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

Ten Ton Hammer: As I look over this list, another thing that I don't think we've talked about before is this virtual reality fighting arena. Was this something that came about as a result of testing?

Todd: No, we've actually had that since very early builds, but it's nothing that we've talked about. We just decided to call it out and give it a bullet point; it's not really a new thing, just newly advertised. I think what we've seen, particularly with this model, there may be folks that go into the game and just really want to do co-op PvE, and the VR fighting arena has turned out to be a nice transition for people into PvP. You don't lose anything, the other team isn't winning anything. It's just a completely no-consequence, non-judgmental way to go up against other players. It's individual; no one on your team is going to be telling you to do something or not do something, it's just a nice way to transition players into the match-made PvP.

Ten Ton Hammer:  Being that the VR arena is individual, will teams be able to go in there and practice tactics?

Todd: You go in as an individual and then it assigns you to a task force. There are two sides, but the system is arranging you. It's less for team tactics and more for individual tactics, by design.

Ten Ton Hammer: Facilities - are these crafting hubs that are capturable, or what are facilities about?

Todd: We're not going into too much detail, but at the high level AvA, the maps are instanced like PvE and PvP, but they have a persistent state on the hex board. There's a set of board game rules about what types of facilities are available to an agency - to build or to upgrade. These facilities - labs, factories, and mines - have different output types that the agency makes decisions about, and as long as the agency is holding that facility during the open conflict window, they get the output from that zone. There's the whole strategy aspect on how much territory you want to try and hold and how you want to concentrate your output and production, and the conflict aspect of attacking other agencies, plus base raids.  

So at the end of a zone open period - let's say I'm in an agency competing for a zone that's open three hours a day that I've kind of self-selected into. The status of the hexes that I won or lost, those are going to have meaning in the world until the next zone open. So if I have a factory and it's making x widgets,  I'm going to get that production cycle over that time. So that's where the persistence comes from and how we can have a game where it's more than one match and then the map disappears. Again, we'll be getting into a lot more detail on that once we get through a few more Conquest cycles internally.


Ten Ton Hammer: Base Raids  - can you tell us a little bit about what these are about?

Todd: At a high level, the zone is open for a certain period of time. These hexes are persistent territories, and one type of territory (instead of a facility that's producing for me, this is a very distinguished type of facility) is a base, which is also a much bigger operation to attack or to defend. Base raids are something that we actually have tested with the alpha group. It worked well, as far as coordinating six different strike teams in a coordinated fashion to take over the base. 

Ten Ton Hammer: One other point of clarification - this is probably obvious, but the game will do a good job of telling you who's a subscriber and who isn't, so you don't try defending your base with a bunch of non-subscribers?

Todd: That's very important to us. Agency management for the Conquest players is a big piece of it, so there's functionality to form your agency and ranks and permissions and all that's part of the gameplay. At a high level, yea, as an agency leader, you will have good visibility into subscriber status. For the most part, as envisioned right now, a non-subscriber can be in your agency and that's someone you can easily team with for PvE or match-made PvP, but you won't be able to accidentally invite them to your strike force.

Ten Ton Hammer: On the core features list, I see you can create up to 8 characters. Will subscribers get more?

Todd: That's not a "gimped" thing - that's just our current number of slots for both groups. Depending on how you want to do it, that gives you two of each class.

Ten Ton Hammer: We've definitely seen more of the non-Conquest game to-date. It shows really, really well at PAX and those kind of fan events, being at its core a multiplayer shooter. Does this mark a turning point in what we're previewing? Can we look forward to more info on the campaign game in the coming weeks?

Todd: That's our primary focus right now. We've really taken the non-Conquest gameplay on the road, it's been hit hard because we play it every day, the beta community's played it, and we've taken it to shows and it is a show-friendly sort of game because you can hop in and immediately have fun, and people can get a feel for whether it's their type of game or not. That part we feel really good about.

So right now, we're doing additional content on the PvE and we're focused on the AvA side. In the coming months we're going to be introducing that to our beta community - that's our next big development milestone: getting [AvA] to the point where beta players can play it alongside our development group, and then talking a lot about it externally. As you know, we tend to want to prove things out internally with the beta group before we set expectations that we have to change. The pricing model, I think, does kind of  put our money where our mouths have been. We've always said thatthe gameplay's fun, people will come for the gameplay, but they'll stick around for the AvA.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will non-subscribers be able to support their agencies in any way, especially since they can't go along on missions or craft?

Todd: As envisioned right now, they really won't, because it's a secondary set of gameplay and set of maps that they can't join. Right now, the intent is that if I'm a non-subscriber, I can be in an agency, but really it's for the purpose of joining with them for co-op PvE and PvP. Right now we're drawing a pretty hard line there. Having a persistent group there really makes it easy to find folks, and maybe you're attached to the name of a group that's doing well in AvA. But we really want some incentive there for folks that want to contribute to AvA - maybe they want to get in there and fight or contribute resources - that's really what the Conquest subscription is for.

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Our thanks to Todd Harris and the Global Agenda team for taking some time to answer our questions on a very busy week!