Miniatures are Brought to Life in the New Action/RPG “Mage Knight: Apocalypse”

by Louis Bedigian

“We went and took a lot of stuff straight from those miniatures and put it in the game, and then brought those images to life.”

To celebrate the upcoming release of Mage Knight: Apocalypse, the highly-anticipated action/RPG, I decided to pick up a few of my favorite miniatures: Hershey’s Miniatures.

Chocolate, peanut, crunch – the flavors are out of this world! All that sweet goodness packed into one bag of candy. My mouth waters just thinking about it.

Though equally delectable, you wouldn’t want to eat the plastic creatures that inspired Mage Knight: Apocalypse. Based on the Mage Knight miniatures game, Apocalypse is more than just your typical PC role-playing affair. “Most action/RPGs are top-down affairs where you go out, collect loot and kill a whole bunch of monsters,” said Dave Georgeson, Senior Producer. “There may or may not be a lot of plotline, but in general the genre has been fun because it’s fast-paced.” 

He’s exactly right. Looking back on the genre, whether it’s Diablo on the PC or Zelda on the NES, these games have always put combat first.

“We kept a lot of that,” Dave confirms. “We kept all of the action/RPG elements and added a lot to it. The game is set in a fantasy world that’s based on the fiction of a popular miniatures war game, Mage Knight.”

Dave explains that the title, Mage Knight: Apocalypse, has to do with the story and how they’re delving into its fiction, but not necessarily the rules of the miniatures world. “We’re utilizing all the backgrounds and the good stories of that game to make a solid RPG and a storyline that we can set all the action into,” he says. “In this particular game, you get a lot of story that goes along with. The characters that you play are pretty heavily involved with the background of the fiction. I think it carries the action along pretty well.

“We’ve also added trade skills, things like being able to forge elements into your armor, as well as being able to collect herbs and make your own potions along the way. We put a lot of good characters into the game so that there’s a lot of good dialogue that continuously goes on.

Campaigning For a Better Tomorrow

Dave couldn’t wait to introduce us to the single-player campaign. “You play as one of five main characters. They are characters that are integrated into the fiction in the background. As you go through the storyline, you’re going to pick up the other four characters that you didn’t select, and they’ll become part of your party. So it’ll eventually be you plus four other characters.”

“The other characters,” he says, “are artificial intelligences that run on themselves, but you can tell ‘em to follow you, attack targets, or sit down and don’t do anything. That way you can control the ebb and flow of the combat, but you don’t have to micro-task all of their different skills. You can just focus on the mini-skills that you have at your own disposal, and work on that stuff, and try to bail out your friends when you get in trouble, or they’ll help bail you out when you get in trouble.” 

Of the six chapters in the game, five of them focus on one specific character, while the sixth chapter wraps things up. “It all rolls around into one big plot. Of course the sixth chapter is the big finale for the game.”

Regarding the game’s length, Dave says that they were originally shooting for about 25 hours of gameplay. “We haven’t timed it yet but we’re fairly certain we’ve exceeded our mark. We’re not sure how many hours are in there in just one play-through, but it’s a lot.”

And that’s not including the replay value derived from multiplayer, let alone the irresistible urge to play through the single-player quest a second time. Dave notes that a lot of people will want to play through multiple times “because there is physically no way you can max out your character in one time [one play-through].” He estimates that you could play through the campaign three times before an individual character has been maxed.

“So there are a lot of opportunities, even if you don’t do the online thing, there are still a lot of chances to just play and play. Until you tire of that character, and even then there are still four others to try.”

Movie Time

Dave Georgeson: “The game isn’t cut up by cut scenes, because that can get really jarring. We use cut scenes for pivotal moments when you’re getting really important information. But the guys that are running around with you, your sidekicks/partners, they chat around all the time. They talk to each other, they talk to you, and it kind of gives you pieces of information as you move through the world. In addition, there are tons of NPCs to go to talk to get even more background if you want to. There’s critical information that you have to have to complete the game, and then there’s stuff that’s there to add flavor. I think it really helps to bring the world to life. I know that players of the miniatures game are really going to like this, because stuff that they’ve seen in the background that was dry or static, will sort of come to life in front of their eyes. I think the mixture of fantasy, with steam technology, techno-magic sorcery, and the living city of the undead, will really excite players’ imagination.”

From Plastic to Polygons

Dave wanted to make it clear that the development team started from the ground up, working with the miniatures as a base point to develop their game. “All the stuff that’s been crafted, the visuals from the Mage Knight universe,” he says, “we went and took a lot of stuff straight from those miniatures and put it in the game, and then kind of brought those images to life.”

“We based a lot of the stuff in the game, on, well for instance: the Dark Crusade, which is the undead, they have a wide variety of powers within the background. We took those powers and kind of dispersed it to individual critters in the game. Certain kinds of knight blade guards, skeletons and that sort of thing, and made kind of a iconic representation of their background. We drive the fiction into the game to make interesting reasons why people do things in the background.”

Chris Wren, a fellow Senior Producer, added, “The characters are very consistent of the table-top game. You won’t find a character with ridiculously high stats as you would in the miniatures game. There should be something proportionate to what you’d expect to see, and that’s because we drew heavily from the abilities and power rating in the game.” 

