Enkele Q&A's:
Earthrise developers answer GameSNAFU's questions in this Exclusive!
GameSNAFU would like to thank Atanas Atanasov the CEO of Masthead Studios for taking the time to answer our questions about Earthrise.
Q: What engine does Earthrise use?
A: Earthrise uses a proprietary in-house developed game engine specifically designed to handle dynamic, persistent online worlds with thousands of players while providing top-notch graphic engine and realistic physics. Earthrise will be the first game to utilize the engine and will serve as a demonstration to its broad range of features we will build upon in our future titles.
Q: We know from Earthrise's website that it has an expansive and intriguing back story. How will the quest lines in the game follow it?
A: Earthrise will provide players with an engaging storyline branching between two warring factions – Continoma and Noir. Players will follow a linear story where they will play a major role in aiding one or the other side of the conflict in its attempt to either liberate the island population from the iron grip of Continoma or wipe out all insurgencies that root in the minds of the loyal citizens. Along the storyline there will be multiple minor quest lines provided by organizations that aid one of the factions or strive to remain loyal, and each of them has its own goals and agendas. Players will be able to change their faction affiliation to gain access to the storyline of the opposite side but will be discouraged from faction-hopping with the risk of being marked as a traitor.
Q: Is the island of Enterra the only inhabitable land mass left on the planet after the 3rd world war?
A: The Enterra population believes the island is all of Earth that remains… is that the truth or a fabrication? Those are the sorts of questions that get answered in content patches and expansions.
Q: Will the character view be from a first or third person perspective?
A: Earthrise will be played from a third person perspective and players will be able to view their character’s presence on the screen as they explore and battle through the tropical landscape of Enterra island. Players will be able to zoom in and out to view the fine details of their character or take a wide view of the surrounding area.
Q: What kind of targeting system will Earthrise use? Will you "lock onto" your target or will it be twitch based?
A: A mix of both. Players will be required to score a single clear shot at a target using their weapon of choice before the weapon could provide advanced locking mechanics that will ease keeping their opponent on target. The locking mechanic won’t remove the need of movement, proper targeting and twitch-based shooting but will aid the attacker in pursuing a fast-moving target.
Q: Earthrise will have PvP elements, how much of the game play will be focused on PvP?
A: Almost every aspect of Earthrise’s gameplay supports or is centered around PvP experience. While following the PvE road, players will be able to develop their character’s combat skills and abilities in order to survive the harsh environments but often will become victims to other players, losing some of their equipment to their attackers. Soon they will not only learn how to protect their belongings from such attacks but also that PvP is a lucrative, risky undertaking promising hefty rewards in form of earned loot from other players. As players gather together into guilds, they will also discover the Territory Conquest gameplay that allows Guilds to war against each other for control over territories that yields rare resources needed to fuel the game economy with powerful items and whoever controls the mining and manufacturing of said items will have advantage against their enemies – an advantage that is worth fighting for!
Q: It looks like the game will have some RvR elements to it. Are we correct in this assumption? And if so what factions will there be in this RvR conflict?
A: We prefer to call them GvG (Guild versus Guild) gameplay. The GvG gameplay will consist of conquering concessional territories as a source of rare resources needed to craft the powerful items in the game. Whoever controls those resources will control the flow of high-powered weapons and armor and will have an advantage over their enemies. But to protect their territory from the ambition of their enemies, the guilds will have to build a customized base with the right balance between defensive structures and mining facilities to extract and process the precious resources. At set period of time guilds will be able to attack their neighbors in elaborate goal-based siege mass combat allowing attackers to seize control over their enemy base and take over its operation. This opens ground for very complex military and political player-run campaigns allowing guild alliances to wield real control over the fate of the game.
Q: How "hardcore" will the PvP be? Will players be able to "loot" another player once they have killed them?
A: We aim to please our hardcore fans but not without taking precautions that would prevent less dedicated and skilled players from being completely "pwned" in Earthrise. Players will be able to loot all items from the victims that aren’t insured but insurance will be widespread and easy to access and would minimize the loss of valuable items as long as the person who owns them is willing to invest in safety.
Q: What kind of death penalty if any will there be in Earthrise? Will a PvP death hurt more than a PvE death penalty wise?
A: Death penalties in Earthrise are worth considering in advance – players may not only lose all items that weren’t insured, but also some types of insurance will expire upon death and items will have to be re-insured again which is a serious, continuous investment in safety. There aren’t major differences between death in PvP and death in PvE although details are currently being fine-tuned in internal testing.
Q: Risk versus reward is always an issue in games that contain a PVP element, what kind incentives are there going to be to entice players into getting involved in PVP?
