MO-Radio Interviews Henrik Nyström - CEO of Star Vault

[Kuroi]

Originally Posted by Shargas

I will try to transcribe the other interview tomorrow (the juicy stuff).

ty *_*

[Dalixin]

Originally Posted by Altor

I was listening to the show..was really nice and interesting!

Especially that female US gamer..Devereux was her name i think..aah her voice made me all fuzzy inside lol.

Thx a lot for posting!

Originally Posted by Cronnix

And she is single too

In my experiences, females with hot sexy voices usually tend to be bigguns. LOL, there are however, some rare gems too.
Those are few and far between though.

I stopped agreeing to meet women from MMO's after most of them were unpleasently plump.

[DarkObelix]

Thanks for this!

[Banok]

Originally Posted by Dalixin

I stopped agreeing to meet women from MMO's after most of them were unpleasently plump.

LOL what did you expect. blonde elves IRL too?

[Banok]

Originally Posted by Shargas

[lots of text]

THANKS!!

[Nezabyte]

Originally Posted by Dalixin

I stopped agreeing to meet women from MMO's after most of them were unpleasently plump.

She sounded a bit on the plump side.

Anyway, awesome interview; I enjoyed listening to the radio version despite all the side chitter chatter.

[Mukan]

You guys are discussing someone you listened to on an internet radio. Nice.

[Isilith Tehroth]

Sounds kinda too good to be true. A lot of game companies uses unrealistic features that appease the players, but never implement them. Its used more as just a lure.

Hopefully this won't be the case.

[SLiB]

Big thanks to everyone involved in producing and distributing this, really appreciate it.

PS: Going to seed this for days.

[Septus]

So how do you buy something that is valued at more gold than a player can carry?

Will players create an ulterior brand of currency for extremely expensive items? (ie. find a light item that's rare enough to be worth 10k gold, and use that for large transactions)

Could be interesting, but I'd at least like the ability to hold a tremendous sum of gold, even if I can't move with it on me. If I want to purchase something with 50k gold, I should be able to at least meet with the guy at the bank and trade the gold off - trading it in pieces (ie. 10k at a time) would not only be a hassle, it would be impossible if the 50k+ is for one item (scamming anyone?)

[Trixxer]

Originally Posted by Cristina

I am worried about what "you can only carry gold up to a certain limit by yourself" means. In real world I do not like to being told how much cash i should or shouldn't carry and I wouldn't want any restriction like that in MO.

FYI, you don´t have credit card in MO.

I played Everquest1 and the money had weight, so you couldnt carry an increadible amount of money. You can allways throw away the copper and save the gold and the silver coins.

Being able to transport the money back to safety is one part of the adventure!

I really like the system they had in EQ1 and it´s good to see they have it in MO. It add depth and makes it more interesting.

[Mukan]

Originally Posted by Trixxer

FYI, you don´t have credit card in MO.

I played Everquest1 and the money had weight, so you couldnt carry an increadible amount of money. You can allways throw away the copper and save the gold and the silver coins.

Being able to transport the money back to safety is one part of the adventure!

I really like the system they had in EQ1 and it´s good to see they have it in MO. It add depth and makes it more interesting.

Exactly. The currency in MO is likely not going to be some paper, it's probably going to be gold coins and such. Metals are heavy. It only makes sense.

[Murata]

Thanks alot mate, I've been waiting for this! I'd have listened live if it wasn't at 5am for me.

[Thyariol]

Originally Posted by Pariah

Wooooow, it's all that I hoped Darkfall would be. Please lords of gaming, let it all be true.

Amen. *g*

[Henrik Nystrom]

Hi all and thanks for listening.

I just want to remind everyone that everything that is being discussed in the radio and irc is a mix of both confirmed features, and not yet finished features. All these features will not be in at the beginning, especially not when beta starts as we chose to add big features along the road to be able to bug track more efficient. Sometime it can be hell to not know what’s keep crashing the server when we have a lot of features in instead of adding one major at the time, especially with the number of players we are accepting at this point.

The features that is in at beta launch will be announced on our website, we will also communicate in what’s to come in the the next patches for the beta testers. Hopefully we will be able to have the entire list we posted before at release and as stable as possible. After this stage we will of course keep adding more content and features.

