CEO David Whatley Continues on Advancement: HJ is ability based. The power of an ability is a function of your level and the enhancements you've made to it. Enhancements follow tracks and have branch points, which allow you to customize an ability differently than someone else has. Further, abilities sufficiently enhanced will unlock sub-abilities as bonuses. This creates a kind of classic "tech-tree" of abilities... sorta.

Like most things, you have to take the whole game design in context to evaluate how any of it will feel. Talking about abilities out of context like this will give you an incomplete picture of the goodness we are baking into the gameplay. For example, the fact that ability power is based a lot on level is key to another feature of the game mechanics that will allow you to (for most practical purposes) group with just about anyone regardless of level variations. How this works will be revealed in time, but surfice it to say that the end result is that if you stuck your toe in the HJ waters and found you loved it and then eventually convinced your friends to come over... you wouldn't have to start over just to play with them. They'd be able team up with you right away. It's way cool.

David on Company History and Why Hero's Journey Will Succeed: True, our first HJ effort was shelved. It was pretty cool, but not cool enough. All other issues aside, I've always said I'd do a graphical MMORPG when the technology was there to pull off what was in my head. I think the consumer and server technology is there to do what has consumed me for all these years.

But also, I needed to go back to my roots. What makes our games work is our tool set that we empower GameMasters with. We mastered that with text games, but doing anything similar in graphics is a very, very difficult process.

A funny thing happened during our E3 demo: While running a demo, a employee of one of our established competitors, dropped in and just stood over our shoulders watching. By this point I was doing the side demo of the toolset (called HeroBlade) for some folks. His mouth was agap... and all he keep saying was "Whoa.... wow.... " and finally he said "I wish I had tools like that!" and walked out. Not sure if he was pissed or heading back to see if he could find where to apply for a job on our web site. :)

Will this version of HJ make the shelves? I'm absolutely determined and convinced that it will. We've put our heart and soul into this, and given the reaction at E3, I think it shows.