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,
target="_blank">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!
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.
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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.
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Ten Ton Hammer: So when
you form the gang, essentially you pick a sort of crafting that you
want to be good at and then your gang is going to focus on that type of
crafting. It's not necessarily player based, it's more gang based.
Casey: Yeah,
it's more gang based.
Ten Ton Hammer: Ok, cool.
So how do players customize their characters? Obviously, you have a lot
of clothing. Do players when they create their character, do they do a
bunch of things with physical sliders? Do they cycle through a bunch of
different models? How do players differentiate themselves?
Casey: It's mostly about clothing. We have male and female character
types, but we don't want to change the size of them because it changes
the hit boxes and would mess up our shooter game side. We have to be
really careful about it or else people would be the smallest,
skinniest guy they possibly could because they would be much harder to
hit.
We have a bunch of different facial things, different kinds of hair
features, all that stuff. But at the end of the day we're really going
for different types of clothing. We'll have thousands of different
clothing types and customizations inside the game. Each common area is
going to have 300-500 people in it. We're going to have three of these common areas.
So there's going to be a lot of people running around in these areas.
We want to make sure everyone looks unique if they want to. Or if they
want to have a theme, if they want to all wear yellow hats, and that's
kind of what their gang does since they're The Yellow Hat Gang, then
they all should be able to wear yellow hats. So we want to make sure
that it's more focused on what you’re wearing as opposed to a
typical MMO where everybody of a certain class and a certain level is
going after the same armor suit and all going to look the same because
that's the most best, most optimized thing for it. We want to make sure
we have as much diversity as we can.
Ten Ton Hammer: Sure. So
the clothes, everything, the size of the guns isn't going to have any
sort of stat influence or something like that?
Casey: We
have a really cool work around for that actually. So essentially you do
have stats. They're kind of minor stats because at the end of the day
we don't really want to unbalance the shooter gameplay.
We
want it to be about the skills, but we still want to reward the player
as much as we can so another way to do that is by getting cool items.
But we have the ability to go to a tailor and you can take your really
cool fedora that just got dropped, but you’re in The Yellow
Hat Gang and it's a pink hat, you can go over to a tailor and get it
customized and changed into a yellow hat. So essentially, you're
upgrading your stats, but you're going to be able to maintain the
appearance of whatever you want to do. So like your dressed up like a
ninja from the ninja gang and you want to make sure the new collared
shirt has you just got has better stats that you want, you can go to a
tailor and get it turned into a ninja shirt and keep going with it, but
you've upgraded your stats.
Ten Ton Hammer: So talk
to me a little bit about the statistics in the
game. What are they used for? Do you have different abilities like a
super aimed shot that players can use? What kind of stuff do you have
in there as far as that goes?
Casey: We'll
have 40 different abilities at launch. You unlock them as you gain
levels. It's much more along the lines of the RPG features you see in
the Battlefield series or in Call of Duty. So it's kind of a perk
system where you're unlocking the ability to have more options before
you go into a battle as opposed to being gunned out. When you're
shooting somebody, it's not a dice roll, it's whether your mouse was
over them when you shoot. So we're not doing that. You're not getting
extra damage or anything because of having an ability unless that
ability is incendiary ammo or something like that which would be a cool
damage over time effect, but you have to weigh the options of what you
want to bring into the battle when you go into the battle.
Ten Ton Hammer: You have a decent amount of NPC's listed on your official.
Are there going to be more NPC's than are listed on the website? Are
there NPC's that players might find and this might be a guy that sells
the best of the best black market weapons or are all the NPC's already
out there and the players will already know where to go?
Casey: The
way we move people throughout the areas are sometimes basic Fedex quests
that we borrow from MMOs, so it's a way for us to communicate
story line. There will definitely be characters you get to know in
the game. That's by no means the full extent of what our NPC's are.
We'll have 70 to 80 different NPC's at launch. It's a pretty vibrant
world with lots of different faction, lots of cool story lines into it,
so we have a bunch more. We have some really cool characters that are
coming out.
Ten Ton Hammer: How do
players level up? Is it just shooting other players in PvP, or is it
actually winning the PvP matches that they're in?
Casey: We
have two systems. We have an experience system and a reputation system.
The experience system is more typical to an MMO. Regardless of how good
you are, as long as you're active and doing things you can always find
a way to gain experience and therefore gain levels.
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"Of course
this is a safe part of town, Tommy!"
But the reputation system is more of a gauge of how good you are at the
game. So that's in relation to your win-loss percentage, all that kind
of fun stuff. But experience, we give it to you just about everywhere.
You can be doing easy mode PvE if you're really horrible at shooting,
you can still be gaining levels and hit the level cap without too much
trouble.
Ten Ton Hammer: If a
player earns a high reputation, what do they unlock?
