Action role-playing games, like the groundbreaking 1996 game Diablo, try to combine the character advancement and hoarding of magic items from traditional role-playing games with the hacking and slashing of an action game. It just so happens that Namco Bandai games is putting the finishing touches on a brand-new action RPG based on the colorful, high-fantasy world of the Mage Knight tabletop game. Senior producer Dave Georgeson explains how development on the soon-to-be-released game is wrapping up and what players can expect from the final game when it ships later this year.

The action role-playing game Mage Knight Apocalypse is almost finished and will be available soon.

GameSpot: Mage Knight is getting very close to its release date. Could you give us a quick update on the game's development? What's left to do?

Dave Georgeson: Mostly just squashing bugs. We've refined the combat interface, set up the mission flows, and the game is getting closer and closer to the goal of being "balanced." But there are still bugs on the pile, and we keep tweaking the game for a better fun factor.

GS: By now you've had a chance to play with a nearly complete version of the game. Has anything surprised you thus far? For example, do you find yourself experiencing cool moments that you didn't originally envision? If so, can you give an example?

DG: Surprises happen all the time. Part of that has to do with the large number of patrol paths that we use in Mage Knight Apocalypse to keep it much more active than other games of this type. Our enemies don't just stand around and wait for you to show up. Many of them wander through the area on guard for intruders or just go about their own business. This often creates situations that aren't entirely predictable. Players sometimes choose to rest where monsters will wander, and that catches you off guard. Or encounters may suddenly become larger because a patrol stumbles upon you from behind while you're busy with other things.

Most surprising moment: I'm personally pretty intimately familiar with the storyline and the way the missions flow. However, I still get a huge kick out of watching the sidekicks fight in combat. There's something very natural about moving through the world with friends at your side. It's kind of like a little pocket massively multiplayer shard on my desk running through a really cool, unusual fantasy world. I like it. (And there's no monthly fee!) GS: How long does it take to get through Mage Knight's single-player game? How much replay value is there? And can you describe some of the different ways you can play through the game?

DG: Originally, we envisioned the single-player game taking about 25 hours of gameplay to get through. Well...we were wrong. It appears that we overshot the mark by quite a bit for what we consider the "average" player. (By average, we mean someone who talks to some of the non-player characters, loots corpses, visits stores to buy and sell, as well as someone who fights through the various battles in the game.)

We're not precisely certain how many hours of gameplay there really are in Mage Knight Apocalypse, but we know there are at least 25 hours of completely original gameplay in the box (that estimate is for only one run-through of the single-player campaign) and probably more like about 40 hours. Let's put it this way...with cheats on that instantly destroy all monsters touched, skipping through the cutscenes and dialogue when they occur, bypassing all looting opportunities, and never visiting a store to buy/sell, it still takes more than eight hours for one person to complete the game from end-to-end...so let's just agree that 25 hours of gameplay is conservative.

Onto that estimate, you can also tack on the time you spend playing the multiplayer, as well as all the different character classes and skill tree explorations. Added all together, well...there's a lot of gameplay and replay value in this little box.

Mage Knight Apocalypse is meant to be played either as a single-player game (where you run a party of yourself, plus some computer-controlled, artificial-intelligence buddies that accompany your travels) or as a multiplayer cooperative game (where it's the same epic experience, but now your AI buddies are played by other players, instead).

GS: Does the inventory system feature randomly generated items, is everything "hand-built" by the designers themselves, or is it a combination of the two? Approximately how many items are there in the game, and what are some of the cooler ones that players will strive for?

DG: It's a combination of the two. The item system goes hand in hand with our "dynamic scaling" game systems. As you get more powerful, the loot that you find in chests or from destroying monsters also becomes more powerful.

You'll be able to pick up many, many different kinds of items.

So initially, we created lots of sets of items that are more powerful and cooler looking as you progress. But there are "prefix" and "suffix" tags that get stuck onto the basic item names that change the abilities of those items, and that very quickly adds a huge amount of unique items that players can find each time they play.

We also have a host of "epic" items that are hand-crafted special items that can be gained only once the character has become quite powerful and only from special encounters within the missions. These are "named" items with cool powers and histories.

And, of course, the players can modify their own weapons and armor through the forging system by adding magestones to them in different combinations. This takes a system where there were already tons of possible items and moves it into a territory where there are 10s of thousands of possibilities.

It will be very unusual, if not impossible, for you to run into a character with the same inventory as your own character when you play multiplayer.