A; How about the sense of victory when you strip your victim to the underwear and march away with all his equipment and gear?
Q: In Earthrise your character will advance even if you are "offline". Will this be comparable to offline skill training like in EVE Online? If not, how will it be different?
A: Offline Professions are not tied to the skill system in a manner such as Eve Online. Instead they allow the player to experience in a simple manner the daily life of their character while they aren’t adventuring online, such as learning social skills and choosing a career. Offline Professions will provide players with minor periodic income which will make sure that players never run bankrupt and can invest in new gear even after they had been completely looted in combat with another player. Also, Offline Professions will provide periodically small rewards depending on the choice of profession, with more lucrative ones from the highest positions in the Enterran society.
Q: About crafting, will most items used by players in the game be craftable? If so how will they compare with looted items and equipment?
A: When it comes to gearing, nothing will beat player-made items made for specific gameplay styles using the right combination of template Techniques and enhancement Designs out of thousands of possible combinations. Players will rely on their own crafting skills or another dedicated crafter to create the best weapons and armor to meet specific challenges from the world inhabitants or other players. What players will find as loot from powerful non-player opponents would be less-customized items that will excel with higher quality made of better materials. These items will be highly-sought not only for their primary use but because crafters can dismantle and use their parts to create new player-customized items. Absolutely nothing is deemed useless in Earthrise.
Q: Is your studio content with Earthrise's development schedule and could you tell us if you have a release date in mind yet?
A: We are doing fine with the schedule so far, but we are not going to announce a release date yet, some important tests are yet to come and we don’t want to disappoint our fans with false promises.
Q: Finally is Masthead working on any other projects they could tell us about at this time?
A: We haven’t started real work on a new project. Right now we are focused on Earthrise only, although we have some ideas for future titles.
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Earthrise Lead Game Designer Interview
Questions by Rick Charbs, Onrpg writer
Answered by: Apostol Apostolov, Lead Game Designer
We at Onrpg were glad to hold an interview with Earthrise’s lead game designer, Apostol Apostolov. A game currently under development, Earthrise is sure to dazzle gamers with its unique crafting and player vs. player systems, with elements that render the game almost limitless. Get ready for an interesting gaming experience, as it is almost ready for the public: “…the [closed beta] sign up process starts at the end of December” explained Apostol.
Onrpg: Could you please briefly explain the setting of the game?
Apostol: Earthrise is set in the future, where the conflict for Earth’s remaining resources has led the most powerful ruling corporations into a self-destructive war that threatens civilization. Facing extinction of the human race, the western corporations funded the project Continoma, which was created to store human genome and memory matrix on the private Pacific island of Enterra. The Continoma project would make it possible to clone humans back to life when the conditions on the planet were habitable once again.
Centuries later, humans emerged from the depths of the cloning vaults to reclaim what once was lost, but are faced with the challenge of mutant threat that has taken over the island. As the survivors set foot firmly by pushing back against the mutants, they built the magnificent city of Sal Vitas and put all government control in the hands of the Continoma, a corporation bearing the name of the project that now promises to advance humanity and avoid the mistakes of the past.
Cloning became widespread and humanity met immortality. Fearing the government had been corrupted by the power it yielded, the opposition staged a coup that failed to achieve its goal but managed to unite the opposition together into a faction called Noir. Using guerilla tactics to weaken its opponent and sabotage its expansion across the island, Noir attempted to disrupt the actions of Continoma and weaken its grip on the citizens. Only after Noir achieved independence by stealing the secret of cloning, did they finally step up into the conflict.
Now, as the tension grows between the two sides, players emerge into the game world as newly cloned individuals, free to decide which side of the conflict to take on.
Onrpg: Could you please further explain the skill-based advancement system Earthrise will offer?
Apostol: Earthrise will allow players to freely develop their character the way they want, by giving them access to a range of combat, crafting and social skills. As players accumulate experience points through combat, manufacturing and maintenance of items and offline professions, they can use these points to unlock abilities, tactics, technologies and designs that allow them to become more a powerful warrior or influential crafter. No limitations exist to what skills players can invest their points in – given enough time and persistence players could theoretically unlock every skill in the game. Using every skill at once however is not possible, as their usage is highly dependent on the choice of armor and weaponry.
Onrpg: How strong is the PVP aspect of the game?
Apostol: Earthrise is built with Player vs Player as its core aspect. From the very start players will face the conflict between Continoma and Noir and will be given a chance to affiliate with either or neither side. That will not only provide him with a storyline and tasks to complete, but also encourage him to seek out and exterminate players of the opposing factions. This motivation will be represented not only with quest rewards but also the loot mechanic that allows players to partially or even fully loot their opponents that have failed to insure their property.
