The Simutronics team behind Hero's Journey continues to chat it up with the fans on our Hero's Journey Message Boards. Here is the summary from last evening:
| Producer Melissa Meyer on Instancing, PvP and Live Events: On Instancing: We're taking steps in our design and implementation to prevent people in instances from feeling as cut off as they do in other games, but regardless of that ... I think an important thing to realize here is that if you don't ever want to enter an instance in Hero's Journey, you won't HAVE to. There will be plenty of Common Areas for you to hunt in and advance through. There will be some content that is only possible, however, in instances.
On PvP: There will be PvP in Hero's Journey. On Live Events: Simutronics has a long history of live events in our games. We think we do it best, and we will continue that tradition in Hero's Journey. So yes, you will see live GameMaster run events. That will be one of many responsibilities our GameMasters have. Melissa on Advancement: Hero's Journey is level based with skills that you may develop and advance.
CEO David Whatley Continues on Advancement: HJ is ability based. The power of an ability is a function of your level and the enhancements you've made to it. Enhancements follow tracks and have branch points, which allow you to customize an ability differently than someone else has. Further, abilities sufficiently enhanced will unlock sub-abilities as bonuses. This creates a kind of classic "tech-tree" of abilities... sorta. Like most things, you have to take the whole game design in context to evaluate how any of it will feel. Talking about abilities out of context like this will give you an incomplete picture of the goodness we are baking into the gameplay. For example, the fact that ability power is based a lot on level is key to another feature of the game mechanics that will allow you to (for most practical purposes) group with just about anyone regardless of level variations. How this works will be revealed in time, but surfice it to say that the end result is that if you stuck your toe in the HJ waters and found you loved it and then eventually convinced your friends to come over... you wouldn't have to start over just to play with them. They'd be able team up with you right away. It's way cool. David on Company History and Why Hero's Journey Will Succeed: True, our first HJ effort was shelved. It was pretty cool, but not cool enough. All other issues aside, I've always said I'd do a graphical MMORPG when the technology was there to pull off what was in my head. I think the consumer and server technology is there to do what has consumed me for all these years. But also, I needed to go back to my roots. What makes our games work is our tool set that we empower GameMasters with. We mastered that with text games, but doing anything similar in graphics is a very, very difficult process. A funny thing happened during our E3 demo: While running a demo, a employee of one of our established competitors, dropped in and just stood over our shoulders watching. By this point I was doing the side demo of the toolset (called HeroBlade) for some folks. His mouth was agap... and all he keep saying was "Whoa.... wow.... " and finally he said "I wish I had tools like that!" and walked out. Not sure if he was pissed or heading back to see if he could find where to apply for a job on our web site. :) Will this version of HJ make the shelves? I'm absolutely determined and convinced that it will. We've put our heart and soul into this, and given the reaction at E3, I think it shows. |
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It is great to see this kind of dedication from all levels of a development team. There were other posts as well, from other developers. They discuss everything from their internet bill, to old Magic the Gathering play sessions, to the game itself. We appreciate their time spent and encourage you to join the discussions and let them know your thoughts on their hype meter.
