MMORPG.com Jumpgate Evolution Correspondent Sean Bamberger recently scoured the North American and European Jumpgate Evolution forums to bring us this report on the most interesting answers given by NetDevil's Hermann Peterscheck.
Originally Posted by Magnus-Ex:
Regarding the "friendly fire off" situation; how do you plan to prevent people nuking the battlefield continuously? Because with no friendly fire, this then seems to be most effective way to kill enemies. Simply nuke the whole bunch (knowing that any friendlies will be fine) or just fly into battle and nuke nearest object or squadmate. This looks to me as critical design problem of "No FF" and I would like to know if there are any ideas to work this out.
Hermann Peterscheck:
The real balance problem there is having a super weapon, which you simply can't have. Regardless of FF, if you have a nuke that kills everything then that pretty much is a critical design problem in my mind. That being said, there isn't a nuke that kills everything, or even anything close to that in the game right now, so I can't comment on how we would prevent that from being an exploit
First off, the game looks absolutely gorgeous, and ive been desperately looking for a good sci fi mmo space or otherwise. (eve just doesnt do it for me).
That being said what will make or break the game for me is the pvp system. I personally think a space flight game is one of the best settings for rvr pvp and that is what im looking for. My problem with JGE is that net devil seems to want to please everyone with their pvp system and i think it will come back to bite them. If the main focus is going to be on titles, medals and other intangibles then i dont think of that as an incentive, territory, resources, production capability for your faction, those, for me, are real reasons to pvp. I know territory control was briefly mentioned, but they seem to be drawing away from that.
I agree that the PvP system will be a huge part in this games success. Which I desperately hope is successful, I want to play this game!
My only problem with this question forum is: It sounds like they are trying too hard to try and please EVERYONE. If they do their best to try and please, EVERYONE, EVERYONE is just going to be MILDLY satisfied, resulting in a game rating of 7.5 and no one playing!
Hope I'm wrong, I want to love this game.
I really don't get the impression ND is trying to please everyone. ND provided a general vision of what JGE was to be over a year ago and specifically said that it would not be JGC 2.0. That and the answers here have been topics of bitter tears and angry crying for some time on the offical forums. ND appears to continue to stick to their overall vision, perhaps taking dissenting voices into consideration - but not radically altering course.
ND is most definately shooting for a far wider audience than a darkfall in space niche within a niche genre product would generate. Whether it will last will depend on how engaged and invested players are. Content that does that at the endgame or in PvP can always be added post release - gameplay that not only fails to engage but pushes away the vast majority of the wider playerbase they are looking to attract would be a plan for failure.