So I just want to remind everyone that we are still following the schedule we presented for you earlier in the PowerPoint. (Read big fat disclaimer)

Thanks you all for understanding and not spreading”non-confirmed features" as it could do more harm than good for some out there. Keep in mind I'm doing this to show my support to the community and having a good time with the fans. And a lot of our feature discussion is a description in how the feature will work when it's in the game.

Oh, and good job Scream and the others in the show

[Looseshooter]

Sneak peaks are always still great for us. Thanks Henrik.

[Revive]

Originally Posted by Kuroi

yes, YES.

TY Henrik

/agreed + /tears of joy

[Kuroi]

Originally Posted by Henrik Nystrom

The features that is in at beta launch will be announced on our website

before the preorder? :P

[Kushaja]

Originally Posted by Kuroi

before the preorder? :P

yeah im interested in this one too. Just so that we who will be buying the preorders know what we're buying

[Trax]

Originally Posted by Septus

So how do you buy something that is valued at more gold than a player can carry?

This.

[Kuroi]

Originally Posted by Trax

This.

money check, lol

[Wanwo1]

This is awesome! Thanks for posting.

[Shargas]

Checks like in UO.

[mosoloa1]

very fun and good to hear

this is very nice:
"Will there be magical light sources?: Yeah, there will be spells. We have two magical ways to make light, one like nightvision and one like Gandalf, where you start beaming."

[Tresilian]

Originally Posted by mosoloa1

very fun and good to hear

this is very nice:
"Will there be magical light sources?: Yeah, there will be spells. We have two magical ways to make light, one like nightvision and one like Gandalf, where you start beaming."

It's transcripted a little wrong actually. He said that there are two ways of implementing the magical light sources. Gandalf staff or nightvision.

[Tresilian]

DISCLAIMER:

The following information transcripted from the MO-Radio show is unconfirmed talk of the game. Features of a game at developing and testing phase are subject to change at any given time. When creating a summary of a transcript/talk it is always ripping things out of context. The questions and answers presented below are mostly not the exact words said by the parties involved in the discussion, but the words of my own.


The following Q&A is a compilation of discussion in MO-Radio 28th of June. Not all questions and answers are listed here, mostly because of the shear complexity of answers or they've been answered already elsewhere. I strongly suggest everyone to listen to the show by themselves. You can find link to the show recordings at the bottom of this post.

Q&A Grab Bag 2:

Q: Did you think the E-bay auction would go over 5000 $?
A: No, I was guessing it around 3000 $ or so.

Q: Why did you choose Doctors Without Borders as a charity target for the E-bay auction?
A: DBW helps saving lives and we thought that was pretty cool.

Q: Will DirectX 10 be supported?
A: Yes, but at the moment DX9 and DX10 have the same looks in game.

Q: When will NDA be lifted?
A: We haven't decided a final date for it yet, but we will be lifting it soon. We will post info about it on the website when it's time.

Q: How does races and bloodmix effect besides looks in character creation?
A: Besides looks, the cap on attributes. It's mostly those two.

Q: Can people place their house anywhere there's room?
A: There will be a few limitations to placing a house depending on some different things. One will be for people occupying a certain area during certain game moments and of course not too close to pre built cities as well. But over that we will always try to make it so that players can place their house as close as possible to the spot they want to place it.

Q: Can I have a summer vocation house in the dragon's lair we saw on the teaser and have him guard my house?
A: Yeah that might be a good spot. *laughs*

Q: Are you going to sell 10k copies at the same time or in 2k blocks?
A: We will sell all 10k when shop opens.

Q: How many bigger spots there will be for player cities?
A: It's hard to say, there's a lot of empty spaces in any continent we are going to release at the beginning. It's very hard to calculate how many, it obviously depends on what type of houses you are building. But we are trying to make sure there will be enough space for the huge castles where you will actually be able to control a country in our next biggest step of development. We think it will be hard for everyone to have a huge house, but we do try to create a lot of empty space for the players so as many as possible will be able to build their houses.

