Gamers

everywhere were excited when they heard that style="font-style: italic;">Gods and Heroes

was not dead, but had been given an imperial reprieve The

Roman-mythology based MMOG, initially developed by Perpetual

Entertainment, was acquired by Heatwave Interactive. Ten Ton Hammer, in

order to learn more details on the state of the game, journeyed to the

palatial villa of Heatwave Interactive. There they talked with Anthony

Castoro (CEO of Heatwave Interactive), Phil Tittle (Produder), and

Theda Sandiford (Marketing Director), and such details were learned.







Ten

Ton Hammer: How are things coming along with the game?

Heatwave:

style="font-weight: bold;">Things are coming along really well. The team is growing and theproject is going really well. I think that we really started to focuson it a month ago and the response from the playtesters has been asgood as we could have possibly hoped. People are really excited aboutit, and the game is in really decent shape. We’ve got it upand running and there’ll be some changes that we’llbe rolling out after these stress tests. We’re pretty excitedabout it.

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Before

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style="font-weight: bold;">Ten

Ton Hammer: You mentioned stress tests. I’ve noticed on your

Facebook page that you’ve entered into some beta phases as

well. How regular are the tests you’re doing and how many

people do you have in there?







Heatwave:

The stress tests are pretty regular. We’re finishing up our

third one. The first two were very focused on the top usage that the

server could handle. The most recent one was for three days where

people could play it at will any time of the day. We just wanted to see

how stable the servers were. Before we get into true, high-load beta

testing, we want to understand what the servers are capable of and what

things might go amiss so those things can be rectified. Tomorrow

morning, we’re going to have a post-mortem on that and decide

what the next phase is going to be. We obviously have a Plan A and a

Plan B depending upon how it went. We’ve invited several

thousand people in, and we’ve had a very good pickup from

that. We haven’t seen the actual numbers yet, but

we’re very pleased with the response.







Ten

Ton Hammer: Picking up the game where it was left with all the

Perpetual stuff, how much work has had to go into the game to get it to

where it is now?







Heatwave:

Surprisingly, not a whole lot. We have some other projects going on at

Heatwave, so even though we acquired the assets at the beginning of the

year, we really didn’t let the team loose on it until August.

There were only two or three people on it up until that point. The

biggest issues that we’ve had to address, not including

getting it configured and up and running, was dealing with some of the

known server scaling stability issues. We have one of the best server

programmers in the business at Heatwave, who’s been at

NCsoft, Origins, and some other places, and he went through and really

fixed up some things that were going to be some obvious problems for

the service. We’ve reconfigured it and we have the benefit of

modern hardware. So, a lot of effort has gone into it that way.







At the same time, we do have graphical improvements, both from an asset

perspective and also what the renderer can do. We’ll be

rolling those out after the stress tests. As soon as we’re

done getting a feel what the servers can do and what we need to do to

make that better, we’ll start rolling out some of the

graphical improvements. We’ve posted some before and after

screenshots in the stress test forums, so players are anxious for us to

get that into the game and see that stuff in operation.







Ten

Ton Hammer: Let’s talk a bit about gameplay. Are you sticking

true to what it formerly was or have you added your own spices to it?







Heatwave:

The things that are central to the IP, such as true historical context

with Roman mythology adventure, the minion system, choosing your gods,

all of that are core to the IP. There are some things that

we’re changing and there are some things that just

weren’t done yet. Those things that were not complete will

take on Heatwave’s flavor. One such example is combat and how

minions work in combat. We love that idea and everyone loves that idea,

but the execution on it wasn’t finished. We have our own

ideas on what will make that really fun and we’ve looked

through the history that it has been through, and some of us were in

the beta test. The community manager for that project is now a designer

at Heatwave, although he’s not working on style="font-style: italic;">Gods and Heroes.

We have a lot of context for what they tried and what they went

through. Ultimately, I think that what you’re going to see

with the minion system will be Heatwave’s play on how that

system should work and what’s going to make it fun.







Also, I think that there’s a certain tone in the game that

we’re going to be adjusting. If you play through the game,

you’ll find that the context of the setting of the game is

very serious, but the conversation aspect of the game is very loose and

is slangy and modern, which is jarring. We’re trying to find

the right tone for the setting, but also for something that

you’ll want to play all the time. A lot of that is writing,

and we have a great writer here, Todd Bailey, who’s a game

designer and he’s going to be working on that.

We’re just trying to make sure that the world feels right.

There are a few other things here and there that we’re going

to change. From a player’s perspective, all the things that

they were excited about are going to be in there.







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Before

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Ten

Ton Hammer: What separates style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Gods

and Heroes style="font-weight: bold;"> from other games?

We’ve seen a ton of fantasy based games, and sci-fi games are

coming out now, but style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Gods

and Heroes style="font-weight: bold;"> is going in a different

direction. Where do you see your game fitting into the landscape of

MMOGs?







Heatwave:

I was just reading on the forums and we have a first impressions

section, and one of the funny things is that a lot of people say,

“Wow, it looks a lot better than it did three years

ago!” We haven’t done anything to it yet, so

it’s probably their video cards. But, playing style="font-style: italic;">Gods and Heroes

is a lot like playing style="font-style: italic;">Age of Mythology

on the Roman side in an RPG format. There’s a lot of context

that people already have for the setting, and there’s a lot

of popular media out now that reflect how people feel about it, whether

it’s style="font-style: italic;">Gladiator

or Spartacus.

