Iron Realms Entertainment Interview
Saosin, 2003-09-23

Recently I had the chance to speak with Matt Mihaly, CEO & Creative Director of Iron Realms Entertainment. For the most part we talked about the three currently playable MORPGs Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands, Aetolia, the Midnight Age, and Imperian. Enjoy.

Matt: Man, it's a little freaky to list more than just me. It wasn't so long ago that it was me and a bunch of talented volunteers. In any case, I'm the CEO and Creative Director. I designed most of Achaea though others are taking on some of those duties these days as we expand and I'm forced to spend more time running the company and less time designing. Christopher Kohnert is our CTO and is the author of Rapture. He focuses mainly on our core technologies but participates in design work on occasion as well. Josh Olson is the producer of Aetolia (www.aetolia.com) and responsible for leading its design while Jeremy Saunders serves the same role on Imperian (www.imperian.com) Jay Sax (Ilya), who ran the now defunct but fondly remembered text mud website Game Commandos, was recently hired as a producer on Achaea (www.achaea.com). Martin Best oversees production, and, with David Kaye, assists me in general business development activities. Finally, Robert French and David Mooter are working on Lusternia.

Matt: Text muds/MMOs/MMORPGs/whatever-acronym-you-prefer with a focus on community vs. community gameplay.

Matt: A few things, I think. The fact that we don't focus on monster bashing. There is monster bashing, certainly, but it's more of a rite of passage than anything else. It's certainly not the focus of the game for most players. Our PvP combat is far more interactive than graphical MMO combat to date. You don't just hit 'kill' and input special moves now and then. Our political systems are very popular with elder players and assist in players creating entertainment for themselves. We also have human beings playing the Gods that are an active part of the worlds of each game. Another thing that many of our players love is that we charge no monthly fee for our games, instead allowing players to pay us only when they choose. You never have to pay and everything in the game is accessible without paying but it's easier to open some parts of the game content by buying something from us. The key is that success can't be bought but success can be made easier. Since PvP combat, for instance, is somewhat based on player skill all the money in the world can't turn an inept combatant into a champion. And of course there's no way to buy your way to success in the political part of the game.

Matt: Well, there's really two aspects to the housing system: subdivision creation and house creation. Each player-run city has a Ministry of Development which is responsible for building subdivisions. These are areas that are 'graphically' represented by coloured ascii maps that player governments can build as they choose with a variety of terrain types. Once built, players can walk around them as any other set of rooms. Some of the cities are pretty creative about it too. Once you decide which subdivision you want to build in, you purchase a plot of land from the city or from a player selling one of his (some players invest in land with the hope of future profit) for gold and then purchase room and door credits using our general 'credit' system. After you've obtained your plot of land and at least one room credit you can start building your house. You determine how the rooms of the house are connected and you write all the descriptions for them. Further, you can configure them into gardens, can make them open-air rooms, create doors with free-form permission instructions (such as "Druids above guild rank 3, the members of the Hashanite Ministry of Security, but not worshippers of Twilight"), imbue them with regeneration, privacy fields, and so on. Imperian recently introduced furniture as well. For instance, a player can 'lie on' a bed or 'sit on' a chair. There's even a command to speak only to people who are sitting or lying on the same piece of furniture as you.

Matt: Politics are a big part of our games. There are all sorts of political positions with real power over other players, from guildmasters to the heads of religious orders to city bureaucrat. What I love about political games is that they embody the essence of PvP gameplay. You can't write script to convince someone that you're going to be a good leader. Politics also lead to some of the most interesting roleplaying in our games. Such passion is aroused by that drive to defend a common entity (patriotism) and to attack a common enemy. Cities create full-blown constitutions, raid enemy cities, rally around particular Gods, and so on. One of my favorite stories about politics in games is from Achaea. At one point the religious Order of Twilight, the God of Darkness, had grown extremely powerful from its stronghold in the city of Hashan, which was basically a theocracy of Twilight's followers at that point. He had spies in just about every major organization in the game and because religious affiliation can be kept secret, he even had converts working for him at the highest elected positions in other city governments. Anyway, people started seeing Twilight around every corner and behind every plot and His pervasive power kind of backfired when cities started getting all McCarthy-esque about 'Twilighters' and exiling those suspected of being such. I don't know if traditional roleplayers would consider this roleplaying (and I don't really care) but it's extremely immersive. Players take the politics -very- seriously.

Matt: This is one of the most intense elder games around in my opinion. There are currently six player city-states and in the future there will likely be more. These are organizations of players that control administrative-built territory as well as player-built territory (the subdivisions). They are a huge part of life in all our games. The governments are composed of elected representatives who themselves elect a leader (different title for each city), and a bureaucracy appointed by that leader. The bureaucracy ranges from the Minister of Development to the Chancellory to the Minister of Culture and so on. Responsibilities of cities range from maintaining the city guards and protecting the city from raids to running events in each city's Arena to developing the subdivisions to managing property tax on player-owned shops in the city.

