“Mage Knight: Apocalypse” Interview, Part 2

by Louis Bedigian

“We don't put a big penalty on having sidekicks die on you.”

At the end of the first part of our interview with Senior Producers Dave Georgeson and Chris Wren, Chris was explaining how each character has exclusive weapons. Aside from a few crossovers, you won’t be sharing content very often. Or will you?

As it turns out, sharing and using are two entirely different things. Chris went on to tell us that trading is in fact a big part of the multiplayer experience. “You can click on a character when you’re playing online,” he says. There’s a trade button – clicking on it opens up the trade window where you can drag and drop anything from your inventory. This allows you to swap items with your comrades, a gameplay element both Chris and Dave feel is very important. 

Swapping flames with enemies.

“We understood that this was a pretty big part of multiplayer gaming,” Chris says. “Even players within the same class – I think you’ll see a lot more of that than between characters of the different classes.” Potions, scrolls, and weapons are the primary items he expects will be traded frequently. He also notes that special pieces, like the Epic Armor and Epic Weaponry, will be a hot commodity. “A lot of things are rare in the game, and I think that kind of rarity makes people want to trade. Even just cool things like mage stones that you can imbue your items with. Trading is an important part of multiplayer. We had to have it.”

Dave adds that while trading is important, tweaking is still technically king. “A lot of the weapons, except for the generic stuff that we wanted people to be able to pass around freely, have attribute limitations on them,” he tells us. “So you might have to have a certain strength to swing a certain axe. You might have to have a certain agility to equip certain armors. Certainly that’s true for certain scrolls for intelligence and wisdom. So there’s a limit to how much tweaking can go on.”

Dave says that the majority of the tweaking that goes on will occur between you and your peers – players that are of similar power rating and have similar stats. In that case you can swap items pretty freely. “But,” he concludes, “you couldn’t swap [powerful] armor to a newbie and have him wear it. It just wouldn’t work.”

However, you may always give it to the newbie to sell or hold onto it until he is strong enough to take advantage of the armor’s power. 

A Sound Decision

dSonic is the studio responsible for bringing Mage Knight: Apocalypse’s sound to life. Chris discusses his experience working with them a little later on. For now, a more pressing issue must be addressed: will the soundtrack ever be heard outside of the game?

“There’s no reason why we couldn’t release something like that,” Dave told us.

But even before the game has been released Dave reminds us that not all music is meant to be heard outside of its original medium. “I’ve reviewed all of the music in the game, and because it’s interactive (the music is based on all the events and scenarios that are going on). We [typically use music] to accent certain areas of the game where everything is frenetic and fast-paced. I’m not sure how great of a soundtrack it would be to listen to because it’s basically lots and lots of slow pieces of music. But if there’s enough interest in it, it’s pretty easy to do.”

Chris adds, “It’s something the guys at dSonic would enjoy doing, if only for download. Downloadable from either our site or the dSonic site – I think that’s pretty reasonable.” Nothing has been confirmed, but Chris believes there’s a good chance we’ll see at least some of the tracks appear for download.

Top-Down On Your Luck?

Mage Knight: Apocalypse does not use the old-school top-down view. Why? “We wanted to go with this free camera for a lot of reasons,” Dave says. “One of them is beauty – the world is beautiful and you can see more of it this way. Another is tactics so you can see stuff farther away. And the last one is we’re able to do more with scale this way, so that we can make a more immersive, bigger fantasy environment.”

“If you’re stuck in a top-down perspective,” Dave continues, “then all you can ever see is when the enemy comes to the edge of your screen. Whereas if you have a free camera people can put that camera down behind them and see the enemy down in the corridor, or up on a hill that’s above ‘em. There are a lot of things you can do with the camera that you could not do with a top-down perspective.”

Though that may be the most important reason, that’s not all the producers were able to do with a free camera. “The other thing we can do with a free camera that can make the game more fun is create really enormous monsters. We’ll use the Apocalypse Dragon as an example. It’s huge! Really, really big! A character is about as big as its toenail the first time you see it. If we did that in a top-down perspective you’d barely be able to see the edge of one of its stumps. That’s not cool.” 

Mage Knight Answers, Part 2

Do you have any control over your party in the single-player game? We've been told that the developers wanted the party to act independently so that the player can focus on his/her individual experience....

Dave Georgeson: The AI does think for itself, so your sidekicks will go off and do their own thing. There are three easy keys or buttons that you can click on the screen: attack, follow, and stop. Through those you can pretty much get your sidekicks to do whatever you want them to do. You can tell them to stop and they’ll hang back. You can tell one sidekick or your whole group to attack a specific target. Or you can tell ‘em, ‘Please don’t attack anything, just follow me.’

