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

Ten Ton Hammer: Cool. Are these instances that can be discovered out in the world and then entered, or will there be any kind of entrance requirements that need to be met such as completing specific quest chains before they’re ‘unlocked’ to players?

Bill Roper: Both. Some you’ll just find, and others are quest chain specific where there might be an item you need to enter or a quest to get in the door. We really tried to mix it up and have both though.

Canada, Millennium City and the Desert will have Patrol Missions which any player can get. Citizens will come up to you in the streets of Millennium City, for example, and ask for help and give you a patrol mission, and all of those scale for team size too. So those are instances that you don’t need to have expressly gone through a chain to do, they’re just missions that you’ll randomly find. All the patrol missions support solo play, but again, they’re all designed to scale up for teams.

Ten Ton Hammer: Once you've completed specific instances, can go back through them later on, or are they more of a one-shot deal?

Bill Roper: There’s a little of both, where with some once you’ve defeated the boss you’re probably not going to go back. Others are definitely designed for replayability, and then some on the high end are designed where players are going to want to go back through multiple times. So it’s kind of a mix across the board. But once you’ve gone through, you can go back, so we know there might be some that we didn’t anticipate players really like and might want to do more than once, but once they’ve opened up we don’t limit them. So if they felt like an instance was really fun and wanted to go back and run it again, or want to go back with their buddy and help him do it they can always go back and do that.

Ten Ton Hammer: The robot factory in Millennium City is one of my favorites so far, lots of cool stuff going on.

Bill Roper: Yea, that one’s pretty fun.

Ten Ton Hammer: Last week I made the mistake of flying up to Grond to give him a handshake while he was rampaging through Snake Gulch…

*laughter*

Will we be seeing many of these overland group bosses throughout the game?

Bill Roper: There’s a handful. I mean, they’re not everywhere; we want them to feel pretty special. But yes, they are out there and some are more advertised than others, but they all get talked about in the game. For example if you’re talking to an NPC and you’re paying attention you’ll hear about them before you get to see them for the most part.

We even have a couple that we’ve hidden around in different areas, or that get triggered by specific events. Kigatilik is a good example of that in Canada - a boss that gets triggered through player events, so he’s not there all the time, but people can get him to come out.

So it’s a nice mixture – there’s probably a dozen or so of that level of boss to fight in the game, and they’re really fun. We were talking about the robot factory earlier; there’s a Doctor Destroyer open mission that you start that culminates in fighting a Mega Destroid, which is this huge, gigantic robot. When we were testing that at the office there were about 15 or 16 of us all trying to take it down – that was a lot of fun.

Ten Ton Hammer: Awesome. Once the overland bosses have been defeated will they be on a standard timer before respawning, or will there be any other conditional elements that have to be met to get them to spawn again?

Bill Roper: It depends on the boss, the big cosmic-level villain. Some are on timers and some will have events that will trigger them, so it’s kind of a matter of learning which of those it is for which boss.

Ten Ton Hammer: Great, thanks for taking the time to talk.

Bill Roper: You bet!