Q: If you want to have your guild as a roaming guild instead of city building guild, will it be viable?
A: We are developing an artifact system for guilds tied to the religion system and gods. In this system you can tie an artifact to a guild stone and it will give a small bonus to entire guild. These artifacts can be found in the world, although you might not understand what it is. If you carry this object you could have quite a huge bonus on the carrier. But you can't place the object in your bag or log out with it. You can give it to another player or try to hide it until you log back on though. We are also possibly making a system so that other players could get a hint that someone is holding an artifact. So players have a choice, they can either try to play with the artifact in their pocket or it can also even be a weapon. Other way is to tie it to the guild stone for smaller guild wide bonus. This is something pretty interesting we are experimenting, but this will not be up for launch, something for later.

Q: How about religion system, will it be implemented for launch?
A: It will be in partly, not something you can control from the beginning though.

Q: How many character slots per account at launch?
A: We haven't decided yet really. First we thought around 4-5 slots, but I think we will be lowering it to 2-3 slots. We will also be testing this in the beta phase, since we don't want a single person to be able to master all the crafting skills themselves. This way there will be more interaction with other players. You have to rely on others services in MO.

Q: Are you going to implement recall runes?
A: At first it was pretty obvious choice, because I couldn't imagine of playing UO without them. In you could get instant action by using them. It worked for 10 years for me and I thought it was an obvious choice for me. But then we started to look at the reactions from the community and discovered that a lot of people didn't enjoy these. We know recall runes brings problems to feeling of big world, things come closer with recall runes. We are inspired from EVE Online where transporting of resources are in important role and recall runes could ruin some of these interesting areas. So we took a big step back from recall runes and we are looking for some limits on the transport, but we are looking at having marked runes near guild houses for example. So it's very limited at the moment to use recall runes.

Q: What about stealth system, will you have sort of magical stealth system or physical(line of sight) stealth system?
A: In first person view games you can't hide like in real life you could, you don't have full control of your limbs. We need to add something that will help you hide more easily. At first we were pretty comfortable of having ”transparent” hiding system, but the more we played the beta we found out that it's pretty easy to hide in the environment without any artificial skills that help you. We are still thinking about how to do this. We think there should be some kind of magic that will make you totally invisible, but in this state you cannot move or do anything.

Q: How do you build a house in MO?
A: At this point you will need some different things. You need resources, skills for building buildings and transport for the resources.

Q: What kind of building variety the game has?
A: At the moment you can only build a house type with 3 different sizes. We also have keeps, towers and castles. But at the moment you can't build walls. So it's only one pre house with an option to upgrade it to something different. The next step will be having walls, because it's interesting for the players to design cities with walls.

Q: What kind of crowd control and escape mechanic MO has?
A: We don't have a lot of different spells or skills that effect you a lot. We do have attributes to effect your speed, so there will be huge variety between players. But it's not like you're running 10 times faster or so. It's hard to say yet how the mechanic will work in the end, we need a lot more testing in this matter.

Q: Do you have more trade skills in the game at the moment besides weapon crafting and armor crafting?
A: Yeah, we have a huge list of trade skills. It's actually too long for me to remember, so we have a lot of skills in the secondary skill tree. There will be so many trade and crafting skills that it will require a lot of players to cover all those skills.

Q: What if all 10k copies are sold out in a matter of hours, what actions will be taken?
A: We don't know yet how many players our server can hold, so we will know more about that when we enter this next beta phase with all the preorderers. Then we will know if we need another server. We need to also find out if we should start NA server as well. Although it seems that EU servers are very playable for NA based players, so we will need to think about how to deal with this if the demand is higher than what our first server can hold. [This answer is way longer than what I wrote here]

Q: But what will you do if the game sells out within first couple hours, really quick?
A: We will probably bring up some champagne. On a more serious note we will probably be very busy at handling all the players with the resources we have. It's a huge task for us, so we will be very occupied handling everything. But of course if we see that things are running smooth and we can handle the pressure we will continue selling more copies.

Q: How does taming work in the game?
A: It's quite similar to UO taming skill. So you have a taming skill, but we take a step future where you have to learn about the animal before you can tame it, such as different animal families and what kind of group they are in. But otherwise it's quite like in UO where you have to talk to it and make it calm and get it to trust you.

