Etrom – The Astral Essence aims to provide the true “essence” of an RPG

by Louis Bedigian

Coming to a PC near you, Etrom – The Astral Essence looks very different from your typical RPG.

With Christmas fast approaching, our attention is slowly turning toward the coming year.  There are still some stellar games to be released, but the majority of the must-have titles are already on store shelves.  It’s no wonder that gamers are already thinking about the future, wondering what early 2004 will bring, and what they might see as the next E3 approaches.

One of the most intriguing PC titles headed your way is Etrom - The Astral Essence.  Etrom is an RPG from Italian game developer P.M. Studios.  It has a creepy cast of unique characters, including Adek, an evil spirit stuck in demoniac ecstasy, and Devislar, a devil-like man who looks like he just walked out of a seedy nightclub.

You can draw your own conclusions about his origin, and if that’s not enough hopefully the game will shed some light on it when it’s released.

Etrom’s Official Site – www.etrom.net – is quite informative.  However, we wanted to get even more details about the game, so we turned to the Managing Director and Lead Designer, Fabio Belsanti.

Character development is a key aspect of any RPG.  How deep is Etrom's character development system, and how will it work?

Fabio Belsanti: The character development system is inspired by the “pen and paper” RPG system that I have developed in the past (the paper RPG will probably be available before the release of the videogame)

About each single feature of the system I’m sorry but, at this moment it’s TOP SECRET...

I can only say that you start with some particular basic characteristics that, as long as experience levels move forward, progress either automatically and according to your choices.

How many different types of characters are in this game?  What is their purpose?

 

FB: In this game You are Etrom, and Etrom is You... you will discover the character, and the character will discover you... you are alone between the Abyss and the Light... you’ll be in front of the Absolute, beyond the good and the evil... where’s the Truth?

Do players have any control over the type and style of their character?  Can they mix and match or create their own for battling online?

FB: Not for this “first episode” of Etrom. There will be some characters presets for the Multiplayer.

Are the worlds persistent, randomly generated, or...?  What will they be like?

 

FB: The worlds/levels are persistent and they’ll represent many “key locations” of the Earth in the 476 A.H.E.F. (After Human Empire Foundation).  (See the background in the website for more information www.etrom.net)
 

Etrom's atmosphere is very dark.

Tell us about the Chroma.

FB: The Chroma is a mystic mineral whose shape and dimension varies, ruby-red, shedding a clear light from the heart of its essence. Nobody knows exactly the origin of this powerful material, including the Bearers of Light who were the first to come into contact during their sacred extra-dimensional meditations.

Appeared on the earth and used by men at the time of the Universal Catastrophe, the Chroma, burnt in special furnaces, produces immense quantities of energy that can be applied to anything: industry, agriculture, etc.

Machines, transports, lights, computers, tanks, everything requiring energy moves and works thanks to the Chroma. “Common” people and, in general, most of human beings doesn’t know the complex and mysterious nature of the incredible source of energy and believes, because this is what the governments tell the people, that the chroma is a normal, although powerful, mineral produced on the earth.

Findable at a depth of 45 km in the earth’s crust the chroma is extremely difficult to be extracted as pure mineral. With a single gram of pure chroma it is possible to meet all the electrical energy requirements of a Megacity for a 10-year period. In the mines, which can be especially found in the center of each megacity, 99,9% of pure chroma is extracted, basically consisting of common rocks “saturated” with the energy shed by the cores, hidden and very hard to find, of Pure Chroma. It has not been found yet, but it seems that the pure chroma self-regenerates according to times and logic absolutely unknown. The Chroma, according to most genial scientists, has an arcane form of “intelligence and will” and “lives” according to obscure logic.

In order to be used for military aims, such as the making of bullets or explosives, the Chroma should be treated through biochemical processes based on the decay of corpses; its vital positive nature should be somehow contaminated.

This contaminated Chroma, in order to serve military technologies, often changes, although not always, its natural colors turning into black-chroma. Due to the very few scientific data acquired and likely to be acquired about this mineral, some kind of shortage in the extraction often occurs inexplicably, leading to unforeseeable periods of poverty for all the people in the Megacities.

They try to get round those unexpected circumstances by stockpiling the chroma extracted and by always looking for new mines outside the Megacities, but unfortunately that isn’t enough. Most of the wars fought among the 4 states are aimed at taking over the chroma mines outside the megacities, in the “Dying Deserts”.

In the game the Chroma will be very useful!

We're sorry Bob, but business is down so we're gonna have to "cut" you from the team.
 

Is it harder to develop an online RPG than you had anticipated?

FB: Etrom was born mainly as a single player game, but we wanted to give the players the chance of multiplayer games. Althought don’t expect it to be a MMORPG.

How do the single-player features compare to the game's multiplayer capabilities?

FB: They are based on the same Fighting and game system.  Multiplayer differs for some aspects of the gameplay and the purposes.

 

Do you think that experimenting before starting development is an integral part of creating a really good, original game?

FB: For me experimenting before starting develompmente is a Must to create a game (to say the truth to create anything…)

What are some of the main ingredients that go into making a killer, must-play game?  What things did you feel absolutely had to be in Etrom to make it the game it's shaping up to be?

FB: Depends by the game genre obviously. For Etrom I can say that the key features are:

A great Background

A really good fighting system

A new, interisting and unusual Character: ETROM (not the classic full good or full evil paladin)!

Care to engage in a fight to the death?...

Being an RPG, Etrom must have a lot of different magic spells.  Could you tell us about them?  (How they're used, their strengths/weaknesses, etc.)

FB: Magics in the videogame of Etrom could be defined using three words: The Astral Essence!

The Astral Essence run into Etrom`s heart, is an arcane mystic artefact which gives the character many powers that are enabled when he reaches the ancient Astral Circles spread all over the world. All the powers of the astral essence use Astral Points. Once you get one or more powers you’ll have to decide a maximum of 2 powers to keep "active" and ready to use via the simple use of the Keyboard. There are many, many powers...

How powerful of a PC will gamers have to have to play the final version of Etrom - The Astral Essence?

System Minimum Requirements:

Pentium3 900 MHZ

GeForce 4 or Radeon 9000 class card

256 RAM

Which do you feel is more difficult: to create an RPG from scratch that can compete with everything that's out there, or to create an RPG sequel that lives up to the original?

It’s more difficult to create a new brand, but it’s really more interesting to do this. Also, there aren’t RPG worlds as complex as Etrom’s around.

Is there a particular kind of gamer that Etrom will appeal to the most?

 

FB: Players that love to THINK and don’t buy a game only for what the marketing-men say. Players in search of adventure and really deep stories.

...This guy does.

Does game development ever keep you up at night?  Do you find yourself thinking about what you could be doing instead of sleeping?

FB: Sleeping? I don’t know this verb…

Kien is seeing an international release – what about Etrom?  Etrom will be coming to North America...won't it?

FB: Don’t worry, the game will be released worldwide!

That’s great to hear!

Thank you for your time.