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

Ten Ton Hammer: It's like writing the next great American novel, right? I mean Stephen King will write 120,000 words and whittle that down to 90,000...

Hermann: I actually remember reading that; he writes 10 pages a night and cuts it down to one page.

A lot of studios that use that methodology have their own names for it. Blizzard calls it "concentrated coolness." Instead of making 15 character classes, make five. Take those fifteen and boil them down into the five core components and make those really strong.

It's not really an intuitive way to work, right? If you're in the development world, your develop. If you're in the writing world, you write. I mean, you can put all of these great ideas on paper, but maybe what's better is to have one idea and make it really, really, really good.

I'm hoping that that focus will pay off.

Ten Ton Hammer: What about your open PvP? You've talked a lot about scenarios and instanced spaces, what about the open PvP? Is it going to be cool and dynamic, or will people just fly in circles and shoot each other?

Hermann: It's a similar kind of approach to what we're taking to the instanced PvP. In the original game, you had beacons and you'd fly through a beacon with a control object and it would switch over to your nation and you'd get experience and money the longer you held it.

It's a similar kind of mechanic that we have in the new game. You still take over parts of space by implementing a special object that you use in particular areas. The thing that we've expanded on, and this is a great example of enriching the experience rather than expanding upon it, is a mechanic where instead of beacons we have these husks.  You go to these husks and use what we call a "mod" and there are different kinds of "mods" you an use to convert these husks.

So when you convert a husk, it basically sets up this defensible area of space, and the husk becomes this big station with a bunch of turrets on it. It'll defend itself even if you're not there. If you want to take over a part of space that's already owned, you have to go take out that defense unit and use your object on the husk to make it yours.

Of course, if you get shot down while you're in the midst of trying to control the husk, it interrupts the process.  What I imagine will happen is that there will be groups of players dedicated to taking over space.

If there's enough of those players on each side, it will turn into this constant struggle for balance that players are looking for. You want to turn the balance of power to your nation, especially if you get the glory for it. It takes time to build these installations and it takes time to blow them up again, so it gives people time to jump over and defend their stations. It creates focal points for that type of combat experience.

One of the unique aspects of Jumpgate is that you can have lots and lots of ships in the same area of space fighting against each other. You can have conflicts of up to a hundred ships fighting against each other. Of course, at some point that just becomes nonsensical, but we saw that that was cool and we want to endorse that.

You can open up your map and see what areas are controlled by the various factions, so that'll give you an incentive to go over to that area and beat that guy back. There are, of course, long term gains attached to that. Medals and items and new ships and things like that.

The core mechanic is always the key, and I think that's where the game's going to be strong.