Massively speaks at length with Jumpgate Evolution's Hermann Peterscheck Pt. 2

How does JGE's character progression via licenses work?

So basically, it works more like what you would expect from a car racing game, in terms of its functionality. So for example, I want to use a commercial ship that's rank 25 or something. To do that, I need commercial ship piloting license class two. So to get that I have the class one license and then fly the class one ship for a while and gain points in that. When I get to the top of that point tree, I can then buy the next license up.

And that's sort of distributed among all the various pieces of technology. We can cut that up in many different ways. Right now I think there's somewhere around 18 different licenses, and they're in different areas such as guns, missiles, ships, mining and things like that. It's a way of letting people sort of specialize what path they want to go down.

Will the system allow for one character to eventually train in several or possibly every license?

At the moment there's no limit, but we are exploring that. On the one hand, if you limit it then people feel like, "Oh, if I choose this, then I lose that." which makes you feel like, "But I wanna do everything!" While on the other hand, forcing strong choices has its own design benefits. It's sort of like the [World of Warcraft] talent tree approach.

But, right now it's open. I mean it's a time consuming thing -- if you wanna unlock everything it takes a long time. Although you could, theoretically.

Well certainly you want to facilitate interested players.

"It's really a issue of the strength of a choice versus the length of play of openness."

It's really a issue of the strength of a choice versus the length of play of openness. So for example: If you have that WoW talent system, it forces you to chose, which means you create alternate characters of the same class. On the other hand you've got a game like EVE Online, which allows you to learn pretty much whatever you want -- it just takes an enormous amount of time. Right now, we're more on the opened license model.

Even Blizzard is moving that direction with dual-specs, allowing max level characters to have two talent load-outs.

Correct, yeah. So the fact that they're moving in that direction leads me to believe that our choice is probably going to stick. It's just gonna be a time thing where you can do all this stuff, but just not all at once.


There are three factions in Jumpgate Evolution -- Solrain, Octavian and Quantar. Will players be able to form multi-factional squads?

"So squads -- which are basically our guilds -- those will not be multi-factional. It creates too many problems."

So squads -- which are basically our guilds -- those will not be multi-factional. It creates too many problems. While we don't have the sort of traditional, sort of national war kind of experience (like Horde and Alliance) because of the way that things like Battle Space --which is sort of our instanced PvP -- and conflict in general work, it's too difficult to deal with all the little ramifications. The logistics of having blended squads get very complicated. So basically, from a design point of view that's the problem.

It's kind of a tentative piece. As an individual player you can go and trade and do missions for other nations, but you can't buy their ships, join their squads or fight in the battle space on their side. You can chat and trade with everyone. The informal side of [cross-faction play] is fine. Where you start getting into problems is when you're forming squads with a guild-type structure or if you're getting into organized PvP, it becomes really tricky.

Just imagine a fight with 50 people and there's rainbow squads. One squad has five Solrains and five Quantar, while another has three Octavian, three Solrains and three Quantar and they're fighting in a frantic PvP battle. How do you know which person is your friend or enemy? It's too much to deal with.