Matt: Big area! Much of our skill system is focused on PvP combat. Fighting in this system mainly involves crippling an opponent with afflictions like paralysis and anorexia and thus preventing them from healing damage you subsequently do to the player. Everything if fast, fast, fast. You can afflict someone in a second and a half and the person can cure it in a second and a quarter, assuming perfect efficiency. There is a huge amount of complexity but I'm also willing to admit that it's never going to be as balanced as a great dedicated fighting game like Soul Calibur. Like in most MMOs, balance is an elusive goal that one just tries to constantly move towards. In terms of who you can kill, we don't have a PK flag that lasts more than about 15 minutes on someone. The game will let you kill whomever you want but if you do so for reasons that aren't recognized by our rules you risk administrative punishment. We allow players to file the equivalent of very simple legal cases to accuse other players of 'illegal' offences against them. Our administrators investigate those issues and take appropriate action if required. This approach has its upsides and downsides. On the down side is that players don't really like having to deal with the admins because the admins are, occasionally, wrong and it's galling to be punished for something you didn't do. It can also be a bit annoying to have to justify your actions to an authority. On the other hand a system without coded protection from PK allows for PK in grey areas that PK flags and PK areas don't. It also ensures that people aren't able to use the system to harrass or hurt other players without risking retaliation from the playerbase.

Matt: It's predominantly skill-based though the importance of level jumps drastically at 99, when you become a Greater Dragon. Only about six people have ever achieved that though that is at least partially because our monster-bashing does not receive a lot of development attention relatively speaking. It's repetitive.

Matt: Custom descriptions, custom clothing, publically-available character histories, custom houses, player-created clans, custom food, custom pets, bloodlines tracing your family lineage, etc. It's possible to create a far more individualized character in a text MMO than it is in a graphical MMO.

Matt: Well, that depends on which game you're talking about. We tend to offer a combination of 'standard' and custom races though. For instance, Aetolia offers races ranging from Human and Dwarf to the fire-breathing Xoran and the sea-dwelling Kelki. In terms of classes we offer unique takes on all our classes from familiar concepts like Priests, Vampires, or Bards to original concepts like Serpentlords, Wardancers, or Runewardens. We figure there are enough games trying to out and out imitate D&D. My guiding principle: No fireballs. Just kidding...sort of.

Matt: Guilds are very important because the only way to gain a class is to join a guild that is associated with the class. Further, the guild can take that class away from you at any time up until you get to a certain rank in the guild. The only way to form a guild is with administrative support and blessing so there are a very limited number of guilds associated with a particular class. In a a few cases, in fact, there are only one. What this means is that players are forced to work together to control the products of a class. Some classes get together and set minimum prices for products to ensure profit is made and then there are the inevitable conflicts with people trying to go to the 'black market' for cheaper herbs or enchantments or whatever. More important than that though is that a guild is usually the first sub-community a player joins. As a result it's often a major source of identity for a player and feature prominently in just about every player's virtual life.

Matt: NPCs play admittedly weak roles. Ideally they'd play strong roles but I tend to believe that until Turing-capable AI is available in MUDs they'll be nothing more than props. They can be programmed us to react in various ways but the only really interesting way that they interact with players involves one of our Gods (players inhabiting immortal characters) possessing that NPC and roleplaying with the players while using that NPC. Yes, you can have AI that can make your NPCs move around or fight well or whatever but until they're capable of carrying on a conversation they are just part of the landscape to players. They can be treasured parts of the landscape (mess with the Dryads in the Western Ithmia and the Council of Oakstone in Achaea will be all over you) but players treat them like favored toys not real entities. And that's fair enough since NPCs in all games today are just props.

Matt: We have hundreds of hand-built quests ranging from the standard trivial FedEx-style quest to larger and more complicated quests that might, for instance, return an ancient Chaos Lord to the world. The best quests, however, are the ones we run and moderate ourselves. Some have pre-determined endings as they're used to introduce new game features or content while the ending in others is largely up to players. We'll have a cadre of admins watching over these quests and interacting with players via NPC possession in order to involve the players with the world itself.

Matt: It's basically middleware for text MMOs. It lets you start writing your game right away as it provides a network engine, scripting language, database support, and so on. Since the game is written in a (very fast) scripting language changes can be hotloaded in the space of a couple seconds with no interruption of connection for the users. This impacts our development style in that we favor frequent (daily usually) changes to the live environment as opposed to bundling up changes into a patch.

Matt: Only that development is coming along nicely and that the world is up to about 3500 rooms right now.

Matt: Two things. First, we're pretty excited about having acquired the exclusive license to Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar series of books. Our plans on how to use the license are not firm yet but we'll definitely be doing at least one game based on the books. What's really neat about this license is that it's not over yet. He has about 10 more books planned and let me tell you, there's some epic stuff that's going to happen in Midkemia. Pick up the first book in the third Riftwar that had a US release a few months ago: 'Talon of the Silver Hawk.' Second, since I know this site mainly covers graphical MMOs, I want to encourage your readers to check out text MMOs generally. They're not for everyone, no question about it, but once the interface becomes comfortable they become at least as immersive as the best graphical MMOs. Look at our games, Simutronics' venerable games, the Eternal City, etc. If you're willing to give up the eye candy at least some of you are going to find gameplay depth that isn't achieved in graphical MMOs to date.