greedily hoard every piece of trash you have ever picked up. This removes frustration but also impacts the value of things.

The Peter Molyneux game, Fable, had a great tag line: “for every choice, a consequence” which is true on two levels. The first is that when designers pick something like inventory size, it has massive, often unintended, consequences on the game. It has to be considered in terms of loot drop rates, frequency of equipment updates, number of crafting components, and so on. This translates directly to the player experience where you want to create choice and consequence. In space it makes sense in a few ways. For one thing you expect that a large hauling ship can carry MUCH more than a little fighter. This is inherently different than, say, World of Warcraft which is not about fighter vs. hauler roles. Thus, there is no “right answer.” Just like everything else it has to fit into the construct of the game you are making and there is only one way to see if your decision is right. Implement, test, fix, and iterate 10,000 times.

Peterscheck: Hard work and iteration. Basically what we have learned is that you have to iterate at every point in the process. In the case of art it begins with concept art. We spent quite a bit of time getting a few pieces of art that defined the first sector, the general look of space and some of the first starting ships. We iterated on that for quite some time before settling on a look. It’s really up to the graphics programmer and lead artists to try and achieve that look. This has to be done within the constraints of whatever your minimum spec is which, in our case, is fairly low.

The term “stylized” gets thrown around a lot in order to encapsulate anything that isn’t realistic. I actually think our goals were a bit more simplistic. “Cool” is the word I would use. I’m not an artist, but I love it when I see an image and it just grabs me emotionally and I just have to see more. I think that this is the goal for graphics. You want to see something that reaches into your psyche and forces you to find more. It’s VERY hard to do that. Team size can be an asset here, actually. It takes a lot less time to get a few people on the same page and even less energy to keep them there. Trying to get 30-50 people to all buy in and share the same vision is very challenging. Also, with a small team there is high visibility, thus mistakes are caught early. It also causes a laser like focus. Since we can’t make the same volume as a team of 30-50 artists, everything has to be that much better. In my opinion I’d rather have a few things that blow me away than a bunch of forgettable stuff. Hopefully we have created some really memorable visuals.

Hamlett: Speaking from experience, you can take damage from flying into asteroids or even while missing the enormous entrance to one of the stations [laughs out loud]. While you aren’t going to die on impact, (unless your shields and armor are already extremely low) your ship definitely takes damage when you hit another object.

The visual elements that you speak of, having them makes the combat more interesting and certainly makes it more compelling. I would imagine that fighting in open space all of the time would get a bit boring. You want to have the ability to hide behind asteroids or dodge in and out of debris.  Since the targeting system isn’t an automatic dice roll on whether you hit your target or not, having things to fly through helps you or your opponent stay alive and makes combat more

Hamlett: Well that is certainly something that is up to marketing, but I imagine that we aren’t closed to the idea of partnering with the peripheral companies. We are absolutely working to make sure that our game has a plethora of peripherals to choose from.  Accessible is our motto.