A Hero's Journey Update from GDC 2007

Simutronics Tech Director Eric Slick catches us up on the latest from this storied online RPG developer.

by Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle

At last year's GDC, Simutronics cloistered themselves into a tiny kiosk. That didn't stop the foot traffic, and the success of the veteran company's complete MMO middleware solution, HeroEngine, was obvious at GDC 2007. With five announced licensees (four were announced just last week), the game-builders responsible for some of the best known MUDs in the industry found themselves increasingly the tool-makers. But that doesn't mean that Simutronics has forgotten about the well-anticipated fantasy MMO Hero's Journey. From a high-tech, spacious turnbuckle booth at GDC 2007, Technology Director Erik Slick gave us a quick update on the status of Simutronics' up-and-coming flagship MMO.

So how close is Hero's Journey to release? “Not nearly as close as we should be, unfortunately,” Slick admitted. “In fact, the success of HeroEngine has slowed us down, but we're speeding up again this year. We're doing a lot of hiring for Hero's Journey... developers, artists. In fact, we're probably going to double the number of people we have working on Hero's Journey by the end of the year. As a company, we're moving to a new location to house all these people we're hiring. And that's all due to the success of HeroEngine. This is where we're going to catch up (and hopefully surpass) where we would have been otherwise.”

But maybe this was the plan along: to build the toolset, then sell the toolset to support the increasingly costly endeavor of building an MMORPG? “[HeroEngine] has allowed us to move faster. We have our own income stream, but we maxed that out. With the new income stream, it's a lot easier to expand and generate more interest in our games as a result.”

Simutronics also aims to build up their powerful volunteer staff, the Gamemasters (or, more commonly, GMs), which are a longstanding trademark of Simutronics games dating back to the Gemstone series in the late eighties. The staff currently ranges between 50-60, and building quest scripting tools for this dedicated team is a priority for Simutronics in the near future.

I also asked Eric about some of the recent trends in MMORPG design. Regarding DirectX 10, “We're still waiting. We're going to support it like everyone else, but we're still waiting.” On the more established tech front, Hero's Journey will be 100% compatible with hardware / software AGEIA PhysX support. This technology is described by AGEIA Marketing VP Micheal Steele as a way to allow developers to do more visually without hurting gameplay performance (rather than just a way to increase framerate – we'll have a separate feature on AGEIA PhysX technology from GDC 2007 later this week).

Also, on UI modding, Eric Slick stated “I think it's fine, so long as its safe,” referring to the tendency of user interface addons to go beyond reorganizing information and improving layout and into the seedy realm of exploits and keylogging.