Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising Q&A - Monsters, Team Battles, and Rome Rising
Perpetual Entertainment design director Stieg Hedlund helps get us acquainted with the savage and mystical world of this upcoming massively multiplayer game.
If you've played a massively multiplayer game before, you'll be familiar with one or more of the following: creating a persistent character with certain abilities, going on quests either alone or with other players, and killing rats to earn a few rusty copper pieces. Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising, from developer Perpetual Entertainment and publisher Sony Online Entertainment, will attempt to break free of the constraints of previous online games by including an intriguing squad-based combat system and by letting players become heroes in ancient Rome, a time and place where men were men--except when gorgons like the Medusa were around, because then, some of those men were actually turned into statues. Design director Stieg Hedlund explains.
GameSpot: We've seen that Gods & Heroes will have elaborate combat animations that will let players leap onto their enemies and choke them to death. How will you execute these attacks in the game? Will they automatically happen if you attack someone, or do you have to perform a specific action to trigger them?
Stieg Hedlund: We specifically set out to create combat that was as immersive as it was exciting. Just creating animations and letting them play out on their own would make combat lose both its immersion and the excitement after the first few fights, so we built the system so players will be able execute various attacks that not only have high-payoff animations, but also all have different game effects that go along with them and have different strategic uses. Non-player characters (NPCs) will become aggressive against player characters, naturally, and in turn use their various attacks when their artificial intelligence thinks it's appropriate or when they have the energy to do so.
GS: The squad mechanic seems like it's designed so you can adventure on your own, but we understand that players will still have a large party of non-player characters to help them out. Will squads let you play through the entire game solo, or will some of the tougher dungeon areas require you to group with other players to succeed?
SH: There are certainly many players who prefer to play solo, and while that's not the main idea behind squads, we did want to allow those people to extend their solo play; but at the same time we didn't want to discourage grouping, as the social and cooperative aspect of online games is certainly very important. Therefore, squads are set up in the early- to midlevel game play in such a way that players can use light minion squads to complement the abilities of their character class: Priests can form an all-infantry squads that can be sent to attack while they make sure the soldiers are "buffed" (protected with defensive magics) and healed, and so on. Even so, minion squads aren't meant to be a substitute for grouping; minions are neither as powerful nor as smart as player characters, and there are many abilities player characters have that are unique. Then, at the higher levels of gameplay heavy and mythical minions become available, but can be hired only by players with appropriate professions, such that priests can hire only minions that cast spells. So, cooperation becomes even more useful.
GS: Obviously, there are different kinds of massively multiplayer online game fans--some approach the games as time-consuming grinds, others as social experiences, and more-casual players sometimes have only an hour or two to play at a time. How will Gods & Heroes accommodate different kinds of players?
SH: This really ties in to the previous question of allowing players the freedom to choose how they play. We've built an enormous world that is rich with history, myth, and adventure and we're pretty much opening it up and saying to players, "Here's an epic world, how do you want to be a part of it?" By giving players the opportunity to acquire various minions, build up spectacular godlike powers, and customize their characters to their preferred style of play, we're basically letting players define how they choose to play--be it casual, hardcore, or anything in between.
GS: Tell us about the game's six character classes--how will they play, and how will they develop over time?
SH: When players first start out in Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising, they'll have the choice of one of six classes: gladiator, mystic, rogue, soldier, scout, and priest. As players progress through the world, they will be given choices on how they want to build their particular class through their feat trees and also through their god of choice. They choose which skills to master and which weapons armor and shields to equip, which minions to hire, squads to form...lots of different things.
GS: Give us an idea of about how much content in the game will be persistent and "public" (letting all players interact at once) and how much content will be "instanced" (closing off individual areas only for certain players). Will the game rely more on one type of content, or the other?
SH: I'm not sure how the idea that we were making an instanced world got started, but I'm happy to help put it to rest. The vast majority of the very large world that we're presenting is public--I'd estimate 75 percent of all of the content is in this form.
We do use instances, but not willy-nilly--there are two reasons we'll make one: If we are creating a scripted event that won't make sense to those not involved (and will break immersion or remove resources for them), we'll do that in an instance. It's a good way to eliminate "spawn camping" (staying in the same place and repeatedly fighting the same enemies as soon as they "spawn" into the world) and to make events that are more heroic and centered around players and groups. The other reason is for computer performance. One of the big payoffs of squads is epic warfare, where we'll tune an area so that a full group with full squads can do battle with appropriate numbers of foes. We put things like this in an instance, because if another group like yours shows up it'll be hard not to have a drop in performance with that many characters onscreen.
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- Sony Online Entertainment
- Perpetual
- Fantasy Online...
- Release: Canceled
- ESRB: Teen
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