GamersInfo.net: Your intent is to make it possible for the players to affect the ecology in such a way that they can cull herds of gazelle or remove prides of lions completely from an area and as long as they maintain vigilance, that area will remain so.

Tracy Spaight: The model is much along the same lines as Richard Garriott and Raph Koster when they designed Ultima Online. However, they didn't realize at the time that the players would go out and slaughter everything that moved. What happened is it broke the ecology model because the players killed everything they encountered; then there was the behavior of the creatures - if you were shooting arrows at a deer it would run up and butt you with its head! It didn't turn and flee.

If the deer had some environmental awareness it's going to know you are coming, go to the herd and they're going to leave. So, our creatures we're going to try and design a bit more intelligently. Our intention is that we're going to make it so it's going to "feel" like a real ecology. It will be a lot more dynamic. Yes, if you kill of the predators, you're going to get a bunch of herbivores…and I don't know, perhaps that's going to lead to them overrunning all of the fields and now you're going to have to maintain that.
More...