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

Ten Ton Hammer: So you’ve talked about where the humans and elves can go. Can the gargoyles go there too eventually?

Cal Crowner: Yes. The intent was the Stygian Abyss is where everyone more or less converges. Nothing is inaccessible from any of the races. We just make it a kind of tiered approach so that eventually it’s accessible to everyone.

Ten Ton Hammer: Let’s say four people want to go in and play UO since this new race is coming in. Is it pretty easy if someone doesn’t want to make a gargoyle to get into the gargoyle starting area from the human starting area, or is that pretty much impossible?

Cal Crowner: For a new player that is going to create an elf or a human, they are going to have to go from the elf or human side in the short-term. In the long-term we will have moon gates opened up so that you can get to there. But in the short-term right now what we want to do is everybody the experience of an evolving story. A lot of people do like to get into the middle of a book and start at page 68, but we wanted to start everyone at page 2 and read the whole book.

Ten Ton Hammer: So there won’t be any immediate teleportation from the human starting point to the gargoyle starting point?

Cal Crowner: Right. We had that discussion for a while and the reason was that from both sides you don’t want to give any unfair advantages.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you adjusting skill caps or anything with this expansion?

Cal Crowner: Not right now. We had this discussion early, but we are talking about it and how to do it because we have a skill-based game and you have to be very careful how you do that.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there anything I haven’t touched on that you would like to share with our community?

Cal Crowner: We have weekly team meetings and the one thing I kind of set up for everybody is these are the reviews that we want and it’s one of those philosophical things, a self-fulfilling prophecy that if we can imagine we’re going to get all these great reviews then it’ll kind of be built towards that. What’s really cool is the initial feedback we got is that we got it right. I think that’s the one thing that we always wanted was for players to basically come in and have fun.
And you asked what kind of lore are we putting into the game? We also want folks to know that we did our homework. We didn’t disrespect UO and we didn’t disrespect Ultima and most of all we didn’t disrespect the community. We did it with flare and style.