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

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.