doobiwan
04-05-2007, 04:53 PM
Seems less ominous than it sounds, more like Guildwars type MMO rather than WoW. It'd definitely let it break the "Oblivion look alike" mould, and become, well, a Guildwars look alike ;) I'm still pretty keen, I dig Guild Wars . . .
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5460&Itemid=51
How early on did you start to consider making Two Worlds an MMO?
We planned the multiplayer part from the first design scratch of our artists. But perhaps it’s necessary to define the term MMO a little bit better, or we’ll soon get into problems. What is a massively multiplayer online game? Is it like World Of WarCraft, is it like Guild Wars? Right now quite a lot of other games are sold that call themselves MMOs, but it is very difficult to give a proper description for this genre because of the different usage of the term.
Therefore, we simply spoke of a multiplayer part for Two Worlds for most of the game’s development. But now that we’re coming nearer to the release date, it’s important that the people know we’re not just presenting a small multiplayer function but a whole independent game, with hundreds of possible gamers taking part, namely a MMO. And as long as you do not define that an MMO requires monthly subscription fees, this applies from right at the beginning of the game’s development.
What are the main changes needed to the game’s mechanics to accommodate this large number of players? Have you had to change the scale of locations, or re-balance the availability of items or the economy?
As I said before, we planned for an extensive MMO section from the beginning of development, and therefore we needn’t make any changes to the mechanics. The game was originally designed for a huge number of players – Reality Pump was drawing on its experience with the multiplayer modes of the Earth [2140, 2150 and 2160] series. They created a lot of unique tools for Two Worlds which make it easy to adapt the MMO features. The item and economy system is the same as in the singleplayer mode. This game is implemented through a special quest system, which will take care of the number and development of the participants, and we have added some more regions of Antaloor for the multiplayer.
How big is the technical challenge? Was the game built from the ground-up with mass-server support in mind, or do you have to adapt now?
Once again, we planned the support for hundreds of players from the beginning. So we have nothing to adapt this close to the release. Of course it is a big technical challenge to host such a large number of players at one time, but this is more a problem of the server software than of the game itself. But we had enough time to think about the problems and solved them in a convenient way.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5460&Itemid=51
How early on did you start to consider making Two Worlds an MMO?
We planned the multiplayer part from the first design scratch of our artists. But perhaps it’s necessary to define the term MMO a little bit better, or we’ll soon get into problems. What is a massively multiplayer online game? Is it like World Of WarCraft, is it like Guild Wars? Right now quite a lot of other games are sold that call themselves MMOs, but it is very difficult to give a proper description for this genre because of the different usage of the term.
Therefore, we simply spoke of a multiplayer part for Two Worlds for most of the game’s development. But now that we’re coming nearer to the release date, it’s important that the people know we’re not just presenting a small multiplayer function but a whole independent game, with hundreds of possible gamers taking part, namely a MMO. And as long as you do not define that an MMO requires monthly subscription fees, this applies from right at the beginning of the game’s development.
What are the main changes needed to the game’s mechanics to accommodate this large number of players? Have you had to change the scale of locations, or re-balance the availability of items or the economy?
As I said before, we planned for an extensive MMO section from the beginning of development, and therefore we needn’t make any changes to the mechanics. The game was originally designed for a huge number of players – Reality Pump was drawing on its experience with the multiplayer modes of the Earth [2140, 2150 and 2160] series. They created a lot of unique tools for Two Worlds which make it easy to adapt the MMO features. The item and economy system is the same as in the singleplayer mode. This game is implemented through a special quest system, which will take care of the number and development of the participants, and we have added some more regions of Antaloor for the multiplayer.
How big is the technical challenge? Was the game built from the ground-up with mass-server support in mind, or do you have to adapt now?
Once again, we planned the support for hundreds of players from the beginning. So we have nothing to adapt this close to the release. Of course it is a big technical challenge to host such a large number of players at one time, but this is more a problem of the server software than of the game itself. But we had enough time to think about the problems and solved them in a convenient way.