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

Ten Ton Hammer: How drastically will a player's beginning experience differ from another who chooses to be part of a different culture when they create their character? How long will those differences persist throughout that character's career? Are their methods in place to bring friends of differing factions together relatively quickly if they so choose?

Peterscheck: The story, missions, map layout and general feel are completely different, but the mechanics and options available are largely the same. At the beginning this is much more pronounced as the groups are largely separated. After the first few hours, however, players begin to mix much more – earlier, I believe, than most MMOS. I think those differences will remain throughout a player’s career, but that is really something that players themselves tend to decide. While the nations can communicate and transact with each other, they can’t join each other’s squads. We need to have ways of enforcing some kind of conflict that is clear to communicate and it became increasingly difficult to deal with things like open PVP and battlespace if we allowed for mixed squads.

Ten Ton Hammer: The lore on the website mentions how it’s said that great Quantar pilots have the Skein flowing through their hands. Will there be anything in place in the game to actualize this as a player grows in skill and power? If so, what?

Peterscheck: We’re working on that very thing right now. Something to keep in mind is that Jumpgate is primarily a skill based game – that is the player’s skill. We have to be careful not to rely too heavily on stats. That being said we have some stuff in mind that will work along the lines you are describing.

Ten Ton Hammer: How will the ships of the Solrain, Quantar, and Octavians differ from each other past the shape and style? How has the team gone about giving the player (an Octavian, for example) a sense of being different from his Quantar and Solrain competitors without actually upsetting the balance between the three factions?

Peterscheck: So early on we tried to make ships that looked like they belonged to a particular nation. The Solrain ships looked like this, the Quantar like that. What we ran into is that they all ended up looking the same, and what people really want is radically different looking ships. Afterwards we went down that path instead. The most important thing to a player when they look at ships is that they think “Wow. That’s cool! I want to fly that ship.” This is secondary to “Oh, I can tell that is also a Solrain ship.” Thus we rely much more on color and texture to define nation and let our artists have more freedom when it comes to shape and profile.