Casey: We'll
have leader boards that will revolve on a monthly basis. So everything
can be pulled up on the leader board in the game or you can pull it up
on our social networking site. We'll have stats that go on that.
You’ll have gang reputation and individual reputation. And
then we're able to reward gang and individuals that get the top slots
with in game items or even potentially a partner for marketing branded
items we can send to people in real life.
Ten Ton Hammer: So the
leader boards aren't necessarily going to be updated every week,
they'll be updated every month?
Casey: Yup. We do have a really cool gang tournament system that we're
borrowing some of the stuff from league matches in FPSes. We'll have lots of
different customized leader boards so we can do it for just your gang
on your gang profile for the social networking site. You can see what
your gang is doing, the people on your friends list, all that kind of
stuff. So there's different ways to get to the top.
Ten Ton Hammer: Are you
going to have like a WoW armory sort of page where it shows your
character and then it lists the achievements that you have and maybe
your individual level and experience level and that sort of thing?
Casey: Yep,
yep. We'll have all that stuff. That'll be on the player profile page
and with the gang profile page you can click through to the individual
player profile pages, set up friends. The gang profile pages are pretty
robust, basically guild sites. You have closed forums, shout boxes so
you can kind of talk trash with a rival gang by going to their shout
boxes. You can set gang hierarchy, who the lieutenants are, all that
kind of stuff, all through the website.
Ten Ton Hammer: You kind
of touched on it a little bit already, but what kinds of options,
tools, and features do gang leaders have with their gang? Like in a lot
of MMOs they might a tax for every kill that a player gets or
something like that? Is that some stuff that's going to be implemented
into the game or are the gangs in CrimeCraft a little looser and a
little bit more mobile?
Casey: You
set the structure. You can set the access to the gang vault. We have
tier one, tier two... all the typical stuff that you find in an
MMO for the most part. We're trying to leverage some stuff to have
player generated stuff to give gang leaders the tools to give really
kind of cool in game content that they can have their gang go out and do.
We're also doing everything we can in all different ways to promote
gang rivalries, so it'll be gang leaders talking to other gang leaders
to set up rivalries and that kind of thing.
Ten Ton Hammer: So the
gangs in CrimeCraft aren't going to be like a lot of the guilds in WoW that are always focused on raiding and that sort of thing? Rivalry is
kind of your "raiding" in CrimeCraft?
Casey: Right.
That's part of it, but there are also gang missions that can be
coordinated where your gang leader would be trying to coordinate the
troops to do certain things. Maybe your gang mission is to kill X
number of people in a certain gameplay mode. The order goes
out, "Hey everybody, let's play this on this date." That kind of thing.
So we have things that we build-in to reward people for getting
together and communicating by planning play sessions and that
sort of thing.
Ten Ton Hammer: Can
you talk about the gang mission a little bit more? Does the gang
leader just get a gang mission from an NPC or something like that and
that's the next thing the gang needs to do? They have to go kill 200 people in
Capture the Flag?
Casey: Right.
It's essentially the same system we have for individual players; it's
just kind of expanded upon for the gangs.
Ten Ton Hammer: Ok. So
it's just a little bit bigger and the guild wins something rather than
the player wins something?
Casey: Yeah,
that's right.
Ten Ton Hammer: So who
came up with the P.W.N.S. acronym? Because that's pretty funny!
Casey: That
was actually a bunch of us. We had gotten off work on a Friday and hit
the pub down the street. We're sitting there trying to think of "MMO".
We're so not an MMO. We don't want to get us compared to WoW. We're not
WoW. I mean we're a shooter, yeah, but we're not just a shooter. What
are we really? So we were like we're a persistent world shooter, but if
we could only get an "n" in there somehow. It was like "next-gen"
because that kind of represents all the RPG features that we're rolling
into the shooter so it totally worked and the P.W.N.S. was born. There
ya go.
Ten Ton Hammer: That's
cool. So kind of stepping away from the game a little bit, do you think
that people are going to have problems with a game like CrimeCraft? I
mean, obviously there's been a bunch of people raising all sorts of
ruckus about Grand Theft Auto and CrimeCraft seem like kind of that
next step. Rather than being in a single player kind of you're in a
story game this is actual players forming gangs and making gangs,
shooting other people in an online world against other players. Do you
think there's going to be an outcry around your game and if so, how do
you plan on dealing with it?
Casey: You
mean like the Jack Thompson's of the world being upset that we're
promoting gang violence?
Ten Ton Hammer: Major media might have a problem with it, right? *laughter*
Casey: Right.
I mean, we're an M rated game. This is not a game for kids. This is a
theme that's pretty ingrained in culture and other aspects, games
included. Everybody knows what gangs are and this is a fun escapist
kind of thing. It's a game, so for us, it's like don't take it so
seriously. It's not something that we want kids to be playing anyway.
