I want to preface this entry by stating that when I was granted permission to do this interview, I was not yet employed by Areae, Inc. I had collected a few questions from the community a couple months ago and I am obligated to post the answers here to show my commitment to my readers. Just want to be sure to clear up any conflict of interest. =)

Interview with Simone van der Lubbe - Office Manager at Spellborn NV

1.) 2007 is a big year for MMOs, how do you expect Spellborn to fair in this competitive environment?

Spellborn is created by a team of avid MMO players. Many of the designers aren’t all too happy with a lot of the current MMO conventions. With Spellborn, we want to create a game that has a new take on these conventions. We focused on player skill, player freedom and immersion and we are confident that there will be many MMO players looking for a game that offers more than the tried and tested MMO gameplay formula in a new setting.

2.) What lessons have you learned from World of Warcraft or other major titles?

The biggest lesson that can be learned from titles such as World of Warcraft is to never forget that games are about having fun. Another very important lesson learned is that a game needs to be stable, tested and polished at release. Never ‘ask’ your customers to pay for your beta testing.

3.) How are you going to keep the player engaged after they’ve reached the “end game”?

Spellborn offers a FPS inspired combat system with manual targeting that is skill based. This combat system offers many interesting PvP opportunities. PvP will be strong component of the current end game content. To tie in the PvP end game content with PvE, we added some interesting things. Level 50 players will for instance be able to learn the archetype skills from the other archetype classes. This will allow them to create a hybrid class that can be extremely powerful and versatile. Of course playing a hybrid class is far from easy since players will need to overcome the restrictions that come with the creation of their skill deck.

At level 50, players will also get access to the higher ranks of the sigil system. Sigils are used to imbue weapons, jewelry and skills with statistic enhancing bonuses. Higher rank sigils offer better statistics and can be obtained through PvE content.

Once players have fleshed out their character, they can enter the Quarterstone Arena where they can play ranked and unranked fights. These 1 on 1 or group vs. group fights allow players to climb the PvP ranking ladders. Top players will be rewarded with an in game state of their character while entire guild will eventually be able to earn additions to their instanced guild hall.

Of course players can also expect a lot of additional content through patches and expansions.

4.) How do you plan to convince traditional MMO-ers that a FPS-style of controls for a Melee-oriented game is the way to go? Likewise, what are some of the strengths and weaknesses of such a combat system?

Spellborn uses an FPS inspired combat system. This means that we integrated FPS elements such as manual targeting and the ability to dodge incoming melee damage. The biggest strength of this system is that it gives players much more control in combat because it relies on the player’s skill. The end result is a more intense combat experience. We are confident that a lot of players will enjoy this new approach of MMO combat, but we can, of course, also imagine that some people might be put off by the faster pace.
5.) The biggest PvP feature of TCoS is Shard Conquests (http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/693/693923p1.html) where the Five High Houses compete with each other in a free for all against themselves and npc factions to gain control of new territory for the Enclave.

Last year it was revealed the focus of shard conquests would be temporarily downgraded in rewarding guilds instead of a single House. After that, no new information was released. Could you elaborate on what has changed for Shard conquests to become guild oriented and in what state will this be ready for release? Could you also get into some more details why you felt reluctant to have shard conquests emphasize power and prestige for a High house instead of guilds and how long you expect to wait before changing the focus of shard conquests back to the five Houses?

Not long after the article on RPGVault was published we announced to our community that Shard Conquest would not be a feature that will be part of the game at release. We were very happy with our initial tests, but somehow the feature didn’t have the impact that we wanted it to have. The biggest reason for this was the fact that everything in Spellborn ties in to the general story and setting. It felt a bit cheap to create a map that could be conquered and would simply be ‘reset’ at fixed intervals. Shard Conquest is currently planned to be released in a future patch together with story and gameplay additions that make the feature an integral part of the Spellborn world.

6.) It was revealed that some pieces of the environment can be interacted with to allow players to perform various actions to solve puzzle problems. Were pvp areas, such as arenas and the capturable shards, also designed with interactive environments, so players can perform tactics that make usage of terrain in ways different from just breaking line of sight, such as burning bridges, causing landslides, calling in npc reinforcements or building pits?

Spellborn does indeed feature many environmental elements that can be interacted with. These vary from elevators in the arena that function as jump pads to mythical ruins that can be ‘activated’ to lure creatures. While these elements are kept rather small in the persistent world, some of the instances feature extremely heavy scripting. One of the dungeons that is situated in the Dead spell Storm, named Exarchyon, will have a group of players sabotage a floating fortress where entire pieces of the complex will have to be taken out; literally. Other instances include boss monsters that will manipulate the environment depending on different stages of the fight.

7.) Spellborn is supposed to have done away with the aggro system that MMOs have always used to define how group encounters worked. What are some of the new rules that define how mobs interact with each other and players? What can players expect with these new rules that makes Spellborn combat a refreshing change from all other MMO’s?

What we tried to achieve with the combat in Spellborn is to have NPC enemies react as players would. And, there is no player class with taunt skills to draw the aggro while casters lob their fireballs and healers keep the tank alive.

