There are a lot of gamers pretty interested in World of Darkness, and it's not hard to see why. The game is based in lore that's still hugely influential in the arena of tabletop gaming, and it's hard to imagine a developer better suited to labyrinthine political dramas than CCP. Machinima.com had a chance to chat with Chris McDonough during the recent Grand Masquerade, where McDonough revealed a few more tidbits about what the game would incorporate and how it would cater to existing fans of the property.
As McDonough puts it, the overall goal is to bring some of the feel of the game's many LARP activities into the MMO space, with the focus on player and character interplay in a sandbox environment. The full interview also discusses the spread of the overall property, why the team decided to focus on vampires initially, and more about what players can expect from the game world. View the full interview after the break.
Like EVE, it's trying to be a different sort of game.
The big problem with EVE, of course, is that a lot of us admire the concept and like reading news about the game world, but don't really enjoy the actual gameplay enough to stay subscribed. We'll see if they're able to pull it off with WoD. Fingers crossed.
It makes me so happy that they are focusing on the original seven vampire clans. On the other hand it makes me nervous when he says, "CCP has a different take on grinding," in which Chris's team is trying to avoid; Key word "trying." And what's up with the no levels thingy, that sounds fairly difficult, yet interesting.
Character advancement will likely be largely similar to the tabletop game where experience is earned by achieving goals and is spent directly on one's stats to improve their ratings. There's no levels because you define the exact nature of your capabilities in a freeform manner.
The tabletop version is incredibly simple to grasp and plan out compared to most competitors, and LARP rules are even simpler, even if you add optional rules like Merits and Flaws. Hopefully they'll present ingame challenges that are designed to encourage balanced, realistic characters, as Storytellers are encouraged to do around the table/at a LARP. Adopting a similar point allotment scheme (three categories each of Attributes and Skills, players pick primary, secondary and tertiary categories that determine how many points each gets, while making sure there's always some points in each) should help too.
I love that their direction so far is to make this MMO with the table top players in mind first as opposed to people that just play MMO and don't care about WoD or V:tM.
I'm really interested to see how they use Generations as advancement. I just hope they don't bastardize the importance of Diablerie/Amaranth so that you have people running around bunny hopping doing it left and right. I'm for it being in, but I'm equally for the sever, very severe final consequences that go along with it. Which means Auspex better be in and auras better be able to be read.
