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

Meet Gods and Heroes again...
for the very first time

Debysue Wolfcale on what makes Perpetual's next MMO
unique among the 2007 MMO hopefuls

by Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle

Every games journalist comes to dread “the pitch.” As the price we often pay for access to the developers, the pitch is usually a lengthy PR-laden diatribe given by someone from the marketing team. It's an attempt to make us the current features of the game through the rosiest-colored glasses possible, so that the questions we later ask the devs sound more like the a back-of-the-box praise and worship session. “Will you really have feature X or class Y in your game? That's awesome! When's the beta?”

Thankfully, we were spared from such a harangue in the opening moments of our Perpetual site visit. SOE's Senior Brand Manager Debysue Wolfcale who, with her extensive MMO work experience dating from Origin and Ultima Online in the late nineties, certainly knows her stuff. Rather than selling us a bill of goods, Wolfcale gave us something of a market analysis for the MMO category and told us exactly what Gods and Heroes would offer gamers that other MMOs simply don't. The formula? Gods, minions, and catering to the time-pressed casual gamer.

Oh gods, you devil

The Greco-Roman gods. Prone to fits and favoritism, and literally fickle beyond belief. Besides offering cool visualizations and “god powers” to players, according to Wolfcale, gods play an important role in character customization. “Right when you join the game, you pick a god you are aligned with,” Wolfcale stated. “For each character class, there's two gods; a male and a female.” A soldier might have the choice between Mars and Minerva (Athena), for example. Soldiers following the will of Mars might be more skilled in bloodletting, while those worshipping Pallas Athena might be more skilled in group tactics, buffs, and area effects.

The mechanic allows for a degree of subclassing beyond the game's seven classes, so players of the same class may offer unique abilities to their group. Or not. Pleasing a god might earn the jealousy of another god. In Gods & Heroes, the devil really is in the details.

Minions: friendly mobs, or... the group that you always wanted, but never got

“The accepted wisdom is that anything beyond three to five players in a group becomes unwieldy and time consuming”, Wolfcale stated by way of re-introducing us to Gods & Heroes minion system. While the exact number of AI groupmates a player could work their way up to is fuzzy at present, there are a total of 132 potential minions covering 6 distinct playstyles (some have access to more powerful “feats” than others, it would seem). If each player could field 6 minions, that's a group of nearly twenty combatants from only 3 players. You'll set up custom formations for your self-made group, or chose from a handful of pre-sets. Best of all, these groupmates are guaranteed to be semi-intelligent and never need a bio break.

Catering to Casuals

Wolfcale made it clear that “reaching out” to the broader RPG community, beyond even the core MMO types, is a priority for Perpetual. She lamented the fact that MMO devs tend to create games in their own hardcore gamer image, and promised that Gods & Heroes' deeply ingrained storyline is the single easiest and most probable reason for casual players to lose themselves (by comfortable degrees) in Gods & Heroes.

Perpetual hopes that the divinity tie-in, the minion system, and the casual emphasis in Gods & Heroes will be enough to win over the broader volatile MMO community. But talk, like pretty screenshots, is cheap; we'd need a hands-on to answer the most important question: is the game fun?

Cody Bye offers an answer to that very question in his article: Hands-On with Gods & Heroes. For more on the basic premise of Gods & Heroes, be sure to check out Perpetual President Chris McKibbin's presentation, too.

Return to the GDC 2007 portal.