Lialith "Interview" commented

Mats Persson · 28th August 2008, 16:03

I'm sorry, but I really don't know where to post this. But as I'm an almighty Dev and want to post it now, I just make another topic and let the slave trolls sort it out.

..erm, hey? Where's my slave trolls?

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Originally Posted by Lialith

Hello there

Hi! It's a shame I never got to meet you guys at the convention, but thanks a lot for posting this in the forum.

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Please dont take what I tell you now for fact until its confirmed :

As always, I would like to put up a big red disclaimer sign, but as most of you already know my "confirmations" here, as always, will be acknowledgments of what we are aiming for, not necessarily what will be in the final game where things might get cut for a thousand reasons. Here we go:

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Mounts do have three different gaits: stride, trot and gallop. Rideing faster means that you lose more moveability in turns.

Yes, this is true for horses. Other mounts may have different gaits.

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Realism is a priority so you wont have to spent a fortune in order to aquire a mount.

Correct. We will not put an insanely high price on mounts just to use them as money sinks

Acquiring a specially trained or uncommon mount might get a lot more expensive though. Moreover, a mount in MO is far from being just a way of increasing your speed after reaching a certain level or earning enough resources.

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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.

Yes, but the rather in-detail description of hold-aim-release is just one of the ways to attack, and only true for weapons designed to perform such an attack (swords, axes etc.). And yes, damage is dependent on velocity.

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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.

Yes, this is definitely what we are going for (but this is really intense in a mmo, remember no promises). This also means the more regions we manage to have the more the individual armor pieces will affect the outcome of a blow, not just adding to some "general Defence/Resistance/AC stat".

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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.

Yes. This is one of the main reasons we can manage with such a small team. Another one being the core Unreal Engine, of course.

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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.

Yes, the in-house prototype (limited no# of players) has been up and running since long, and it's also in there we constantly test and change stuff that has to do with combat and player features. However, we're now in the middle of the process of moving all that stuff to the constantly changing server solution in collaboration with our partners. It's a turbulent time, meaning it's very hard for any of us to know what has to be changed, limited or sacrificed. Unfortunately this also makes it very hard to give sincere, confident and detailed updates or answers in the way we want them to be

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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.)

Yes, it's a ridiculously huge in-game screenshot with only minor tweaking for print. Honestly when working with it I didn't think you would see the "small" flaws and lack of props, but it turned out even the barrels some 500 meters away got 2cm large when printed

I have to say I'm very pleased with the final result though!

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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.

This will be tested and tweaked until release, and then some.

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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.

Well, the original design was much more of a Lord of the Rings-setting when it came to magic, meaning very few dedicated spellcasters or magicians in the world. However that meant we had to introduce very strange and artificial limits on who could be a mage or not, and after feedback we decided to go in another direction. The flashy and colorful stuff will never be in though

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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.

We'll of course reveal more of this but later on. What I can tell you is that we decided to skip schwifty-five million different spells, buffs and counters pretty early on as the 1st person view and realtime combat made mage-duels unplayable, or at least completely random. Although we had a really complex and thought-through system, not even we ourselves could stand it as it became inpossible to keep track of all combinations and counter measures - every "duel" ended with people throwing random stuff at eachother as you couldn't read your opponent. A typical example of what sounded good on paper but really didn't work out.

It wasn't until we reduced the direct battle/counter spells to around 20-30 that we started to find the balance. This may not sound like much, but believe me when I say it takes days to learn and months to master. When you add other factors to that like melee and ranged weapons (as many mages will put more than one point in those skills too) every duel between skilled players is extremely demanding and intense!

Magic doesn't end with "direct battle spells", however. Magic schools and things like the 10-pointed Correlation Spinier (!?) are of course still in but their focus tend to be on direct spells for other uses, more complex spells, enchantments, rituals and of course a lot of PvE-specific spells as well, some of them being battle spells.

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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.

