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

Ten Ton Hammer: Backtrack to the scenario you were talking about where the player has a big missile strapped to them. How does that work? Is it random chance on who gets the missile attached to them?

Hermann: Right now, you can pretty much just buy one of these big boys and equip it to your fighter. If you have a heavy fighter, you basically have a slot that's large enough to hold the weapon.

The missile itself is also different in that it's not a guided missile. Most of the other missiles in the game lock-on before you fire them. With this one, you line it up, shoot, and it just goes very slowly in a straight line. If it hits something, that object will be destroyed, pretty much.

What we realized, especially on the PvP side, is that if you want to have interesting PvP in space, you need to concentrate people around objectives. If you have two people flying in empty space, what they tend to do is fly around in circles shooting each other. Imagine a Quake match without walls. It's not very interesting.

Space doesn't have walls, and on top of that you have complete freedom of motion. You have to create things that are the center of attention, like a capital ship that you have to blow up. People will fight around the capital ship, and that capital ship also has AI and is defending itself and launching ships, so its a much more Star Wars type of experience. You have to avoid the capital ship while also avoiding its shots while also fighting the other player.

By throwing in some other crazy mechanics, like this giant bomb that I'm talking about, it creates this other objective that's going on. We've just learned from playing what works and what doesn't.

Ten Ton Hammer: What has been different about taking this kind of approach to developing your game?

Hermann: It's interesting, because this kind of approach doesn't lend itself to "grand reveals." A lot of game developers fall to the temptation of working on the next really cool unique feature that nobody else has. These tend to sound really, really good when you describe it, but when you play it's not that interesting.

MMOs tend to do it with combat systems. You hear the description and think it sounds really cool, but then you play the game and find out that you're just hitting 1-2-3-4. I'm convinced there's probably a unique, cool system in the wiring, and I don't think people are lying or exaggerating. I just think they're forgetting about the experience. If you make a cool combat system, and I don't see it, it doesn't matter.

Rather than trying to make these really cool, awesome, unique things that fill up bullet points on the back of a box or make for interesting press interviews, we resist the urge to put in new things and try to enrich and deepen the things we already have in the game. It's a very hard thing to do. As a developer, you always want to add, you don't want to refine. Refinement is less rewarding and less interesting.

Developers want to move on to something new. But my experience has been that when you refine, you always get WAY more out of it than when you add something new. It's been our approach from the start.