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

David Allen was the driving force behind Horizons, is the co-founder of QOL (Quest Online, LLC), and is on a mission to spread the word about his latest endeavor, Alganon. For every player that's complained about games not having enough depth of meaning, being forced to fulfill the same party role day after day, or wants a chance for their name to forever live on in a game's history, it's time to listen up. Eric "Dalmarus" Campbell sat down with David and Alganon Lead Designer, Hue Henry, to get the latest scoop on this ambitious new title.

---

Ten Ton Hammmer:
For some of the readers that may not be familiar with Alganon can you give us the basis of the game and some of the lore behind it?

David:
The thing that made Alganon different from the other games is it was built around a world run by deities. I wanted to have large-scale interaction at some point in the game to where you were part of a world that was a living, breathing world that had these majestic deities that oversaw a certain domain, they fought amongst themselves, they had followers.

So the lore behind Alganon is really deity based with a lot of history. If you go on the website and read the history of the game, you can see it goes back quite a bit. There are wars, we have how the races were born, how they're intertwined, and how they followed the deities.

I wanted to create a foundation that served as a rich playing field because my original goal with Alganon was to have it so deities would actually appear in the world even as themselves, controlled by high level CS GMs. So you could be walking through the forest and suddenly Triatia would be 15 or 20 feet tall, and appear before you, and be like, "I have a mission for you!” You know, that sort of cool interaction because then that person could be, "Oh my god! I just saw Triatia!” Then once we get the Library to the point that we want it to be, which will also serve as a news center in addition to an information repository, then those stories could propagate.

Plus, domains also are supposed to be under the control of specific deities. So if you're a patron of Deity A and you entered a domain controlled by Deity B, you may have some weirdness going on. You may have some automatic deficiencies; it may be a little harder to fight. It would put you at a slight disadvantage more than anything else, but then you would have people that would rally around their patronage and their deities and that sort of thing.

Alganon is 100% original IP and that actually gave us a lot of wiggle room for what we could do. Our goal was to create a living, breathing world, to where if you chose one side or the other, there was a reason for it and there were connections. In Alganon, there are deities associated with the races, there are reasons behind your participation, there's history to it as far as where your race comes from, what your obligations are, who your enemies are. Alganon really was a lore-based game as a whole.