Leipzig Coverage 2008

[lazyasian224]

Originally Posted by Sebastian Persson

Wait for comments..

does urs count as one?

[Asmodeus]

They said there weren't gonna be any loading screens >.<

[Phi]

Originally Posted by Lialith

Hello there

As you might know I was at the GC yesterday (Saturday).
What was really annoying were that cheerleader girls at some booths, hyping their games with their really shrill voices.
The booths of the big MMO publishers NcSoft (GuildWars, Aion) and GOA (War) also had quite a show running, their target audience were clearly under 18 years old. They had a guy at their stage, hyping their games almost all the time while throwing merchandise like T-Shirs, Posters, Bags and Buttons into the crowd. What i found interesting is that not only FunCom (AoC) but also Blizzard (WoW) didnt have that kind of "let the crowd hype us" advertisement. Anyway...

What you would like to hear about is MO i guess...
Well, you have already seen some pictures from their booth that Necromantic had posted recently.
http://s5.directupload.net/images/us...1/nefyrn4h.jpg
http://s1.directupload.net/images/us...1/mx4m8ges.jpg

It was a very nice and classy small booth and as far as i can tell, they had a few interested visitors there for almost all the time.

So my fiancé and I talked with our nice guys of StarVault for about an hour and here is what we educed from that conversation. Please dont take what I tell you now for fact until its confirmed :

• Mounts do have three different gaits: stride, trot and gallop. Rideing faster means that you lose more moveability in turns.
• Realism is a priority so you wont have to spent a fortune in order to aquire a mount.
• There will be mounted combat and as i understod, it works like this: you press the action-button and your character rises his weapon, you aim and the moment you release the button, your character swings his weapon. So you have to time your attack while you ride towards your target and the damage you deal also depends on your movement speed.
• There will be body boxes and hit boxes are separated into different body zones, so that you deal more damage if you for example manage to hit the head of your foe.
• As I have understod it, not StarVault but EpicGames (developer of the Unreal Engine) is creating the netcode for MO. So EpicGames do really know what they are doing there, after all its their engine.
• They do have a playable version of the game but they are still changeing so much every day, and also detailed things about the setting are not definite enough jet, thats why we dont get to see or read new stuff at the moment. Also the netcode is not ready jet, so thats why there is no server version of the game and therefore no beta jet.
• The city you can see as view at their GC-booth is an ingame screen of that big city where the guy on the rino in the trailer rides through the gates. (We could see that gate in the city screen at the booth.)
• At the moment they are working a lot on the realtime fighting system in order to make it feel really great in pvp. I think its importent to them that this feature is going to be really perfect.
• They first thought about creating a low magic world, where magic is something quite special and no every day thing. But they realised that a lot of player want to play characters that are totally into magic. So there will be magic characters in the game but not that flashy and colorfull like in many other games.
• I really dont think there will be a one klick and thats it casting system. A system where you have to prepere your spells and also have to aim and channel your cast some how, and not every cast will automaticly be sucessfull - something like that probably but hey didnt tell us something definate on that topic.
• I also really dont think there will be playable orcs. They did choose half-orcs because they wanted to make that warrior kind of character more concrete. If you think of movies like 300 or Gladiator, thats the kind of direction they were aiming for when they decided to have playable half-orcs. They dont want to have playable "monsters" and also do not want to let monsters become human in some sort of way. I think it will be a realistic fantasy setting as far as it is possible.
• They dont want to have loading screens and dont like them at all, but it could be that it is not possible to totally ban them from the game, so there will only be loading screens at points where its for technical reasons not possible to create that part of the game without them.
• There will not be closed instances. You will always be able to follow other players whereever they are going to. I think to what extent there will be instances is not decided jet.
• Talking about servers, they are thinking about different solutions and havent decided on that topic jet. As far as I can tell, there will be possibilitys to play with people all over the world, even if it means to have to live with lags when you are sitting in the US and decide to play over the European server. (For sure there will be no costs for character transvers if you want to play with your friends and those have their characters on an other server.) So decentralised servers are one possibility, another would be to have one big simulated server. (I think that would be a little bit like the system in Eve)
• They seem to really think that they are going to be able to release the game as planed. But still, if they should run into some kind of unexpected trouble, they would have some buffer left. There was also more feedback than they had expected at the GC, not only from the press but also from some big publishers, and they were quite excited about that.

So all in all we got quite a few information. We were the first ones who were told about the mounted combat system by the way.

So, well I hope we didnt missinterpretate to much and that I was able to give you some new infos that we all were longing for.

wowsers so much info, 1 million thanks to you. I really liked this tidbit... ""There will be body boxes and hit boxes are separated into different body zones, so that you deal more damage if you for example manage to hit the head of your foe.""

Also the pic of the city looks epic and gorgeous... It may be a little too early to assume something like this but i can't stop myself from imagining exploring that huge city in first person view.. going into the shops, joining guilds, collecting gossip, (maybe some espionage), all in first person view while being an MMO at the same time... awesome, utterly awesome.

[Mats Persson]

You will find the commented Lialith "interview" here
Please make further comments to that post at the above link!

[Danach]

Awesome posts guys, thanks for all the great info.