sale program, but other than that you can get them all. The selection of characters you have at the very beginning is limited. There’s only five different characters you start out with, but you can find different ones in the game and unlock them with character tokens or you can buy a specific hero that you want to start with if you’re sure you want to play as, say, Spider-Man.
CGM: When you were thinking about making a game in the online space, what gap was there that you thought this game could fill? DB: A lot of things. To me an MMO is a massive multiplayer online game but that doesn’t mean it’s like WoW (World of Warcraft) or like Everquest. So many games went down that path and when we started out there were examples of successful MMO’s that are not clones of that kind of direction, so I wanted to keep breaking the mold that way. EVE is an example of a massive multiplayer game that isn’t strictly the WoW or Everquest type model. I wanted to get away from it in that way, but we could also break some rules because it is free-to-play. A lot of massive multiplayer games take a tremendous amount of time, and that’s because it’s a subscription. The longer the game goes the longer you’re subscribing, but we don’t have to adhere to that model. How fast you level or things like that could be different in our game, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of content but you don’t have to grind up levels. Levelling is a side effect of what we’re doing, not the point of what we’re doing. And I also wanted to get away from the standard quest structure of “kill seven wolves and pick four apples” and go with quests that really mean something as you play through the story. In a lot of ways the game is much more like Diablo II where there’s a storyline as you traverse through different areas to uncover what’s going on. It’s a very different levelling experience, it’s a very different scale experience, but it’s a very deep game with lots of things to do. 66
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It plays more like Diablo II than it does an MMO. Until you’re in the game and you realize “oh my god there’s a bunch of people in here that I can trade with and chat with, and group with, and do public events with” that makes it that real MMO experience.
CGM: You have a lot of experience with action RPGs obviously, but do you ever want to give another genre a go? Do you ever get worried that your games will just fall into the “plays like Diablo II” category? DB: [laughs] Sure, I want to make other games other than Diablo II type games. But it really isn’t that bad a game to be good at. It’s my bread and butter, I’m very passionate about this genre, I’m very passionate about this kind of game. And so in that way it was something that we really wanted to focus on. I wanted to get back to my roots. The last game that I made was Hellgate London, which I’m very proud of but it was not like this. There were a couple mistakes I made that I really wanted to learn from. I wanted to get back to the type of skilled direction that I had with Diablo.
CGM: The characters in this game are all recognizable names, can you have more than one of the same character running around? How does that work? DB: Yes. If you want to make a guild called “The Bubs” and run around as a pack of Wolverines, we’re gonna allow you to do that. We’ve done several things in the game, first off there are hundreds of different costumes in the game. So my Deadpool could be wearing a pirate costume and talking like a pirate. Your Deadpool is going to be wearing his X-Force costume. So even though it’s the same character they can look radically different. They will play very differently. If I am using my Wolverine to jump around the screen a bunch, your Wolverine