Dragon Empires Interview #1: General
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-08-14

The folks at Codemasters have been working on Dragon Empires, their highly-anticipated mmorpg, for quite some time now. A few weeks ago the first beta invites were sent out... a good time for us to ask Peter Tyson, community manager of Dragon Empires some questions about the game. In this first interview, we asked him a few general questions regarding the team, the game and other various topics.

Peter Tyson: We're just about to enter beta at the end of July/start of August. The first phase of beta will be testing a lot of principles and design elements to see how work and hang together. A big part of the testing is testing initiating and joining formal PVP battles. This is a system whereby players can challenge others to game-like combat and is one way players can get involved in PvP.

Peter Tyson: I think end game has been lacking, mostly because the fun is supposed to be in the journey itself. While the journey can be fun more and more players are focusing on getting through leveling as quickly as possible, mostly because not being top level can be a real hinderance to fun. This is contrary to offline-RPGs which often end about the time you are likely to cap your character.

The answer to this issue is to either make leveling more fun and result in less negative impact for players (but thereby reducing the overall satisfaction of being higher level than anyone) or increasing the ammount of stuff to do once you ar capped. We have decided to do a little of both. Firstly, it won't take forever to cap your character (and if you do cap it quick chances are you haven't capped crafting or other alternate advancement routes) and secondly we are trying to make player skill quite important in PvP. It won't dominate the game (we're not making a first-person shooter) but clever players can beat higher level poorer players. Finally, we're making sure there is a lot to do in the end game. There are the usual quests, dungeons and hunting but also we have gathering resources to make the best items, city capture and management as well as the formal battles, the role PvP system (where you can be an outlaw, bounty hunter and trader) and so on. We want to give players a lot to do, really, we want Dragon Empires to be a virtual toybox where players can dip in and have some fun with a part of the game that appeals to them at that time.

Peter Tyson: I think there are sufficient customers for most MMORPGs in development. People like these games and people's tastes are becoming more defined which means there is room for games with something a little diferent in the design. However, I don't think MMORPGs are at the peak of their success. Think of first-person shooters. First(ish) was Wolfenstein, then came Doom, which was a real generation change on Wolfenstein, then came Quake, another revolution (real 3D spaces) and the games coming out since Half-Life could be argued to be revolutions on Quake. However, when you think of MMORPGs gameplay really hasn't changed much since the text MUDs of the 80s. I really think we're due for some revolution in terms of gameplay and interactivity but I don't think we're there yet. I have a few ideas of where things might go but I think I'll keep them to myself for now! ;)

Peter Tyson: He's bang-on right. In the good old days gamers were exstatic to be playing with more than a dozen other people, customer service was just icing on the cake. These days gamers are more familiar with MMORPGs and understand they are paying for an ongoing service and expect ongoing customer service for their fee, this is in addition to extra and regular game content of course.

Currently we have no plans to sign with a company such as Themis or the one Dale is involved with because we have team members experienced with solutions provision and customer service. I guess this is where we might disagree with Dale. We believe customer service is vital but don't necesarily see why we can't build it ourselves. With good planning and testing we can create a tailor-made solution and get the job done as well as a bought solution but for a lot less cost.

Peter Tyson: I guess we're aiming to be an interesting itteration. I think there is real innovation out there but gamers often shy away from the unfamiliar. As for how we are different and better? Well I'd point at a few features:

Firstly, the world looks great. It is really dense with life and looks phenominally realistic. Everything from weather patterns shifting over the course of a day, layers of clouds, bugs, birds and bees are in the world. The naturalness of the environment really sucks you in and takes you away from the convention of zones, 10-tree forests and ‘terrifying peaks' that would rate as a large mole-hill in the real world. We're lucky in that our engine guys have gone wild and come up with something really unique and different.

Secondly we're really trying to add interaction with the world. There are resource points to collect raw materials from as well as cities to move those goods too. Each city has a local economy where supply and demand is based on buy and sell prices set by players. Each of the 50 cities is connected to its neighbours and sends out buy contracts for players to fullfill by moving goods around.



Players who own and run these cities will be able to add to the cities economy by adding buildings or to the city's defenses by adding walls and so-on. They control the tax rate and economic specialty and will be called on to defend their town should they face a challenge for ownership. To be really succesful clans who own towns are going to have to keep players who live there happy and protected, thus boosting their tax returns as goods are bought and sold locally instead of somewhere else.

Those are a few ways in which we're doing stuff a little differently. What I like is how each of our systems is linked to the other. Economics and politics are very closely linked and you can't ignore one for the other, for example. There are other features and subtleties at work but it would take me pages to outline them all, best to check our site and the rest of these interviews!

From now until december we'll bring you one interview with Peter Tyson every month, each one about a different topic concerning Dragon Empires. Stay tuned!