As characters group together into Guilds, they will enter a whole new level of PvP – the Concession Grounds, a vast portion of the island broken into contested territories that can be conquered, built up into profitable bases with many functions such as mining, manufacturing, and guild administration. Guilds will fight for control over these territories for many reasons, but the main being economic power – as some of the most powerful resources used to create the most wanted items originate from the Concession Grounds, Guilds in control of these territories will decide the fate of the world economy. With power comes rivalry as the more powerful guilds will face fierce opposition from everyone else not profiting from the production.
Onrpg: Character customization seems to be a priority in this title. What are the advantages of having no “class-restrictions” in the game?
Apostol: No class restrictions means that the player won’t need to start anew when he faces certain limitations of his character that hold him from enjoying fully the game experience. It makes no sense that a character cannot learn a new skill outside of his specialization the same way we do in real life – but he would be limited to using it depending on what gear and tools he has. Learning most or even all the skills only allows a player to be more flexible and gives them more freedom to recreate any build he desires at any moment rather than create an unbeatable, ultimate killing machine that has no match. Players who keep learning more skills than they actually need for a single build are rewarded by the freedom to switch to another build in the future without having to restart and replay parts of the game that have already been done once.
Onrpg: A quite unique feature we have stumbled upon is the character progression feature. Player’s characters will continue to develop even when you aren’t logged in. How will this elaborate system function?
Apostol: Offline Professions are jobs that characters do for a living when not involved in online adventuring. We created Offline Professions in order to not penalize players that do not play constantly and see their time offline as lost opportunity to advance in the game and as a new way of revenue for the character to support their adventuring even if they are looted dry in a PvP combat. Players can learn Social skills and seek out Offline Professions openings throughout the Enterra island in order to get hired and earn both steady income and random rewards based on the type and grade of the profession. As a character works offline on his profession, he will accumulate Career Points that are invested in unlocking Social Skills, prerequisites for even better paying and more rewarding jobs. Only one character per account can have an Offline Profession.
Onrpg: Crafting is another important aspect of this game. To what extent can you customize your own items?
Apostol: Crafters are given unprecedented freedom and influence over the world economy in Enterra, to a point where no other game on the market today comes even close. In many games players can customize their items on their own and crafters simply supply the ingredients without giving players say in what items they can have access to and for what price. In Earthrise players cannot customize their equipment – instead, crafters have the freedom to create any type of items using template Technologies and Design enhancements and then decide what items will be made available to other players in a fully player-run economy. Crafters can advance technologies they are best suited to do, seek out new niches and provide equipment for them or advertise new types of weapons and armor that players have yet to find useful. Few other games make crafters so important that players will go to any length to seek them out and pay for their services.
Onrpg: What payment methods are you considering for the title? Will it require a monthly subscription?
Apostol: Earthrise will have monthly subscriptions. The player experience in the game is based on this concept. We want to put everyone on equal grounds and let them have access to everything in the game.
Onrpg: With a short glance at the official Earthrise website it is easy to come to the conclusion that you focus a great amount of your attention on the community, even before release. Why do you think keeping a tight knit community is so important during the development phase of the game?
Apostol: Absolutely! Fans feedback has been incredible from the start and we have studied and taken into consideration player desired features, ideas and suggestions as we developed different mechanics for the game. It is very important for every developer to know their audience and our forums have really helped us to get close to our future players and do our best in creating an exciting, satisfying game.
Onrpg: What is your favorite aspect of the game currently?
Apostol: It probably has to be crafting, as this is the direction where Earthrise explores one very undeveloped direction for the MMO genre. The combinations possible are truly endless and designing a system that allows players to shift the economy in a direction based on their own demand, rather than the expectations of the developer, puts us both in the role of the creator. Earthrise will allow the player to explore the system’s capabilities and every day find new uses and new possibilities for a smart crafter to make a big name and profit.
Onrpg: When do you plan for your first test release?
Apostol: If you mean closed beta, the sign up process starts at the end of December. After that we will start inviting players according to the testing needs of Earthrise.
Earthrise Lead Game Designer Interview - Onrpg.com
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Nog andere Q&A's en interviews:
http://reviewstash.com/viewtopic.php?id=1049 <br />
Earthrise Interview - Page 1 // MMO /// Eurogamer - Games Reviews, News and More
Earthrise - JeuxOnLine
. Toch niet in vergelijking met wat bijvoorbeeld Funcom of Mythic er tegenaan hebben gesmeten.