Gods & Heroes: Stieg Hedlund Interview (Page 2 of 2)

There is an overarching plot in Gods & Heroes and it very directly affects the world that you are in and the NPCs you interact with. In fact, the story is so relevant that your god choice will make a difference in what quests you get and how the story progresses for you. In the end, how the players respond to the overarching plot will make a difference on the content we later build into the game.

Gods & Heroes is a level-based game with a feat-tree system similar to the Diablo franchise. The other mitigating factor is god system which adds that extra twist to the character growth. Players will be able to build characters based on any number of factors, the least of which could just be random selection! Otherwise, the most common path will be to build them around your god selection and the inherent strengths and/or bonuses granted by that god choice combined with your class strengths.

Then again, who really knows what awesome advancement paths players are going to come up with?

You know, even though combat is an enormous portion of the Gods & Heroes experience I have come to fully believe that the story and the epic nature of the game really overshadow that facet. Players will definitely be rewarded for their exploration of the game, and let's face it, Roman mythology is all about the great quests and fantastical trials, so you can absolutely expect to be given epic quests that you will be rewarded for completing.

End-game content is still under wraps at this time, however the one thing we've been focusing a lot of attention on is the fact that we can't just put all of our energies into the first half of the game and then flounder about as everyone gets to the maximum level. We're actually spending a considerable amount of time focusing on making the game a decent challenge and then maintaining the experience as players approach the maximum level. Add to this fact that we have an entire Live Team that is slated to handle all these issues, and you can definitely expect a lot more as you explore our game.

All of the above! Our idea is, why limit ourselves to one thing? Why not let the players choose the areas they want to be focused on? So in Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising we let the players focus on the areas they want to focus on. You want to tweak skills, go tweak skills. If you want to play with items and gear, have fun! You want to dump your energies into the minions and squad setups, hunt and build and configure until you're content. We've built this game to give you the freedom of play, and more than likely you're going to be involved in more than one, if not all, of these systems.

Gods & Heroes is a game that supports both types of play. I know that sounds really far-fetched, but that's the benefit of the minion system that we have introduced. Now you don't have to worry spending hours trying to find a pick-up group to do small runs. You can get your minions and just go out and play to your heart's content. For larger missions and more epic play, you can get 4 or 5 of your good friends together with all of their minions to experience a much more robust style of game play. Of course, we do encourage group play and there will be moments in the game where you will just find things will play a lot easier with a larger group of actual players than it would with all minions, but all in all, it's really up to you how you want to play.

The announcement that Sony's Platform Publishing division was going to be handling the North American distribution along with the PR and Marketing of Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising was released several months ago and we are very excited at the opportunity to be working with an extremely experienced company in the MMO industry. Their experience and exposure is an enormous boost to the project and we look forward to continuing our relationship with them.

You can comment on this interview here.