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Godswar : Pets Dev Journal
Posted Jun 19, 2009 by Jon Wood
GodsWar Online Game Designer Ethan Pan writes this journal discussing the new pet system for the free to play MMO.
Let me say first that a ton of effort has gone into preparing this system for release. The RPG standard for pets is that they join their masters in a fight and can wield various melee attacks or spells while leveling up and becoming more powerful. This is common, and ultimately boring. We wanted to shake things up a bit and eliminate another source of tedious grinding, which I think we've managed to do.
With this in mind, we began designing the pets. Right off the bat we saw that providing interaction between pets and their masters without resorting to combat was going to be immensely difficult. Fighting seemed to be the only way to get them to talk! To resolve this problem we introduced the pets more into the storyline and made them part of random events. We went with the most basic of pet duties, Fetch. These events were loaded with items and treasure that pets would be able to pick up and add to their masters Exp and Talent points. All of the sudden, taking pets for a walk didn't seem like such a chore!
;)
Read the Pets Dev Journal
