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

Ten Ton Hammer: How do you keep it so genies aren't being exploited? 

Jon: That's a very good question and it's actually something we were very concerned with too when we first heard about this system. The catch with the genie is when you have a genie, it has an energy bar. Basically like a rogue in World of Warcraft. So when you actually equip a genie or swap genies, it starts with zero energy and takes a minute or so to build up that energy. So that prevents people from swapping them, burning abilities, then swapping them back. 

Ten Ton Hammer: Otherwise you could just have a whole inventory full of genies custom made to fight everybody. 

Jon: Exactly. 

Ten Ton Hammer: What kind of endgame experience do players have with Perfect World International at this point? 

Jon: There's actually multiple avenues and paths for players to achieve high level in Perfect World International. The primary draw in high level is territory wars. The game map is broken up into 44 different territories, each of which, factions [Editor Note: Guilds in PWI are called factions.] can compete for ownership of these territories every week. 

For example, my guild owns a territory, Katrina's guild owns a territory, and you own a territory and I want to fight you. So come midweek on Wednesday, that's when the bidding opens up for territories. I can bid upon your territory for a certain amount of in-game coin. Then if Katrina chooses, maybe her guild wants to fight you too, in which case she'll outbid my guild. So a bidding war will occur between my guild and Katrina's guild.

Whichever guild ends up bidding the most money by Thursday night when the bids are finalized will win. Let's say I bid the most money so I win. A tie is then scheduled on the weekend for your guild and my guild to fight one another. It's an automatic scheduling system that assigns a time and then on that scheduled time during the weekend a specific instance will open up for your guild and my guild and essentially, it is 80 vs. 80 PvP combat. 

There's two bases, each guild has a base. There's three lanes in between the bases. There's also towers and fortifications and whatnot. Essentially, the players are pushing back and forth between these two bases and there's also siege weapons that players need to drag or bring to the opponent's base in order to take out their buildings. The players themselves, they can damage these buildings, but it's no where near the amount of damage these siege weapons will do. 

In these PvP instances flying is actually enabled within them so it adds a whole new dimension to the combat that's occurring within these instances. You have a bunch of people who are on the ground dragging siege to the enemy base while at the same time you have people that are defending, maybe flying up over the wall, archers staying up high, clerics flying and healing people down below. It's really, really dynamic PvP. So for anybody that's interested in hardcore PvP, this is almost as hardcore as it gets, at least in my opinion. 

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you have guilds that have 80 players vs. 80 players fairly often? 

Jon: Definitely, definitely. I mean, I myself am in a guild where I'm a relatively high level and we actually have more than 80 players in our guild wanting to go, so at that point, we've got to do duels and scrimmages to decide who's going to go this week, and so on and so forth. It gets very interesting. 

Ten Ton Hammer: That's cool. So what do you guys have planned for the future? Age of Spirits came out relatively recently, but you guys seems to have a pretty good pace on content releases. What's the next big thing on the horizon? 

Jon: Basically, the reason why we're so lucky to have so much content at such a rapid pace is because the players in China just *drive* through content like butter. They're crazy. They play almost 24 hours a day in some instances, they never sleep. As a result, the development team has to keep the pace up. 

On the horizon we do have another expansion that's going to be coming out this fall. I've been told I cannot go into the exact specifics regarding it, like what all is included but what I can say is that is much more ambitious than any other expansion we've had before. It's going to add some new mechanics and some new... I'm trying to use the word because it will give everything away. 

Basically, it's going to change everything. It's going to change the way people play the game. It's going to make a lot of people think about re-rolling something new, but that's all I can say. 

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there anything else I haven't hit on that you'd like to let our readers know about before we go? 

Jon: In terms of endgame content, we recently added a new instance called Warsong City. Currently, it's *the* most challenging instance in Perfect World International. It's essentially a three-phase dungeon where there's a boss hunt, there's a monster hunt, but there's also a siege element. It's very challenging. The primary focus on it is actually teamwork, so people that don't work together are definitely not going to experience any kind of success within this dungeon. 

The interesting thing about this dungeon and the story behind it is that it's located between the genie world and Perfect World. This evil menace is trying to get control of it but it's up the players to try and defend this genie realm and more importantly, all the items or rewards for this dungeon are strongly associated with the new genie system. 

For example, the genies actually have their own equipment sets and you can actually get equipment for your genie and in addition to that, there are also genie experience cubes so when you use them they can level up your genie at an incredible rate. 

Releasing Age of Spirits was only half of this system. This dungeon, this instance, was the completion of that new system. It really accents and compliments the existing genie system. That’s probably the highest content we have right now. 

I do have one last end game thing we do have that I think players will find is very unique. In Perfect World International, there's is a puzzle instance. It's called the Cube of Fate. It's a dungeon that players go through solo in a private instance and they're provided with a series of challenges. 

There are 60 rooms within this dungeon. So for example, you go into the first room with all these floating orbs that are different colors and have to count all of the orbs that are a certain color and give the correct answer. If you give the correct answer, you'll roll a die and depending on what you roll is how far you go. Say I roll a six, then I'd move ahead 6 rooms. Each individual room has its own separate challenge, whether it be kill a boss, or solve a puzzle, or answer a question. If the player gets to the end of the Cube of Fate they are rewarded quite heavily with experience, money, etc. 

It's one of the most unique solo PvE experiences I've ever had in an MMO. 

Ten Ton Hammer: It sounds like you guys are doing some incredible things with Perfect World International. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us!