Dave continues: “Whatever you do in the game, whether you use a skill or swing a sword, make a potion out of herbs, whatever, is going to increase your attributes by a tiny little bit. And by attributes I mean things like strength, agility, intelligence, those sorts of things. As your attributes climb over time they’re going to automatically unlock certain skills on the tree. The kind of skills that you can unlock are based on the kinds of things that you did. So if you’ve used a lot of stealth, then your intelligence is naturally increased. The skill based on intelligence, which is using spells, would start to unlock.

“That’s rank 1. You can increase a skill all the way up to rank 5. So even after it’s unlocked – and skills only unlock if you use that particular attribute [relating to the skill] – so different players will get different results from the same character. After you unlock ‘em, you still have to decide if whether that’s a skill you want to use a lot or not. And if you do use it a lot, that will increase the rank of that skill and it will become more powerful. It will also become more Mana-efficient. So as a player, you have plenty of opportunities to maximize your character. And we also tell you which actions you can do in the game, while increasing the stats you’re looking to increase more rapidly, so it’s obvious what kinds of things you need to do to get the kind of skills you want.”

Mage Knight Answers

When I spoke to Tim Johns (Associate Producer) last year, he said that the demo shown at E3 was made from just two and a half months of development. How has the game progressed since that time?

Dave Georgeson: [Laughter] The short level that you saw at E3 is still in our game. You’ll see it in our tutorial. That’s an optional sub-quest you can go on. But everything else is new [laughs]. All the systems, all the critters, all the plotting, the tons of features…it’s a hugely different game than it was back then. At it’s core it’s still click to move, click to attack, that sort of thing. But the interface for skill use, being able to access more than one skill to do things more rapidly in combat. The free camera system is better and different. It’s a complete game now. [Eighteen months ago] at E3 there was not that much to show.

Chris Wren: That kind of shows how far it took us in two and a half months. Getting it barely stood up so that the world could actually see where we were going with the game. After E3 we had to take the whole thing apart and build the cool skill systems, etc. It’s just so big and intricate, it was just a few months ago when everything got into place. The game really got ugly for a while [laughs] but now it’s pretty again. E3 was a place to show just what was possible with our game. How cool can we make it look, how can we make the combat. And we really spent the last 16 months getting all these systems in place so that it’s not just a one-night experience, but something people can play for a long time, try out different characters, play online with other people… The game’s complete now, whereas before it was just, “Is it possible? Is it gonna be cool?” 

In 2005 Tim Johns said that newbies and more experienced players could play together – the game would adjust accordingly so that the newbie still feels like he's contributing, but not be too difficult for him. Can you tell us more about how this will work in the final product?

DG: Sure. Essentially, the game revolves around the concept of dynamically-scaling the game to match the player’s skill level. Let’s start at the beginning.

When you start playing the game you can play either Easy, Medium or Hard. If you play it on Medium then you’re playing it the way we’ve balanced the game and the way as designed. If you play it on Easy, then everything’s a lot easier.

That being said, if you’re just playing on normal (Medium), as you go through your character you’re going to be accumulating stats and skill levels. The different scenarios will adjust to your skill level and your power level (what we call Power Rating), so that there’s still a challenge. Monsters might get tougher, do different things.

And what this allows us to do – first let’s talk about a game without scaling. You might be playing the single-player game, then want to go play multiplayer for a while. Well, when you go play multiplayer, you have to start a new character for multiplayer because you can’t take your [single-player] character to multiplayer. If players could do that, they could go into multiplayer, gain all this experience, and when they go back into the single-player, they’d have to either flush all that experience into loot, or else their save games would be really super, super easy because they [their character] got tougher in the meantime.

With dynamic scaling, we allow you to take your single-player characters and play online as much as you want to. You can play for weeks, then come back to the single-player campaign, and the game will adjust to your Power Rating. That allows you to be able to play any way you want to.

That same mechanism is used in multiplayer to scale the monsters to be able to make younger characters more useful, we adjust the newbie level up to the veteran level so that they can still play at that level. The younger players can now play against the same monsters [as the veterans], it’s just that they won’t have as many skills or acquire as much loot. 

CW: Getting into the loot real quick, the loot of the game scales as well. A higher-level player will naturally get better loot. Higher difficulty rating gives more loot. You’ll have harder monsters, but get more loot.

We’ve designed the system so that if you’re playing with a newbie it shouldn’t deter you from getting your own loot. So the way it works is, if a newbie character is playing alongside an experienced player, the loot drops, the enemies will be the same difficulty for both characters, and the newbie player will have greater damage capability [in proportion to his weapon, which is weaker than the veteran’s weapon].

When the loot drops, however, it’s specific to each character. When you’re playing online you’re still building stats [that can be taken into the single-player game]. But [as a newbie], you’re gaining stats at that level, as if you were playing a single-player game. We’ve tried to make it neutral. You won’t advance your stats faster this way, so that there’s no advantage or disadvantage to any player. And so that no one feels encouraged to kick people out of their group because they’re not experienced enough, or the other way around.

DG: It’s individualized so that you don’t pick up stuff that’s not useful to you. Janos [Freeborn, the dwarf] isn’t going to pick up a lot of Amazonian armor. You know, you’re going to get mostly grenades, and guns, and things like that.

CW: If you’re a dwarf, you won’t ever see Amazonian armor. There are a few items shared among the characters. Janos can’t use axes. But a crossover example would be the Amazonian and elf characters, they’re the only ones who can wield it. A dwarf character will never see anything like that, only guns.
 

Keep your browser pointed to GameZone Online for Part 2 of our interview with the senior producers of Mage Knight: Apocalypse.