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The On-line Adventure Continues With
Shadowbane The world of on-line role-playing games is about to get a whole lot more populated. Ultima Online is gearing up for Origin, the second generation Ultima Online game (previewed at the Electronic Entertainment Exposition in May down in Los Angeles) while still running their Ultima Online servers to near capacity. Everquest is still running about out there, Microsoft has Asheron's Call, BioWare is working on Neverwinter Nights and Wolfpack Studios is gearing up for the release of Shadowbane. Sam "Meridian" Johnson, Wolfpack's lead writer, took a few minutes to talk about the next challenger to the online adventuring RPG genre. Question: You are launching an Internet program, which has been done before, but tell me how this program will differ from the others online? Johnson: "Well, Shadowbane is actually quite different than other online games out there. The most compelling difference, I think, is that we've added a 'strategy' element to gameplay in an attempt to answer the universal question that players hit at the end of any RPG, 'So what do I do now?' "Our answer to that question is quite simple, 'try to rule the world.' The core RPG elements are all there, of course — players choose a race and class, building a character and adventuring with friends, collect treasure and explore the world. Beyond that, though, we've expanded the 'Guild' into a political and strategic Kingdom simulator. Groups of players can get together and capture vast provinces of virtual terrain, building up castles, keeps and city defenses, and even building siege equipment to wage war on your neighbors. "It's quite a dramatic step forward for the genre, of course, to allow this degree of player control." Q: Is there an honor system in place? Johnson: "Actually, we aren't big fans in artificial social tracking mechanisms, like honor systems or reputation flags. Any automated system like this can be fairly easily circumvented or abused, so instead, we've tried to put in mechanisms that will make players more accountable for their actions — viewable logs, tracking mechanisms, things of that sort. We've also taken great pains to reduce the amount of 'time loss' one player can inflict upon another, so that interacting with the 'evil elements' in our player society can be more fun. (It's hard to consider such things 'fun' when they can set you back days upon days of gameplay, after all!)" Q: Ultima Online had to restrict the number of players. How will your servers react to the number of players that are sure to sign up? Johnson: "A few of the members of our development team have a very strong background in creating distributed systems software. The server clustering technology that they have designed is amazing — they've included things like hot swapping of gameservers and dynamic load balancing of terrain across all of the servers in a cluster. While I'm sure the system will take some tweaking during beta (as any complex system does) we're very excited about the way the system is coming together." Q: Will there be a restriction to the number of online players? How have you learned by the efforts of other online games? Johnson: "Naturally we're going to phase the beta process (and possibly the release) in order to test the system at varying player levels. Additionally, we're just beginning a phase of internal stress testing as well, so hopefully we'll be pretty well-prepared to man the floodgates when the subscriber base starts to kick in. Q: What characters will be unique and different? Johnson: "Shadowbane offers:
Q: How will players interact? Johnson: "Players can band together in a number of ways to form all manner of political organizations and affiliations. In fact, Shadowbane supports the following Organization types: the Amazon Temple, the Barbarian's Clan, the Holy Church, the Mercenary Company, the Military Legion, the Noble House, the Ranger's Brotherhood, the War Temple, the Thieves' Band, or the Wizard's Conclave." Q: What sort of system requirements will needed for this game? Johnson: "Well, these aren't yet set in stone, but our current
'best guess' is:
Q: If a player has a slower modem speed, will that affect their ability or reaction time? Johnson: "Well, while it's true that faster connection speeds will always help to some extent, we've tried to minimize this as much as possible. Our goal has always been to allow players to enjoy the game with as little as a 28.8 modem, and early indicators look very good for achieving this goal. I'm sure we'll have quite a bit more information on this once we hit Beta. Q: How many quests will be involved? Will they evolve? Will multiplayer action be inclusive in solving quests - as in, if the quest is solved, will all players benefit? Johnson: "We opted to go with an 'interactive quest' model instead
of an automated one. To this end, we're hiring a cast of actors and actresses
to play 'feature characters' in Shadowbane. They'll play roles within the
game, and basically exist to 'stir up conflict' and keep the overall game
plot moving. You'll see FCs playing everything from aged kings to greedy
merchants, with maybe a demigod or two thrown in for fun. The goal here
is to keep the game vibrant and dynamic, so that it takes on some of the
qualities of a television series or comic book, rather than remaining as
static and unchanging as a single-user RPG experience."
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