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

What's a company to do when the fantasy market still has a behemoth looming over everything? Side step it of course! That's just what the team at Vogster Entertainment is doing with their upcoming title, CrimeCraft. They're betting the world is getting tired of your typical MMOG and are creating a new genre, the PWNS (Persistent World Next-gen Shooter), so grab a sidearm and get ready for all the headshot goodness!

Ten Ton Hammer's Cody "Micajah" Bye recently got a chance to have an extensive chat with CrimeCraft's Casey Dickinson about gangs, guns, and a whole lot more. Cody even gets the story of the PWNS origin out of Casey!

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Ten Ton Hammer: Where exactly is the game located? I've gotten the sense that the game was set in a city, but it's a city within walls where essentially crime is akin to the major corporations in this world. Is that correct?

Casey: That's a pretty good snapshot of what we're doing.

You're gang's logo will always be placed on your back... like a target.

Essentially it's a little bit of a "stripped from the headlines" kind of feel where there's a big ecological and financial disaster in the world. It's had a domino effect that's basically turned society into chaos. So in order to control that, the cities built these walls around them to keep some semblance of order.

But even inside those walls, gangs ended up getting into control of what was going on. It's a very kind of Wild West kind of theme; you check your gun at the door. When you're inside the common area, there's no shooting, but as soon as you step outside, it's total chaos and a total free for all.

So we have common areas and then outside of those we have instances. That's the framework where we have the typical shooter game type fights whether it's capture points or team death match, capture the flag... that kind of thing. It's all within a wrapper of being crime themed. So ya know, capture points is like a turf war. Capture the flag you're stealing stuff from the other players, that kind of thing.

Ten Ton Hammer: How many players can you have in an instanced space at one time?

Casey: It scales anywhere from 3 vs 3 up to 8 vs 8. We didn't want to go super big. Bigger isn't always better. We wanted to make sure there's a tactical focus. We have integrated voice chat so we don't want to have 32 players on a team talking over each other. We want it to be much more about good team work being a deciding factor on who wins.

Ten Ton Hammer: Sure, I gotcha. So does the game have any sort of player versus environment elements in it or is it all PvP?

Casey:We do have two different game types for PvE also.

One of them that we're going to launch with is kind of a "defend an area" type of mission and those are basically going on the fly. They're always running. You just jump into the game and you start shooting things. They're a great place to pick up loot. We're going to have boss battles that will be incorporate into those also.

And then the other PvE is a bit more of a linear kind of experience. You progress through the environment, but again very much borrowed from what makes sense in an MMO. It will have different difficulty levels, so like easy, medium, and hard and based on the difficulty level, there are different loot tables that you'll roll on. So on the easy level you might just get vendor junk, but on the high level you have a better chance of getting rare items. Those rare items can either be items in and of themselves, or elements to be used in crafting. We also have a full crafting system in the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: So are players going to be rewarded with items and loot when they go into the player versus player matches too?

Casey: We have a big system for jobs and missions which are essentially quests. We also have an achievement system, but that's not as directly tied into itemization. So jobs are essentially more statistics, very shooter focused, like kill 60 enemies, get 20 head shots with a pistol, that kind of thing. The missions are much more of the story driven element. It's like doing missions that get assigned to you by one of the big gang factions.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can players join particular factions and be associated with a particular side in this gang warfare sort of thing?

Casey: No. We're much more focused on the player generated gangs. It's all about the gang structure that you build for yourself. The player generated gangs are essentially guilds from an MMO or clans from an FPS kind of blended into one. You can raise gang levels. You have a gang crib, which is essentially player housing. By raising gang levels you unlock new things you can put inside your crib so you can decorate it. You have a shared gang bank. You can have crafting stations take place all inside the gang crib.

Ten Ton Hammer: So with the crafting system, what are players crafting? Are they just making guns? Are they making clothing? What's going on there?

Casey: Guns, gun attachments, clothing, boosts, booster kind of consumable items that give you benefits inside combat instances. Each gang specializes in a different type of crafting. So your gang might be really well known for creating great clothing. Another gang might be a great boost dealer. You get a reputation if that's what you’re doing so it causes the gangs to kind of have to communicate instead of just shooting each other in the head. It's to get people into gangs as soon as possible and have viable resources as soon as possible.