Q: There wont be any instant messaging?
A: Yeah we do have some different methods of communicating. There's the normal local chat and then there's pigeon birds that you can use to send a delayed message to someone. Then you have guild communication in which you can talk to anyone in the guild instantly.


Recordings:
MO Radio: 2009-06-26
MO Radio: 2009-06-28


MO-Radio homepage
MO-Radio thread on this forum

[Tresilian]

DISCLAIMER:

The following information transcripted from the MO-Radio show is unconfirmed talk of the game. Features of a game at developing and testing phase are subject to change at any given time. When creating a summary of a transcript/talk it is always ripping things out of context. The questions and answers presented below are mostly not the exact words said by the parties involved in the discussion, but the words of my own.


The following Q&A is a compilation of discussion in MO-Radio 28th of June. Not all questions and answers are listed here, mostly because of the shear complexity of answers or they've been answered already elsewhere. I strongly suggest everyone to listen to the show by themselves. You can find link to the show recordings at the bottom of this post.

Q&A Grab Bag 3:

Q: Will there be different kind of creatures in the night compared to daytime?
A: There's a lot of gameplay features affected by daytime cycle. There are a few resources like flowers or so which can only be picked up during daytime or moonlight. There are also different mobs that are awake during certain time of a day. Also the combat and pvp is affected, since you have to use light sources during the night.

Q: Will there be a chat bubble over people who talk near you?
A: The text others say will be shown in the local chat window and also above player heads like in UO.

Q: Is there summoning or teleporting spells?
A: We need to be careful with this, because it affects the entire travelling system. We don't want people to avoid trading routes by using that kind of travel. However there could be some sort of teleportation close to the guild stone at some point.

Q: What game feature is the most worried about at the moment? Something that could go wrong.
A: Well I was worried at some state about the real time combat system, but after we ran testing over years We feel and I'm confident that we have very good real time combat system. I'm not sure if we have any other feature that we're worried, but it could be the minigame system for crafting. It might be that we can't get that minigame ready for launch. Because it's really difficult to implement into our system. It's unreal engine that's really limiting us in some ways and we will have to develop a new pipeline for the engine and that task is not simple or quick.

Q: What kind of minigame is this for crafting?
A: We haven't released much info of it yet, but it will be nothing like some other games have. It's really unique and very cool. It has puzzle elements in it and experimenting.

Q: Does MO have a system that can be updated visually after like 10 years?
A: The Unreal Engine is very flexible graphic engine and yeah, it can be updated well.

Q: Will players have to pay extra for large updates and expansions?
A: We believe in having a loyal customer base and for that we have to give something back for the community. So at the moment we are aiming for having these as free updates.

Q: What arc type are you going to play in MO?
A: I enjoy the half orc race and I'm going to be on the battle field a lot. If you enjoy the pvp you will see me probably some time. I enjoy the magic also so I will probably be using magic.

Q: Will hybrids be best in MO pvp?
A: I don't think that mixing melee, archery and magic will be the best way to pvp because each of these require a lot of skill from the player. I think the best combat style for a player is the one he likes the most. So a quick answer to the question is no.

Q: Will I be able to get married and have kids?
A: We're not sure about that step, but it's a possibility if it's wanted by the players. We're not restricting ourselves in lore or so however, so it's possible.

Q: Will there be caravans for trading, chariots etc?
A: Yeah, well that's actually a must if you want to build a castle or a city. You will need wagons and mounts to carry the resources, same goes with building siege weapons.

Q: How cartography skill works?
A: We're looking into this still how to do it. There are two ways. One very interesting way is to make players paint the map with a digital pen on their own. But this requires a similar interface system like the crafting mini game needs. So it wont make it to launch. Cartography will be more generic at first where you can't do so much on your own.

Q: If and when you get the system for the crafting mini game and others alike, what else can it do?
A: You could draw your own paintings, guild logo for crafted armor and guild logo for banners hanging from the walls and such. This is quite high priority after launch because it opens up so many new features. Hopefully we get to work on this system in the near future.

Q: Will you be able to upload your own guild logo image?
A: At the moment we have pre set of images and logos. We have looked at the possibility of players to upload them, but we're not sure about the administartion for that. We still have limited resources, but if things run smooth and we can increase our resources things like that will be looked at.

