More Multiplayer Details for “Mage Knight Apocalypse”

by Louis Bedigian

“We wanted multiplayer to be a cooperative experience.” 

Last month the producers of Mage Knight Apocalypse divulged new details on one of the year’s hottest RPGs. They told us about the characters, the story, the gameplay, their inspiration, and their ideas for keeping the miniature game alive and kicking in a PC gaming world.

They provided in-depth information on the game’s scaling process, a system that enables players to enjoy a balanced multiplayer experience. Playing with three people when two others decide to join in? The game will adjust accordingly based on the power ratings of each player. 

Players will also adjust accordingly, and automatically. Newbies are given a boost that will enable them to play alongside more skilled players. How is this possible? It’s all in the character statistics, which decides each individual’s power rating.

Full details:

Mage Knight: Apocalypse Interview

Mage Knight: Apocalypse Interview (Part 2)

The magnitude of information given to us the first time around did not leave much room for further revelations. Fortunately we were able to unearth a few final details about the multiplayer content for Mage Knight Apocalypse, which will be released this week. 

First off, is multiplayer strictly co-op, or are there reasons to battle against your allies?

Chris Wren, Senior Producer: We wanted multiplayer to be a cooperative experience. But there is a hostile mode, which can be [applied] to any of the other modes. In hostile mode, all of your allies become targetable. The idea behind this is, in some of the world war shooter games, you have friendly fire to make it more realistic.

On the competition side we have the idea of loot in the game. You will be competing for loot, but we’ve designed it to drop specifically to your character. How it works is: when in multiplayer, you’ll find loot [that is specifically for you]. You cannot pick up loot that was dropped for other characters.

But each character has a power rating, whether it’s a single-player character moved to multiplayer or not. The rating is based on the number of skills you’ve unlocked, the stats that have been increased, etc. The power rating affects the loot that will be dropped. The higher the power rating, the better the loot. 

Is the quest that you play solo (offline), the same as the one you'll get to play with others online?

CW: Yes, it’s the same game. We wanted the player to spend a lot of time playing the single-player game, collecting loot, building up your character, etc. And we didn’t want any of that to get lost. So when you go into multiplayer, you can access all of the same missions. You can actually transfer your character from single-player to multiplayer and back to single-player.

Let's talk about the balance between solo and multiplayer. I assume that when you go online, enemies get stronger, and appear in greater numbers. Is that the case? And if so, how does the game adjust to allow for the perfect amount of enemy encounters - not too many offline, and not too few online?

CW: The number of enemies doesn’t change a lot. The game was designed around a scalable system. With the single-player experience, you just start out with one character. By the second region you’ve got two, and by the end of the game you’ve got five characters in your party.

The enemies were scaled to make things interesting for five people on the fifth region, four people on the fourth region, etc. But the scaling is based on the power rating of the party. The balance we’ve found works really well, regardless of what power rating. 

How do you communicate with others while playing online?

CW: We’re including Xfire. Within the game itself we have chat screen, which also doubles as a combat log. We have the standard IRC-type commands you’d expect from a chat program.

Can players drop in and out of a multiplayer game at any time?

CW: Multiplayer for Mage Knight Apocalypse is very open-ended. People can jump in and out when they want. You can quit whenever you want. If you quit the host will shift to another member of the party. You can set up a dedicated server if you like, keep it running, and people can jump in and out of that game whenever they want. Or you can just host a normal game.

It’s also designed so you can host several types of games. You can have a multiplayer experience that’s very close to the single-player experience. That starts at the beginning of the game, and you can’t just jump around to any mission you want. You have to go through them in order. This is for the people who want a single-player kind of experience with their friends.

We also have a mode where the game is divided into six major regions, each of which has several missions in them. For people who enjoy regions or just want to play one region, you can set up a server, set up your game to be a chapter game, and choose one of the six chapters. 

In the future, after players have completed the game and unearthed every secret – do you have plans to take the multiplayer experience further? Will players be able to develop mods for the game? And do you, the developers, have plans for updates or any kind of future content? Or would additional content be better saved for a sequel…?

CW: We haven’t done a lot with modding. What we did do is allow people to tweak the textures. Most of the textures are very tweakable – textures for the world and characters. With a pretty simple plug-in, you can make your characters look any way you want. This is not something we’re officially promoting, but it’s in there.