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

Ten Ton Hammer: That almost reminds me of the old Priest of Discord in EverQuest that you could turn the book into that would perma-flag you for PvP, only a more advanced version of that system.

Lee Hammock: Exactly. For a whole PvP server there are so many little things you have to look at. For example we’d have to make the Lifenet pods non-PvP zones because rezzing in a place where you can be killed is just ridiculous. So there are all these little things we’d have to do to make a full-on PvP server, but we think we would do a better job integrating the ability to be fully PvP flagged into an existing server rather than try and make it into a separate one. Also it’s better for us in terms of maintenance to be able to just focus on the one server type.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you have plans for any live events scheduled for after the official release?

Lee Hammock: Totally. That’s part of the live team’s job. We’re planning on having some holiday events – probably 6 or 8 a year – most of which are going to be based around the factions. We’re probably not going to hit Halloween because it’s too close to launch, but we’ll be doing Thanksgiving which I think is going to be a Vista holiday. Each holiday is going to have a particular faction that’s associated with it so it should be a lot of fun.

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s the mood at the studio right now? Is it the launch crunch or are things pretty laid back?

Lee Hammock: Actually it’s pretty laid back at this point. There’s definitely stuff that we’re trying to get in, but we’ve done all we can for the most part. We’re still working on patches and we’re doing all that we can to get things like fixes in, but really there’s not that much stress.

We’re a fairly small company; very much an indie game developer. We’re not part of a huge studio, but rather independently financed. I think the running joke was for a while – I’m not sure if this is still true – but for many years WoW’s cinematic department had more people than our entire company.

So it’s the sort of thing where we don’t need to launch with 500,000 players to be profitable. If we launch with 50,000 we’re actually very profitable. If we launch with 100,000 we’re extremely profitable. So we are confident we can hit the launch numbers we need to stay in business, and we’re very much shooting for the EVE model of realizing we’re not going to be the biggest launch and we except that. But we are confident that over time we have enough depth of gameplay to really pull more people in.

So overall we’re good. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback lately, and I think we’re starting to find our audience in terms of the beta testers and all that kind of stuff. It is very true that this is a very niche game, it’s not for everyone. Folks who like an easy experience who don’t like having to learn how the game works – I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – but this is a complex game. It’s not a simple thing to just pick up and play without any real thought or effort. But there’s a real audience of people who want that. The audience I think we’re going to end up with are the people who would play EVE if it wasn’t so much a spreadsheet in space, or would play WoW if it there was more depth to what you were doing. That’s really the audience we’re shooting for.

Ten Ton Hammer: We wish you all kinds of luck with it!

Lee Hammock: Thank you!