Orcs will not be playable. This is a desicion we made as we like their feats/abilities and society to be very different from the "playable" ones: Having to implement such a totally different kind of society (without regular reading/writing, without regular spells etc) would be very costly as it would have a huge inpact on everything from skilltraining to character setup. Even more importantly, the Orcs are at war with the civilized world and are one of the constant dangers to it, and letting people play them would encourage race-wars in a way we don't want to. (That will be up to the players, not by some pre-determined allegiance by the game.)

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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.

Very true.

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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.

There seem to be a lot of confusion regarding the term "instance", and I won't even try to clear it out here. In short, we are staying as far away from "WoW/AoC-instances" as possible, and will do our utmost to keep it that way. You will always be able to follow any player everywhere as long as there are no natural obstacles (locked door, a cave-in etc). If there's 100 people in a city, every player will be there, not 50 in City A and 50 players in City B. If your group goes down a cave to face the rare Pink Sebastaclor, other groups might already be there, and groups may enter and enter and enter until there's a big happy lagfest in the Pink Sebastaclor cave.

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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)

Regional servers and a (more laggy?) World server with the possibility to play on whichever one you like sounds the most reasonable. The one-server solution simply isn't possible for this game unless technology and it's implementation in the world jumps at least 10 years forward, as even a regular fantasy-mmo would have severe problems doing that.
Also, I don't recognize the "no-cost-to-transfer" in the case of several servers. As things look at the moment, we would have to do that manually, and that would of course cost money. Henrik, help me out here?

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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.

Yes, although we are not actively looking for a publisher, that kind of attention is always good, and we are open for suggestions.

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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.

Well, I guess Henrik told you a lot more about the mounts than just the hold-aim-stuff, didn't you Henrik?

Thank you so much again for putting this together, and from what I read here you seem like a good listener

I hope I've managed to actually make some clarifications, not only raise new questions or add to the confusion.

admiralnlson · 28th August 2008, 16:19

woot, Mats is back on the forums... for good

Sebastian Persson · 28th August 2008, 16:27

We are awesome!

LightsabeR · 28th August 2008, 16:32

Thanks a lot Mats. Honestly, I really like every direction you guys are going (or at least trying to go) with the game. Hopefully everything goes as smoothly as possible with the move from in-house to the server.

Hereshk · 28th August 2008, 16:37

Thanx alot for the clarifications !

Its awesome and appreciated that u guys are taking time like that to keep us up to date with good infos

Ndition · 28th August 2008, 16:40

Sounds awesome.

and to denny Vaporware

Victor · 28th August 2008, 17:09

Concerning Character transfers...

Why not simply, save players characters on the account server, afterall, a character save file contain not much kb. And have this account server, access all world servers. That way we always can play even when our regular servers are down.

If this would cause problems, there could be a timer, 24 hour delay until you can change server again, to avoid mass immigrations, and overloading of servers.

Anyways, this is just a suggestion, would save the company from doing account transfers, would save the hassel for customer to contact the company. Etc.

Also, it would be easier for us to keep the servers alive with a healthy population. No server merging needed ever, since the players handle this on their own. You can just shut down one server, and the players can log onto another.

P.S Thanks for the other info, Mats, sounds good so far concerning the other aspects of the Game.

Altor · 28th August 2008, 18:06

sweeeeet

Torgrim · 28th August 2008, 18:11

Nice work snaphane

Sleeping with the fishes · 28th August 2008, 18:28

This all sounds friggin awesome! Keep up the good work guys!

Yes I really hope there will be smaller regional servers in this game...
To be able to fight, with the system you describe, a very low player ping and very low server load will be required!
Then ofc I'm all for the possibility for players to choose the international lagfests if they want

Sorjak · 28th August 2008, 18:34

Great post, mats. It's exceedingly relieving to hear professional confirmation on some of these topics, the magic system arguably the most.

When you talk about the "10-pointed Correlation Spinier", do you mean some sort of rock paper scissors system between the types of magic, or elements of it?

Brb, gotta look up Spinier

Lialith · 28th August 2008, 18:40