Greetings Ladies and Gents,

This is the third installment of The Matrix Online developer journal. Today’s journal is pretty big, so go grab a cup of your favorite beverage and settle in for a good read.

I’m pleased to say that the team has been making great progress. We’ve had a busy month working on game improvements including the SOE mail system and the first phase of the content revamp. And now, as we head into the last month of 2005, our hard work on the combat revision is paying off. The main focus of today’s journal is to explain the first part of the combat revision and I think you will love the changes.

Combat Redux

In my first journal I mentioned that we started working on improving the combat system shortly after launch. We needed to create a system where player versus environment (PvE) and player versus player (PvP) combat are both balanced. That, with our varying combat modes such as Interlock and free attack, makes our combat system more complex than most other massively multiplayer games. Interlock alone uses somewhere on the order of 16,000 animations (Yes. 16,000). Keeping it fun, exciting, and balanced is a real challenge.

Today I’m going to explain the nuts and bolts of the combat revision. I may create more questions than answers with this journal, but that’s to be expected. After all, we’re asking you to throw out everything you know about combat in MxO and look at this with fresh eyes.

We have worked toward our goals for many months so we can bring a better gameplay experience to everyone. To help ensure that we’re successful we are planning to release the combat revision on the soon-to-be revived external playtest server before we take the revision live. Walrus will update you on the full details for the playtest server later. I will say that, yes, we plan to allow character copies to make it easy for players to check out our improvements. Greetings Ladies and Gents,

This is the third installment of The Matrix Online developer journal. Today’s journal is pretty big, so go grab a cup of your favorite beverage and settle in for a good read.

I’m pleased to say that the team has been making great progress. We’ve had a busy month working on game improvements including the SOE mail system and the first phase of the content revamp. And now, as we head into the last month of 2005, our hard work on the combat revision is paying off. The main focus of today’s journal is to explain the first part of the combat revision and I think you will love the changes.