With those few things you can totally orchestrate the battle, you can move NPCs in and out of combat, [etc.].

Then you’re free to focus on the skills that you have in your own tree as well as your own potions and scrolls. Maybe you want to change out your weapons, all those things. So there’s plenty of stuff to do, and the AI takes care of itself.

Chris Wren: We designed the whole system to be passive if you want it to be, the sidekicks will help you out and take care of themselves. They’ll die from time to time but are easy to get back. We don’t put a big penalty on having sidekicks die on you.

When you first pick a sidekick you get to decide what kind of a sidekick [it will be]. That changed since the beginning. We didn’t originally have that in the design. But [now] you can decide what kind of skills he’s going to focus on. If you get a dwarf, for example, and you want him to focus on his gun skills. He’ll get better gun skills, [increase] his proficiency, and start getting into different gun types.

The way we did it, when you go shopping in the game [by talking to a vendor], it doesn’t check at that point. It says, Okay, have you as a player unlocked certain stat skills? And it checks your power rating.

What eventually happens is, when you go shopping, [the sidekicks] will upgrade their armor and weaponry along the skill tree you have picked for them.

Now, talking about the elf. He’s got a lot of healing spells, protection spells. You don’t necessarily want to have him lead the battle. I usually just leave him back. What’s good is that he’ll basically [pump up] the party [by casting spells] when he doesn’t have anything to attack. Keeping him out of battle is good ‘cause he’ll use all his magic on the party to heal it, things like that. Whereas the dwarf and the Amazon, let them go take all the damage.

How you pick your sidekick, and how you want to play your character – you build your party however you want. The sidekicks can [be passive], but if you really want to get into it and fill out your party in a specific way, you can.

DG: We like multiplayer games so we wanted to make sure that the sidekicks felt like that kind of experience where you’re doing your own thing and you can kind of make suggestions to the other players, and a lot of time they’ll follow your suggestions because it’s smart to chain your attacks together and that sort of thing. And sometimes they’ll do their own thing, and that’s how the AI is in this game too. We kind of set it up so that when you play the multiplayer with four friends it’ll be the same as the experience you have when you play it single-player.

CW: The fact that you get to play as the whole party lets you see how other characters behave.

DG: Even if you just play single-player and never go online, it just increases the replay value. Every time you go through the game you can change the kinds of partners you select. So if you don’t want to change your [main, player-controlled] character and just gain more experience, your play experiences can [still] be significantly different from play to play [by having different sidekicks].

CW: A lot of games have sidekicks with one or two skills. This game has several, and they will change over time. When you get into combat you’ll find that the sidekicks don’t just do one or two things. They [the AI-controlled sidekicks] have to consider: do I need to heal? Do I need to protect the party? Should I attack? And they’ll really choose the best attack. You’ll really get a sense different from any other game out there. 

dSonic was responsible for handling Mage's audio. Why were they chosen, and were they needed throughout the development process?

DG: Yeah, dSonic handled all the sound for the game, including the music. We worked with them personally on all of the voice-over sessions. We spent a lot of hours in the studio with those guys and some really good actors. But Chris is the one that found them, and I want him to answer the question.

CW: We got those guys early on in the project and they were really excited about it. We told them a little bit about it. They had done a fantasy RPG kind of game before. Before long they had written the dwarf music and Amazon music. As you go through the game you’ll see just how into it they got with the voices and everything.

I think because they loved the game and because they wanted it to be a showpiece for the company, they put a lot into it. And not just from the sound effects side or the composition side, but [also] on the technical side, those guys are amazing. They put all the sound effects in themselves, we’ve been really impressed with that. It’s clearly been a labor of love for those guys.

When they were wrapping up, they finally sat down and played the game all the way through, and they said they had an incredible time. That’s a really nice complement for us, especially when you’re this close to a project. It’s hard for me and Dave to gauge where it’s at. It’s cool for someone who has been privy to one area, the sound, to take a look at the game and go, ‘Wow!’ They [dSonic] obviously wanted the sound to be good. But they’ve also been happy with the way the rest of the game turned out.

DG: I agree with a lot of the reverb and environmental effects they’re adding to the sound. I really like the choices they’ve been making. When you hear the character who all the others have sworn their oath to, you’ll understand some of the sound experiments we’ve been doing. There’s just a lot to it. They’ve tried to make it embrace 5.1 [Dolby Digital surround sound]. They’ve been a really great team to work with.

Thanks guys for all your great answers.