Earth and Beyond Preview

Sure, Electronic Arts has a handful of online games like Motor City Online and Majestic on the horizon, but when Origin recently announced the cancellation of the anticipated sequel to Ultima Online, Ultima World Online: Origin, EA was left without a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that's compelling enough to compete with the ever popular EverQuest. Enter Westwood. The renowned developer has been working on Earth and Beyond, a robust MMORPG with a unique sci-fi twist, for nearly four years now, and EA is banking on this game to be next year's EverQuest...well, EverQuest in space. During a recent visit to Westwood's Las Vegas offices, we had a chance to briefly sit down with producer Rade Stojsavljevic and get a hands-on demonstration of Earth and Beyond.

As has been previously revealed, Earth and Beyond takes place in the 23rd century, about 100 years after a deadly civil war devastated the planet Earth. Humanity has splintered into three distinct factions: the Progen, the Terran, and the Jenquai, all of whom have so far managed to coexist in an uneasy alliance that's reminiscent of the 1980s-era Cold War. These three races each specialize in a certain field of expertise. Specifically, the Progen are a warrior society, the Terran are capitalist traders, and the Jenquai are scientifically inclined explorers. When you create your character, you'll choose to play as one of these three races, and you'll inherit their respective skill sets. You will also be able to skew your character's level of expertise even further by choosing from one of these same three specialties. That is, you're free to create a Terran trader with a specialty in exploring, or you can go all out and create a Progen warrior with a specialty in fighting. In addition to the nine possible specialty combinations, your character can further be customized through Earth and Beyond's skill system. While you'll only start out the game with one or two skills per character, as you progress through quests and gain more experience, you'll be granted with more advanced passive and active skill sets. For example, as a Terran, one of the passive skills you might acquire is negotiation. With this, you'll automatically get lower prices for any item or weapon that you wish to buy, and conversely, you'll be able to ask for a higher price when you're looking to sell something. Some of the other skills include combat and diplomacy. In all, Earth and Beyond will have a total of 90 skills, 10 for each of the game's nine character combinations.

Like traditional RPGs, experience in Earth and Beyond is gained as you complete quests. Unlike other role-playing games, however, Earth and Beyond has three different experience-point pools for your character to advance in. So you can be the best Terran trader this side of the galaxy but still be a measly level-2 explorer and level-4 fighter (the level cap in the game is 50). And while it's impossible to have a level 50x3 character, you'll still have to worry about making sure that your secondary and tertiary specialties are up to par with your primary one. Thankfully, the game's quest system is a robust one that dynamically generates adventures based on your race, specialty, level, and any skills that you might have, which means that no matter what kind of character you're playing, there will always be a quest specifically tailored just for you. There are three basic quest types: trade quests that involve shipping items from one region of space to another; exploration quests that involve discovering new galaxies, nebulae, and so forth; and combat quests that involve, well, combat. Earth and Beyond will also feature some "hand-built" quests that, upon successful completion, will reward you with rare, coveted relics called epic items within the game. Naturally, these quests will be much more involved and, oftentimes, much more difficult to complete than the basic tailored quests.

Space is certainly vast, but it won't take you months of planning and millions of dollars to navigate its dark reaches in Earth and Beyond. When you create your character, you're given a ship that will stay with you throughout the entire duration of the game. As Stojsavljevic describes it, this ship is your character's physical manifestation in the game. Unless you're lounging around the game's lobby, players in the game will only recognize you by your ship, which is the only way for you to get around the world of Earth and Beyond. Each server will be split up into roughly 100 sectors, which are the equivalent of zones in EverQuest. To say that these sectors are huge would be an understatement. Within each sector, your ship can travel at a regular cruising speed or at warp speed. What's the difference? It takes about five minutes to warp from one end of a sector to the other, and about an hour and a half to cruise that same distance (you jump to different sectors using one of the many stargates scattered throughout the game). Also, Earth and Beyond is littered with an equal number of planets and space stations, all of which you can fly through and explore, and you'll begin to appreciate this game's scope.

Earth and Beyond has nine basic ship designs to match the nine available race-specialty combinations, but you'll be able to customize your ride by choosing from various paint schemes and decals. Additionally, as your character advances, so does your ship. You'll be able to able upgrade any of nine separate aspects of your ship with every new level that your character attains, including engines, shields, ammo type, and so on, each of which is visually represented on your ship's 3D model, giving it an additional unique flair. For instance, your ship's thrust trails will change color and composition depending on the type of engine you have equipped. You'll also be able to easily identify a high-level Progen's ship as the one that's bristling with weapons. It's interesting to note Westwood's approach on "twinking" in Earth and Beyond. These ship upgrades are attached onto hardpoints on and within your ship's chassis. So? So the level of your character, your ship's hardpoint, and your ship's upgrade all have to match, which makes it impossible for an experienced player to give a level-6 laser to a new player who has a ship with only a level-2 hardpoint. You'll have to upgrade the old-fashioned way, by earning it.

Another interesting feature of the game is Earth and Beyond's wear-and-tear aspect. All items in the game will eventually break down. Some might take longer than others, but sooner or later, your items--be they engines, lasers, or shields--will get old and stop functioning. You will certainly be able to repair your inventory of items and upgrades, but every time you do, that item's maximum life span will decrease a notch. While that might seem like an unappealing feature, especially after finding a particularly rare item, Stojsavljevic assured us that it would take months of gameplay time before an item lost its usefulness. Besides, Earth and Beyond will let you research items to create your own upgrades without having to purchase it. Let's say you stumble upon an alien wreckage in space and find an impressive-looking laser weapon. You can take that weapon back to your lab, research its technology, and build a derivative laser that's compatible with your ship.

According to Stojsavljevic, the design team at Westwood should be entering the closed beta phase of development as you read this, and he anticipates the game to enter open beta this summer, which would put the game's release sometime in late 2001. In the meantime, Stojsavljevic and his team have a veritable grocery list of design decisions to make, including how to support player looting and player combat, what to include in the game's Web portal, and how much of a monthly fee to charge. If the little bit of the game that we saw is any indication, EverQuest will have a worthy challenger to the MMORPG throne next year.