NPCs have an alert range and an aggro range, which is always shorter then the alert range. Certain NPCs, like the howlers, only have an aggro range. When a player enters the alert range, Humanoid NPCs will draw their weapons and alert other NPCs if they are part of a group. Creatures will start to make threatening moves. If the player stays in the alert range too long, the NPC might start to attack or flee. Entering the aggro range of an NPC will also trigger the attack or flee response.

NPCs have a class and a skill deck, just like players have. How the NPC will select a target and use its skill deck is based on different triggers such as distance, player class, player level and skill cool down. Groups of NPCs will try to combine their efforts just like groups of players would.

Every player in the group will be heavily involved in each combat encounter and Spellborn requires good group coordination to survive the group content. To keep coordination manageable the standard group size is set to a maximum of four players.

8.) TCOS is going to have hidden quests hence your marketing tag line “What lies hidden must be found.” To what lengths will people have to go to unlock these hidden quests? What percentage of the 1000+ quests available at release will be hidden?

What lies hidden must be found doesn’t really refer to the hidden quests. The tag line refers to the setting of the game. Unknown events in the history of the Spellborn world resulted in its complete destruction. Players are part of a civilization that is fighting for survival in the remnants of that destroyed world. What happened in the past and what is left in the present are things that players will need to uncover.

9.) One interesting feature that was mentioned in one of your chat discussions was that depending on the High House you are affiliated with your quest completion goals can differ from group mates aligned with different Houses. Are these differences significant enough so that quest goals for one house conflict with another? If so, in your quest design have
you chosen to put players in areas where they can pvp each other so they’ll have all available choices to settle their differences, or have all of the quests been set up where players must compromise and barter for agreements on how to complete these quests?
Well what can I say! All of the High Houses have their own agenda. Some have a hidden agenda whilst others are too honest for their own good. Most of the High Houses have something they do not want the other Houses to find out. So to answer your specific question, yes, players will get different quests based on their High House affiliation and yes those quests will have different and partly conflicting goals, especially in instances or dungeons. But these goals will not conflict with each other on a gameplay level. In the end we want everyone to be able to complete their quest and get their cool reward for completing it. As for players settling their differences House wise, well there are more than enough occasions to… get even so to speak!

10.) A big concern for many players is how much of any game is instanced.
To my understanding TCOS uses something new which you call a “silent” instanced method ( http://tcos.com/sbforum/viewtopic.php?p=146384#146384) which runs a check on populations, in any given area, and if a population grows too large, players are filtered into a new copy of that area. This was implemented so players won’t have the lag issues they normally experience in other games like the capitol cities in WoW or the most contested zones in 0.0 space in Eve Online and to mitigate the annoyance of competing for mobs.

Beta 3 hasn’t finished yet so I’m not asking what you decided to do about people who want to group across these layers after playing for awhile but I
do wonder how this can work for people who want to start leveling up from the very beginning. Will there be a join as group function in the log in screen or can a guild officer be given a beacon that allows all players related to that guild to be filtered into the same area the officer is or did you think of something entirely different?

The “silent” instanced method as described in the forum thread you linked in your question has switched from only alternative to one out of others.
During the Beta 3 course and internally we’ve been actually experimenting with other options, ranging from a no instanced system to a partly instanced system. Yet, we still need to test and validate one of the aforementioned systems before further commenting on it.

11.) Speaking of grouping, do you have anything in place to try and correct the more common problems players experience in MMO’s such as: level gaps or lack of prerequisites for quests?
Even though we are aware of these concerns, such systems are not implemented as of yet. We might consider different alternatives to alleviate those problems, depending on our community feedback after release.

12.) Do you have a target audience in particular?
We haven’t really designed TCoS for just one specific audience. We rather want to provide players coming from very different gaming backgrounds with elements that are unique and original in the nowadays MMO universe.

These original elements (among many others) would be the FPS-like combat system (with aiming), the strategic thinking required to build your skilldeck, the importance of Lore and background history, and last but not least the atmosphere and living feeling brought by the art style and music. PvE’rs, PvP’ers, RP’ers; everyone is invited to embark on a journey that will take them to long forgotten places in the Spellborn’s world.

This design actually reflects the gaming habits of our dev-team itself. We have some hard-core MMO players who live for PvP, some others are typical PvE machines, tremendously valuing the importance of questing and history in a game, and some others are late MMO-players and come from a FPS, RTS environment. Far from being a disadvantage, these broad gaming origins help coming up with lots of new and innovative approaches.

That’s the whole idea behind The Chronicles of Spellborn: creating a world that is unique in which every player will feel like home.

13.) Anything else you wish to tell us about The Chronicles of Spellborn that the players might be interested to hear?
Working on such a project for the past couple of years (and even more) and seeing all the hard work and ideas coming together is just so rewarding. All the persons working on the project are breathing, living, eating Spellborn 24/7 and it just feels great. TCoS is our baby, and we do care a lot about him. So when it comes to test and play all these things, I can tell you it always very easy to find a group!