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

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.