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

A new browser based MMOG is on the market, and it's called Disciple. This Free to Play game with optional microtransactions takes place in the violent world of Aphelion as players pit their skills against other players and fight for fame and power.

Ten Ton Hammer caught up with Resistor Productions CEO, Toby Batton, and he was more than happy to tell us more about the game.

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Ten Ton Hammer: Where did you come up with the idea for Disciple?

Toby: Where I got the idea for Disciple, originally, was a game that came out about 2 years ago, and it was really successful right off the bat. It was called Duels.com. It was more of a MUD game. I was playing the game and I felt all the mechanics of the game and the game play were a lot of fun but it would be a lot more fun if it was animated. So that was sort of the spawn of Disciple - sort of making a duels.com style game that’s fully animated.

I had been writing stories about this world called Aphelion for about three or four years. It was a made up world that I liked to write about. You can read about it in the lore book on our website.

Ten Ton Hammer: What were some of the problems you faced during development?

Toby: The big problem is that you want to make these fully animated games on the web without a client of any kind. There were a lot of challenges that we ran into with Flash, mainly the rendering speed. Flash can’t multitask; it can only do one thing at a time. So when you click a button to do an attack, it’s trying to make the animation show up on the screen and do the rendering at the same time. So the biggest problem we had to solve was that rendering issue. We’ve got some really genius Flash developers that were able to essentially “hack Flash” and make it lie to itself so that it can both render and display the animation simultaneously. From a technology perspective, I think that’s the most interesting thing.

From a concept perspective, and the game play, it’s very PvP focused. The objective of the game is to level up. The leveling up process is very similar to a standard MMORPG where you kill people and you get experience points and gold.

The process that we developed is very similar to Guild Wars, because we are so focused on PvP and not PvE. The level cap is level 20. Once you get to level 20 it’s all about 1) getting the best armor, 2) increasing your PvP rankings, and 3) getting a clan banner.


Ten Ton Hammer: What are clans and clan banners?

Toby: When you join a clan, a clan being similar to a guild in other games, the clan can take all of the gold that they win from fights, put it into a clan bank and purchase a banner. When they purchase a banner, they get to choose three different options. They choose the image on the banner, and the two colors behind the image. Those choices provide everyone within the clan with different stat bonuses. The image is worth the most, the top color is worth the second most, and the color on the bottom is worth the least.

So that’s what it’s really all about- building your clan, building your disciple, getting the most powerful weapons and armor and it’s very political.

What can happen is when people purchase these banners, the stats that the clan leader chooses may not be the stats that the people in the clan want so you may have a mass exodus of people from your clan moving over to a clan that has the banner that they need.

Ten Ton Hammer: What about PvE?

Toby: We do have a PvE aspect to our game. There are quests that you can go on to travel different parts of the world. Quests will give you objectives that are anywhere from an exploration objective to killing an NPC, to making friends with people, to making enemies with people, reaching a certain level, getting a certain piece of gear. So there are quite a few different quest objectives. There is a story line that’s tied in with that as well.

Ten Ton Hammer: What do you feel are some of the biggest assets Disciple brings to the MMOG market?

Toby: I think the greatest strength of Disciple is that you can play it from anywhere. It’s just like Facebook or My Space. If you go to the website and create an account, you can play it at work, you can play it at home, you can play it at mom’s house. You don’t have to wait for the client to download.

Ten Ton Hammer: What was your incentive to go with a primarily PvP centered game?

Toby: The whole idea of social networking. It’s available on the web, you can access it anywhere, so we really wanted to provide a lot of the social aspect that’s available on the web and integrate that as much as possible into the game. We want people to really have a social obligation to play the game, and I think, once again, that it’s not a client download and you can access it from anywhere makes that social aspect much more accessible.

The focus on PvP is really about making friends and making enemies, and bringing that social obligation to the forefront of the game play.

Ten Ton Hammer: PvP gamers are typically a competitive lot. What kind of competitive mechanics are included in the game?

Toby: There will be a leaderboard on our homepage. We’re using what’s called the Elo Ranking System. The ranking system will require what we believe to be about 2 weeks of data so you won’t actually see that ranking page show up for the first 2 weeks after launch.

Everybody in our game is ranked, so if we have a million people playing the game, or if we have 100,000 people playing the game, every single person is going to be ranked based on the algorhythms on how that Elo Ranking System works. There’s only one “server,” one instance of this game, so you’re going to be ranked against everybody who plays. Now in terms of competition, we went to great lengths to make sure that it’s not just chance and number crunching. There’s a lot of different things that you can do as a player to make your character better.

There are two big areas where you can make decisions that are better than the decisions your opponents are making. The first area is that as you level up you get to distribute stat points to different areas: mind, body and spirit. Depending on your class, you’re going to want to put those points in different areas and it’s really a learning process for the players. If they put those points into the wrong areas, then they’re going to find that their character may be weaker than the person that they’re fighting. In addition to that, a lot of what it comes down to is the combinations of the attacks that you use, depending on your opponent and how they’re built.

So, for instance, if you’re a Warlord, which is our tank class, and you’re fighting a Shaman, which is our casting and debuffing class, you’re going to use different combinations of attacks than if you’re fighting a Bloodletter, which is our damage dealing rogue class.

Learning all those systems, the combinations, and how to distribute the points is really where the competitive angle comes in because the people that learn that the quickest are going to excel the quickest throughout the game.