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

When the developers at Perfect World Entertainment put together their North American version of Perfect World International, everyone on the staff at Ten Ton Hammer was impressed. Everything in the game was translated extremely well, and the gameplay matched what we expected from a game that boasted so much hype.

Now the PWE team has put its efforts into the localization of Ether Saga Online, but what should gamers be expecting with PWE’s next MMO title? Along with more tween-friendly graphics and standard class-based advancement system, ESO sports one of the most in-depth pet systems in any MMO thus far. Recently, Ten Ton Hammer’s Cody Bye got on the phone with Craig Beers, the product manager for ESO, to talk about the game’s pets.

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Pets are a big part of Ether Saga Online.

Ten Ton Hammer: Pets are a big part of your Ether Saga Online. Can you give us some basics? Can anyone have pets? Can you choose to fight without a pet?

Craig Beers: The pet system is the integral part of our game. Every class has a pet in our game, unlike other MMOs that only have specific classes that can have pets. They are important to the gameplay in several ways.

First, there are nine monster types in the game, and there is a paper-rock-scissors system between those monsters. Some monsters have definite advantages over other monster types. You can bring along pets that can assist you against monsters that you might be weak against or want an advantage over. You can choose to fight without a pet, but the pets do give you added bonuses and skills that they get as they level up.

The last really crucial element in the pet system is the fact that you can Fuse with your pet and you have a shared HP pool. So if you’re fighting a really tough monster that would normally wipe the floor with your character, you can Fuse with your pet and whenever the monster hits you, half the damage will go to you and half will go to your pet. That’s really good for tanks as well, especially if you’re fighting a big, bad boss mob.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do the character classes fall into that “paper-rock-scissors” system too?

Craig: All the player characters in the game are humanoids, so that fall under one of the monster types. But the classes don’t necessarily fall into something like that.