Interview with Lars Kroll Kristensen

Seed Q&A (Page 2 of 3)

We won’t. Not in our wildest dreams do we anticipate moving 5M plus fantasy hack’n’slash players away from their preferred game play. The way I see it, we want to expand the MMO community, to also include those that don’t care for combat, and to offer a role play rich game to those of the MMORPG community that are tired of combat and want role play instead. Most MMORPG players don’t care about role playing, which is fair enough, but that is also the problem of many RP servers of other games right now: Even the RP servers have a large proportion of non- role players. We believe that our community will have a much higher proportion of roleplayers, and indeed judging from the activity on our over 5000 strong community forum, this seems to be the case. With a bit of luck, we will continue to attract primarily roleplayers, and this bodes well for the quality of roleplay new players can expect on our servers.

The afore mentioned administrators can set up sharepoints on their hardpoints. A share point is a sort of shop, where you can access and make available items and components. The game world uses a pseudo currency called “Access points” which is similar to money, but with the key difference that at least one party in a transaction involving access points must be democratically elected.

Players cannot directly trade access points, although they can barter items freely. The idea is to have a capitalist economy but tightly controlled by democratically elected representatives.

Initially, (at commercial launch) players can produce items and components from blueprints, using components and resources. They can choose to produce in higher or lower quality, faster or slower, using more or less components. At a later stage (post launch) we will introduce a “prototype” crafting system, allowing players to create their own blueprints, by combining item functions, power sources and other components in a free form building block approach. This will also be a min-maxing type of gameplay. Of course, research projects can drop blueprints for new items and components going into the game world.

Lots and lots. Table top roleplaying, Live action role playing and of course a range of computer games, both MMOs and single player. To list a few: WoW, Civilization, EVE online, A tale in the desert plus many others. Most of these different games have influenced the way we think about games, both in terms of what works, and what doesn’t work.

That is really hard to say. I expect that more developers and publishers will try to break off from the main stream gameplay, and deliver all kinds of MMOs, catering to different niches. I definitely do not expect the combat-XP-quest model to die, on the contrary, I think there is going to be many new games in that genre. I just also see a need in the market for other types of MMOs