Jumpgate evolution is a space action combat MMO. The one thing that I really want people to take away with Jumpgate is the experience of having you know having a massive space combat battle with tons of other people at the same time.
My name is Herman Petersheck and I’m the producer of Jumpgate evolution. To me a lot of games are about getting the vision of an experience that you want to capture and a lot of that comes from movies or books or other source of fiction. So if you think about something like the end of return of the Jedi where the fleets are kind of jumping in and they are fighting the Deathstar. Or the new Battlestar Galactica has a kind of a raw feel to it, there is emotional moments in both games and movies and if you can capture those and sort of deliver them to people, I think that’s the best thing you can possible do.
Jumpgate evolution is the fusion of games like Wing Commander, Priavateer, Ex wing versus High Fighter, sort of traditional science fiction space combat games with the MMO mechanics around it and that’s things like trading, missions, advancing, getting tons of equipment. You know there’s a whole sort of player driven economy aspect so you can go out and mine and build things and sell them to other players and stuff. We’re really tying to capture a sort of what I would call like the Han Solo experience.
SMS multiplayer game, its means that you can do this experience with thousands of people at the same time, you play a pilot and so in the beginning of the game you choose from one of three nations and those are Sol Reign, Quantar and Octavius. The Sol Reign nation is sort of this mercantile state but they are also kind of mafia. The Octavians are—we think of them as sort of Spartans, so they have this militaristic nature but they’re also mercenary in some way. The Quantar tend to be more spiritual as suppose to say religious and so they have this mystic side and so by having this three different groups to choose from, it allows players to have a rich experience so that they can experience the universe from three different sides.
In terms of game play, there's a lot of variety in Jumpgate, there is the traditional MMO features, so you get missions, you get experience, you gain rank that allows you buy new equipment and advance yours ships. A lot of this activities can be both done as single player but then there’s also group activities, so for example there is end bosses that are this giant mother ships and you really need a lot of people to take them down. And so getting a group of people together coordinating the attack so you have different abilities and different weapons and you go in there and you try to figure out how do we defeat that really big alien mother ship. And that sort of hall mark of end games and MMO’s is really coming together as a group and taking those things down and then on the PVP side, its similar right? It’s a group of say 50 players on each side trying to take down each others giant battleship or something like that or trying to hold a control point and so it really builds the sense of camaraderie.
The way I think about it is a really good MMO, when you’re done playing that you’ll sort of go back to your station or whatever and you when in chat you’ll be like, “Remember that time we did that cool thing and took down that ship? That was really fun, lets go do that again.” Even then you know talking smack to the other team being like the last time we totally wiped you guys out, we want to try it again and so it really allows people to have lots of different stuff they can do in the game.
From the beginning of Jumpgate we tried very hard to focus on ease of entry into the game and that covers a lot of different areas. There is the obvious thing which make the game intuitive to play, so instead of having a sort of long and boring tutorial that explains every tiny little feature or people tend to sort of drop off and loose interest. Its like giving someone a huge manual and saying read this before you can drive a car, instead of just sitting in a car and saying okay, put it in drive and now do this. And so we tried to take that approach where you start out and you’re just in space and we teach here’s how you fly, here’s how you shoot, here’s what you do. And our approach has been if you need a tutorial to explain something, its probably too complicated.
As a social game we want as many people playing as possible and so we’ve worked really hard to keep the system specifications as well as we can so that people who don’t have the new $5,000.00 computer can sit down and play the game. To get frame rate hitches or lock long loading times, huge downloads, all those kind of things prevent people from wanting to play the game and so we tried to reduce all those barriers to the smallest possible.
There's lot of different reasons that people are going to enjoy Jumpgate evolution, for one thing its provides the unique experience that hasn’t been done yet, there's lots of fantasy MMO’s out there but there is not much else and there is nothing that’s really a space action experience on line. And so when we approach games here in Net Double, we try to think about what would we like to play in a game that’s not there and then provide that and then there is probably going to be a market for that as well right because there is going to be other people that want that.
I’d love to for people to come to me and say hey, “We did this huge battle and it was awesome” and I’ll feel really vindicated as I gained it over. The best place to go for information is just go to our home page, which is jumpgateevolution.com, you could sign up for BETA there, you can join the forums, talk to other players. The developers are on those as well like people ask us questions and we kind of chat with them and talk about game play and stuff like that and then we’re always updating that site. You know putting screenshots on and movies and information about different stuff and its really the way that we communicate with our players and so that’s a great place to go.
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