Q: Is there any anti cheat system for the game?
A: Epic Games have been working for an anti cheat system for us. It's not so simple thing though, because we always have to be careful when we're implementing different systems so it will easily support the anti cheat system. We do have a system at the moment and tools to track down cheats and instant ban them. Hopefully it will be efficient enough for what we are going to face.

Q: Does banking have item limitation?
A: Yeah, there will be item limitation. This is because we need to control the size of our database. But you can also store items in a house you own.

Q: How will murder flagged(reds) bank?
A: There will be a few towns that will be guardless so reds can bank there. We're still forming the rules for the reds, but they will have access to banks.

Q: Is there a way to reproduce books and maps in a fast way?
A: You will be able to copy books and maps with right skills and resources. I'm not sure how fast it will be.

Q: Is there treasure hunting system?
A: Yeah, you will need cartography for that.

Q: Will paypal be supported as payment?
A: Yes, we will support it.

Q: How much will Mortal Online cost?
A: It will be cheaper than for example Darkfall was. The price will always be cheaper for the non-EU players because of the 25% VAT. But it will be cheaper than Darkfall for both EU and non-EU based.

Q: Will there be flying mounts?
A: No, there wont. We did have some nice design for it, but we ran into too many problems and we are ditching it probably for good.

Q: What inspired you to start Mortal Online project?
A: It has been a long journey to start the company etc. I've always been a ”doer” type of a person, it really started from UO beta stage when I felt that this is something I really wanted to do in the future. At that point technology was restricting to create a game like MO, but now we're here.

Q: What's your favorite color?
A: That would be green. Good question!

Q: Will the animals be nude?
A: Yeah, they're nude.

Q: Will you be able to reproduce tamed animals?
A: Yeah, you will be able to breed animals.



Recordings:
MO Radio: 2009-06-26
MO Radio: 2009-06-28


MO-Radio homepage
MO-Radio thread on this forum

[Kaasflipje]

Thanks Tresilian!!!!

[gamon hogger]

zomg nude animals!!

[Aenaria]

<3 how Henrik references UO a bit

[Slann]

Tresilian is included the part transcribed by Shargas?

[Tresilian]

Originally Posted by Aenaria

<3 how Henrik references UO a bit

Well here lies the exact problem of transcripting and transforming discussion into Q&A. It was actually mostly another way round, the people asking the questions used UO as a reference. I just can't make the questions a mile long, it's easier to put the reference to the answering side. As I stated, these are mostly my words explaining the discussion the way I see it.

Originally Posted by Slann

Tresilian is included the part transcribed by Shargas?

What do you mean? You mean why haven't I added Shargas link to the OP? There's a minor issue with it before adding the link to OP, I've explained it to Shargas in PM.

[Aenaria]

Originally Posted by Tresilian

Well here lies the exact problem of transcripting and transforming discussion into Q&A. It was actually mostly another way round, the people asking the questions used UO as a reference. I just can't make the questions a mile long, it's easier to put the reference to the answering side. As I stated, these are mostly my words explaining the discussion the way I see it.

Im talking about the live show in which he mentions it...I downloaded and am listening now, btw great show man + rep

[Travie]

Thnx guys, we really appreciate it

[Slann]

Originally Posted by Tresilian

What do you mean? You mean why haven't I added Shargas link to the OP? There's a minor issue with it before adding the link to OP, I've explained it to Shargas in PM.

I mean if what Shargas transcribed is the same that you done, or if you did the rest?

[Lingxiaoyu]

Sweeeeet.

[Shargas]

Slann this is the other MO radio program. I transcribed the one from 26-06-09. That one is from the 28-06-09.

Thanks again Tresilian.

Q: Is there treasure hunting system?
A: Yeah, you will need cartography for that.

Just, awesome.

[mosoloa1]

What is local banking

[Nezabyte]

Originally Posted by mosoloa1

What is local banking

Items placed in a certain bank stay there and cannot be viewed/taken from other banks.

[Lagoon]

Wow, so many questions unanswered for months got answered in this interview
And I love all the answers
A huge thumbs up to SV!