Hermann: Some of that, yes- oh, wow. Cool I just got a good item there, sorry. Dude, I dunno if you saw that but I got a nice green item there.
Massively: That's pretty intense, you're getting flanked.
Hermann: Yeah that's what I'm talking about. I'm creating this intense combat. These guys are defending their base and I gotta take 'em out.
Massively: Are fighters similar to say, haulers or freighters in terms of size?
Hermann: No, they'll be like, probably ten times bigger.
Massively: So you'll definitely see some visual differences between ships?
Hermann: Definitely, yeah. Between the fighters, you kind of want the different types of fighters to be similar in size for all sorts of reasons. Not the least of which is PvP considerations, 'cause you have you consider a profile since you are hitting a target. You want the haulers to feel like trucks, and they handle like trucks. Like this fighter I'm playing? It's relatively fluid. It's not as tight as a light fighter, but with the hauler you couldn't just fly right around a small asteroid.
Massively: We were actually able to boost and then brake, flip around and boost face-first with guns blazing into an enemy earlier. You probably couldn't do that in a hauler, right?
Hermann: Right, yeah. You want those ships to pilot differently so that the experience is different. So maybe a bomber type of fighter ship can't turn nearly as fast, but it can move in a straight line really quickly. It's advantages are to swoop in, fire a bunch of missiles, then get out. Pretty much how you would expect airplanes to behave. You don't send in a B-52 to do dogfighting.
Massively: You send the B-52 at the capital ship, or the battleship.
Hermann: Right, yeah. Then you want the light fighters to protect the bomber. That's the kind of experience we want to recreate.
Massively: Are you guys expecting players to have quite a few ships as they level up higher into the game?
Hermann: When you think of fantasy game, it's usually class-based. You're a mage or you're a warrior and that's kind of what you are, if you want to play a different role you start a new character. In a space game, it's about the ship. Nothing's really preventing you from flying the hauler and then you can say, "I feel like fighting today, so I'm going to fly a fighter." We want to encourage that kind of behavior.
Massively: So can we expect to see generally every standard MMO feature in Jumpgate Evoltuion?
Hermann: That's the goal, but there are some things that are different. Take loot, if you think about loot in most MMOs its designed like, "I own that monster, so don't touch it. It's mine." system. That doesn't work in space combat really well, because if there's a group of fighters after me how do you know which one is yours? If there's ten fighters and they're firing at me while you're coming from another direction, it's chaos. So we did away with mob ownership completely. So basically, the way it works right now is if you and I are both fighting this thing we both get full credit for it and that means loot and experience. It's what I call soft grouping, you can see people playing her doing it. They don't really know each other, but they're going to see an enemy target and take it out and you want to encourage that cooperative behavior.
Massively: Thanks for your time, Hermann.
If you want to find out even more information, give the audio interview a listen for all the nitty-gritty stuff that we just couldn't fit into here. We promise that if you're a space MMO fan you won't regret listening!