Ten Ton Hammer: How much of a shooter is this game? I mean is it a
third person shooter? Is it a first person shooter? I was looking at
the forums and it seems a lot of people are interested in having a
first person mode. Is it a third person shooter or a first person
shooter?
Casey: We're
a third person shooter. Because we have so many RPG features we really
wanted to drive home the character affinity of having your character on
screen. I mean there's things like when you join a gang, your gang logo
goes on the back of your character. We have pretty good camera
position, so even when you're playing the shooter, you're not using up
a lot of real estate on the screen. You can certainly see around your
character, see everything that you need to.
Ten Ton Hammer: So
you're just staying away from that first person mode all together.
You're not even going to give it?
Casey: Right.
I mean when you look down your scope... there's lots of weapons
attachments you can put on your gun. If you have a scope on your gun,
it's going to pop into a first person obviously in order to do that,
but the core gameplay is going to be in third person.
Ten Ton Hammer: Right.
What kind of weapons and those sorts of things are going to be
available? Is it going to be a large broad in depth sort of, "Here's a
ton of guns, pick the one you want. Or is going to be kind of a select
few guns then maybe have modifications on top of those?
Casey: It's
more of the select few gun classes, so every time you go into a combat
instance you can bring three different types of weapons.
Ten Ton Hammer: Ok.
Casey: One,
which we're calling the skill based, or primary, weapon which requires
a skill in order to use. So that's like your rocket launcher, grenade
launcher, sniper rifle. Secondary weapon which is your kind of jack of
all trade guns, assault rifles, shotguns, that kind of thing. And then
a side arm whether that's a pistol or submachine gun. On each of those,
there's a number of attachments you can add. You can add more
attachment slots by going to certain crafters so then there's thousand
of customizations for each one of those different types of guns. So
yeah, there's a lot of guns, but at the same time we're kind of keeping
it to core gun classes that make sense and really allow us to balance
the gameplay.
Ten Ton Hammer: Does
adding attachments change the look of the weapons?
Casey: Yeah.
We have some that are specifically cosmetic. When you add a scope,
obviously, you see that. You'll see a stock that you add on to the end
of it. A silencer. And then you can also add textures. You can have can
have a camo gun, a gold plated gun, so there's a lot of different
things. But yeah, it's all reflected in the 3D model that your
character walks around with.
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You realize
wearing turquoise is a shootable offense, right?
Ten Ton Hammer: Got it.
So how much community interaction are you guys planning on
implementing? I read in your latest F.A.Q. you're talking about live
events and that sort of thing. Is that going to be a pretty common
occurrence in CrimeCraft?
Casey: Yeah.
I mean, as much as we possibly can. I think that a lot of MMO's come
out with stars in their eyes about having to do that and then it's very
expensive and difficult to manage the logistics of doing those, but we
definitely have lots of plans of doing it.
We have a really cool proprietary in game app platform that we're not
really using to serve as, but we're using it to kind of add new
textures into the world so we can use that to promote in game events.
We can say who's the top gang on the leader board and ya know, if they
get their gang logo decked out through everything then obviously have
an in game GM to kind of go in there and do cool things. It's always a
goal to have.
Ten Ton Hammer: Cool. So
how many players are you expecting per server?
Casey: We're
looking at each common area, and there's three common areas, can hold 3
to 500 people, so there's 1500 there, then the number of people that
are out actually shooting people. So we figure there are about 2000 per
server.
The
structure that we have allows people on the same server to share common
areas, but when you're shooting people, you're shooting people from all
servers. So the goal there is to have people that create relationships
in the community around trading and that kind of thing in the common
areas but to have a deep enough pool so you're always shooting kind of
new people unless you're doing direct kind of challenges and fighting
your way up the leader board.
Ten Ton Hammer: So are
the leader boards all server based? Like do the leader boards pull
people from all servers rather than just one server?
Casey: We
have filters on everything so you can compare yourself to the global
list, you can see how you're doing just on your server. You can look at
yourself however you want to filter it.
Ten Ton Hammer: Ok. So
are you going to have a leader board that a new gang can have something
to be proud of rather than like, total kills? Maybe like a new guild
option? I don't know how to say that exactly, but if you're new, how
can you get up on the leader board?
Casey: Yeah.
By not having them carry over every month. You know, it allows people
that just joined the game to at least compete in the next full month,
so they'll always be resetting.
Ten Ton Hammer: Oh! So
you're resetting the leader boards after every month. Ah. Ok.
Casey: Right.
Because if it was just straight accumulation then you'd never get on.
The first guy to join would be that top guy.
Ten Ton Hammer: I gotcha.
I've kind of gone through all my questions. Is there anything that I've
missed? Maybe an important element that you really want to touch on
that I haven't seen or haven't talked about yet?
Casey: Um...
not that I can think of. I think you asked very appropriate questions.
You obviously did your homework.
Ten Ton Hammer: Haha. I
try.
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our CrimeCraft Game Page.
