Jumpgate: Evolution Interview

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Eurogamer: Is this all level-based? Do you level up over time?

Hermann Peterscheck: Well, it is a continuous-progression game - a pretty standard MMO method - the more you play, the more money you get, so the better equipment you can buy, so the more powerful your ship becomes. And it's an ongoing arc that continues for a long time. It starts out rapidly and slows down as these things tend to do.

The crucial difference is the that the combat is much more like, say, an FPS game. You shoot where you aim, and your bullets hit if you were aiming in the right place. This model makes the range of participation much wider. If I'm level 10 in WOW, and you are level 12, I'd struggle to have a chance against you, if you're level 18, you can forget about it, I can't even hit you. In Jumpgate a guy who is level 7 can go to a high level fight with a guy who is level 20 and actually contribute, it's that kind of game.

Eurogamer: So it's a case of less-experienced pilots simply doing less damage?

Hermann Peterscheck: That's kind of what it boils down to, yeah. You have access to better equipment, therefore you tend to do more damage. We wanted to avoid the narrow grouping experience that levels bring in. We want to widen the range of levels that can participate.

Eurogamer: And this is the case in PVP too? You talked about factions earlier, is it an open PVP war?

Hermann Peterscheck: Well there's friction going on, right? It's not open war. You get to decide if you want to work with these guys, or fight them. We try to keep the conflict in the hands of the players, rather than having it at a top level like "Horde versus Alliance". What the original game had which was cool was a "war-meter" so that if more of one faction's ships had been destroyed then the hostility level would be greater. That meant there was this kind of conflict in the game, but it didn't force that scenario on you. We found that was a cool thing in the original game because players could feel they were shaping the universe with their actions.

Eurogamer: How much will players be able to invest in the actual infrastructure of the world? Any guilds? Player-owned space stations?

See how we carefully ignored Auto Assault? Yeah...

Hermann Peterscheck: Well we've got the guild-level organisation, and advantages for doing those things, certainly. Player-owned stations is something we've talked about a lot, but we won't have that in for launch. I mean it's basically player housing, and when that's done well it's great, but when it's done badly it's really awful. So if we do player-owned stations I want to make sure we have time to implement it in an interesting and elegant way that is meaningful for the players. The danger with housing is that is breaks off people into little pockets and they interact less.

Eurogamer: So let's wrap up with a quick overview of some of your content: what are we going to spend our time doing in Jumpgate Evolution?

Hermann Peterscheck: Well we have all the standard MMO type missions: defeating opponents, collecting things, or delivering things, escort missions... but we're just now implementing something really awesome which are these giant capital ships flying around - huge staged battles - and taking those out is becoming a major part of the game.

We're also working on a fairly advanced PVP system, with mass battles that have clear objectives: take out their battleship before they take down yours, hold this position for a period of time, and so on. There are two things that players have been responding to really well, and that's large groups of ships fighting each other, and taking down really large opponents, and so those are the things we want to develop for launch.

But there's loads of exploration too, we've worked really hard to make areas of space different and interesting. Also there's the player-driven economy that starts out from mining, turning raw materials into commodities, and commodities into equipment, so lots to do.

Eurogamer: So speaking of the launch, when will that be? People have been saying how finished the game looks, and yet we're still not at beta.

Hermann Peterscheck: Well a lot of games go into beta too soon, and players end up testing things that they should not have to test - like basic client stability! We're trying to do as much of that as we can. We had the game playable at the Penny Arcade Expo, and lots of people came up and said it looked pretty complete, and we get that feedback with everyone, but we just want to continue with that mantra. We want players to test the stuff we don't know about, even if that is time-consuming for us. We're right on the cusp of large-scale outside testing, and we intend to launch in the first half of next year.