Mike Wallis reveals Colony's MMO secrets

Paul speaks to Colony about their forthcoming opus

Colony Studios are busy plotting an MMO revolution. Paul Newcombe chats with CEO Mike Wallis on the uprising afoot.

With new MMO's almost ten a penny these days your promise to do something new to the genre certainly grabs attention at the very least. What can we expect to see different in the first Colony Studios game that we've not seen before?

One thing that sets us apart from most MMOs is our scale of play. Players can terraform worlds as well as destroy them. Players can own businesses that span the galaxy as well as be a part of massive fleet battles. It's really exciting what we are planning on letting players do.

One of our main goals is to allow players to have the freedom to do what they want to. Now there are other MMOs that have granted freedom to players but what sets us apart is that you will actually have things to do given this freedom. Freedom in our game isn't that you have the freedom to either grind mobs or do quests but that you have the freedom to terraform a world for colonization, fight for your faction's military, conquer regions of space, etc.

The other attention grabbing area is the collective expertise your team has built up, with members who between them have worked on almost all the major MMO's to date. Is there a sense that everyone's ready now to push on and try all the things they've wanted to do in the past but were perhaps constrained by working on existing titles?

Absolutely. But to be clear this isn't a case of "we must be different!" - it's more a collection of guys who have seen limitations in the process of development, be it time, technology, or philosophy. Having actually shipped these games, we can call upon our experience and new technologies in order to actually realize some really cool ideas that were left on the cutting room floor, so to speak.

One of the standards of the MMO is the 'go there and kill ten of something' style quests that constitute a fair chunk of the level grind. Love it or hate it no-one has yet come up with a better way of progressing through a game. Has Colony found a way of leveling up that is a little more creative?

We have a progression model designed that will feel familiar to players, but at the same time is not the typical trade off of experience for task completion. You will progress based upon what you do, and you will also progress based upon the state of your faction which is affected by your actions. For example, if you set up a trade route or protect a trade route, you are helping the commerce of your faction grow, which in turn helps you to progress. In layman terms you will progress simply by playing the game.

When you talk about taking any genre onto a new level people naturally expect some of that progress to be visual. Can we expect next-gen visuals to go with the next-gen ideas?

Next-gen visuals often are synonymous with next-gen systems. We are more concerned with giving our game a unique style than an impressive minimum system spec, but rest assured we'll still have great visuals with as many bells and whistles as we can cram in.

Current MMO's haven't got where they are today without doing a lot right, what familiar elements can gamers expect to see finding their way into your game in some form or another?

Too many to mention, but if I had to put my finger on something we wish to glean from successful MMOs it is ease of control. In games like WoW and Guild Wars, the way the control schemes are designed and implemented are very intuitive and very slick. Things like this can often be overlooked by developers but they are crucial to a game's success.

With juicy details of your game still hard to come by what can you tell us about it?

Juicy details hmmm...

In our game you will have the power to destroy planets and lay siege to entire star systems. Is that juicy enough?

There have been quotes coming out of Colony that the game world will be far more dynamic than players have experienced before with a real sense of things happening in it while you've been logged out. Can you give us any more details on this?

The definition of dynamic for us is that a player's actions, and in some cases lack of action, have an effect on their little corner of the universe. Say that over the course of a few weeks a player is able to facilitate a trade route. He's a relatively small trader so his depot sees two to four ships a day bringing in and taking out supplies. The player has contracted some NPC escorts to protect his route as he cannot protect it 24/7.

This small trade route is normally self sufficient, the escorts take care of his shipments and he is making a nice little profit. So one day the player logs in and is alerted that raiders from another faction have attacked his route but were chased off by his escorts who now are asking for money in order to upgrade and repair their ships. The player now has the option to spend funds on increasing security or he can take it upon himself to gather up some friends and go after the raiders who are based near a moon in the far side of the system. If the player does nothing the attacks will most certainly continue; in addition to losing shipments, the player will lose his trade route contracts due to his business partners losing confidence.

This is just a small example of how the player interacts with the game.

You've promised a rewarding end game, something that's often missing in other MMOs, how is that going to work? Can you really keep a player's interest even when they've hit the level cap run out of quests?

Our end game will mostly center on ownership and expansion of factions. Achieving these two objectives will involve both PvE and PvP gameplay.

Since our game isn't quest centric we don't really have to worry about running out of quests. Every time a player logs in there is the potential for something new to be happening.

Will you aim to release expansion packs at regular intervals or will new content be added dynamically as time passes?

That's a good question. It's a bit early to speculate on what we will do, but our hope is to offer both as long as they fit within the game structure.

Is there any chance of a console version appearing at some point?

Our game mechanics would easily port over to a console system. However, it will depend on the situation with the middleware technology we are using. We'll work closely with the creators of the Hero Engine tech in order to realistically map out a process for development of a console version.

Thanks for letting us talk with your readers. They can visit www.colonystudios.com for more information.

No problem Mike, best of luck with the completion of the game, whatever it might be called!

By Paul Newcombe