We have the ability to tap into that. In some ways, it’s a

little more epic and a little more serious than your traditional

fantasy. Our goal right now is to be very focused on those things that

get people excited when you talk about this theme, so it’s

not going to launch with everything that you could possibly throw into

the kitchen sink of an MMOG. It’s going to come out with

great combat, the minion system, a cool context with the mythology, and

the animations that make it really pop.







There are other systems that other MMOGs might lean on a bit heavier

than ours do and we might get to those things down the road. Right now,

we’re really focused on the aspects of minions, combat,

questing, and your estate where you go to deal with your minions and

some of your other resources. Later on, we’ll address the

other system types that people will want to see. We really

can’t do everything that every MMOG has ever done. We need to

stay true to what gets people excited about style="font-style: italic;">Gods and Heroes.















Ten

Ton Hammer: You mentioned combat as one of your priorities. How does

combat differ from other games?







Heatwave:

First of all, the minion system makes combat very different.

It’s there, but right now, we have to finish it.

There’s the opportunity to do a lot of cool things with the

minions that aren’t there right now, such as instead of

replacing other players, but rather giving the players interesting,

contextual things to do with their minions with a certain configuration

of minions. For example, if you have four healers and you’re

a healer, the things that you can do in combat are different than if

you’re a soldier with four healer minions. From a gameplay

perspective, the tactics that you can employ and the decisions that you

make with your minions make for a very different feel in combat from

other MMOGs, where you normally wonder what buff you’re going

to be using or what ability to use in a certain situation.







Ten

Ton Hammer: Let’s talk a bit about revenue and your target

audience. Who are you targeting the game towards? Who do you see it

appealing to?







Heatwave:

Everything we do is bad-ass games for guys, males 18 to 34. Our target

audience is for MMOG gamers who are looking for the next thing.







Ten

Ton Hammer: Have you decided on a revenue model yet?







Heatwave:

The answer to that is yes. We’ve discussed it with the

current audience of people that we have in the game. The way the game

was built and true to the current model, we’re focusing on

bringing the game out as a traditional pay-to-play game. Down the road,

depending upon what the players like and what their preferences are, we

could adapt the game to a different model. Going to a free-to-play

model with a game that was designed for a subscription is a pretty

significant undertaking. The game is so far along and there are so many

people interested in it, that the monthly subscription isn’t

going to matter to that core audience.







Ten

Ton Hammer: When you say subscription, are you talking a traditional

subscription? The reason that I’m asking is that you see

games now that charge a subscription but have other ways to cash up

with selling extra little items.







Heatwave:

I think that we’ll definitely offer the players the ability

to buy some cool new stuff, but the game isn’t if you want

this specific content, then you have to pay. If you pay the

subscription fee, you can play all you want. Sure, there’ll

be some stuff you can buy to make yourself look extra special.







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Ten

Ton Hammer: How can fans become more involved? Specifically, I can see

that you’ve set up a Facebook page. Do you have plans for any

official forums outside of the testing forums? How will people get

involved in beta as well?







Heatwave:

On the href="http://twitter.com/GodsAndHeroes">Twitter

page and the href="http://www.facebook.com/godsheroesromerising">Facebook

page, you can sign up for the closed beta. In the coming weeks, we will

be inviting people who do sign up.







I’ve been in this business for a long time and community is

central and is the business. Ultimately, the game is more about the

quality of service that you provide to the players than it is just

about the game. I think that now the industry has gotten mature enough

that people don’t just decide on what games to play, but

whether they’re going to play your game. So we started early

on with a player advisory board with 30 to 40 representative players,

guild leaders, and fans of style="font-style: italic;">Gods and Heroes.

They’ve been exposed to the content much earlier than anybody

else and they’re able to give us feedback and their thoughts.

Now, we’re slowly adding in more people who are passionate

about the game. Our goal is to slowly roll those people in to give us

time to take their input, and to roll out the changes we make with our

plans and see if they think those changes are awesome or not. If

they’re not awesome, we’ll do it again. The way to

get in is to go to our href="http://www.godsandheroes.com/">website

and sign up. There’s a newsletter there and we just pull

candidates for the beta from there.







As soon as we’re done with the stress test and as soon as we

feel that we have the stability that we need, we’re going to

rapidly roll into an exclusive closed beta for a period of time and

build up that audience. The better the game is, the more people

we’ll add. We really hope to turn that community into not

just a test-bed, but a part of the development team. So, we have a

really cool program that people can use to contribute and be a part of

development that hasn’t been done before. We’re not

giving details on the program yet, but we’ll be using some of

the democratic precedents set in the Roman era to let people

participate in the development of the game.







Ten

Ton Hammer: We’ve talked about technical updates and

graphics. Does that include support for DX10?







Heatwave:

I’m not sure if we’re going to go all the way to

DX10. One of the nice things about picking up a game that is a few

years old is that everyone can play it. The client runs on just about

anything. We are doing some improvements to the renderer and

we’re evaluating on how far we’re going to take

that. I don’t know if we’re going to go do full-on

DX10 support. Obviously, it’ll run nicely in DX10. Certainly,

some of the things that have happened in shaders and rendering

techniques over the last three years are going to be incorporated; some

of them already are. Ideally, when we roll that patch out, people will

ooh and aah.







Ten

Ton Hammer: Is the goal still to launch next year then?







Heatwave:

Our goal is to launch sometime of next year.





