MMORPG.com: With the end of alpha, you announced several new features coming with the beta as well as upcoming features. Could you tell us about these in more detail?
Corey Davis: We recently added Controller Support which allows you to play with and rebind game controllers like an Xbox 360 Controller or a PS4 controller.
We’ve added new abilities for existing classes, like the Reaver’s new Shadow Step power that lets him essentially teleport from place to place. The Sentinel received a new aerial grenade ability called Air Strike that lets him harass from afar.
We’ve also reworked various systems like the matchmaking interface, the in-game loadout select and scoreboards, etc. for clarity and usability. And we’ve implemented popular community requests like a region filter for matchmaking.
MMORPG.com: Now that you've gone from alpha to beta, what are some ways that community feedback has helped shape the game?
Corey Davis: The biggest impact has been on balancing and feature priority. The community as a whole can test and play Nosgoth more than we could ever hope to, and we use both their direct feedback and data collected from matches to constantly tune and refine the game balance.
They’ve also helped shape how we prioritize features. Controller support was in high demand and based on that, we adjusted our schedule to get it to the fans sooner. It’s now live in the Closed Beta as a result.
MMORPG.com: The second mode for the game, Siege, was announced during alpha. Tell us a bit about Siege. Do you have a date for us on its inclusion?
Corey Davis: Siege is an objective-based gamemode in which the humans must move to and capture strategic locations. The vampires must prevent these captures by slaughtering the humans. We really wanted an objective-based mode to mix up the gameplay and moment to moment goals of each team, but found during development than vampires were simply way too good at traditional Domination-style game modes. We feel Siege does a good job of encouraging the human team to work as a mobile strike force focused less on raw kills and more on strategic capture, and as a vampire it’s a blast to try to disrupt that process in any way possible.
Siege is available now in the Closed Beta to players Rank 10 and above.
MMORPG.com: Four new classes are coming (two Human, two Vampire), along with new weapons. What roles and strategies will the classes offer for each team? What can you tell us about these weapons?
Corey Davis: The Vampire Deceiver is a master of misdirection that can confuse and distract human teams by disguising himself as a human, creating illusions, or even taking over the mind of a human briefly and running them towards a group of vampires.
The Human Prophet is a hybrid damage and support class that mixes dark blood magic with two deadly pistols to great effect. She can heal teammates at the cost of her own life force, conjure a life-draining AoE curse, and fire hexed bullets that can remove an enemy from a fight temporarily.
MMORPG.com: Can you describe the planned leveling system to us, as well as how it relates to your unveiled “Evolved Skins”?
Corey Davis: Each class you play earns XP and levels up. Your total XP (all classes combined) contributes to your overall Rank which is visible in online lobbies / scoreboards / etc.
Leveling up a specific class unlocks content unique to that class, like promotion rewards that give you a random uncommon or rare item designed for that class, or eventually the Evolved Skin for that class.
Ranking up overall currently grants tokens that can be traded in to unlock additional classes like the Deceiver or Prophet. In the future it will also confer more cosmetic unlocks like badges you can equip that show behind your name in lobbies.
MMORPG.com: In what ways might we see Nosgoth take greater advantage of the Kain series lore?
Corey Davis: We are already using the lore to help shape the content of the game in many ways, from the background and abilities of each of our classes, to the locations and history of the levels, down to small things like the characters you see commemorated in statues in certain maps. The lore permeates the whole game, although obviously the way that the player experiences this is very different from in a narrative-driven single player game. Going forward we’ll be continuing this, with new maps and new classes being the most obvious candidates, and we’re working on other areas that we’re not quite ready to talk about yet.
