Imperator Interview

Camelot Vault had the opporunity to sit down with Mythic Entertainment’s Mark Jacobs at E3 and ask several questions about their next MMORPG, Imperator. Here’s a snippet:

Q: How are you going to handle death?

A: Gently. There always needs to be a death penalty in these kind of games. Anyone who says otherwise has really not studied the problem correctly. There are, on the other hand, different ways of handling death penalties. You can be too harsh, certainly, and you can be too lenient. We hopefully err on the side of being a little too lenient than harsh, but there need to be penalties. Otherwise, you get people doing things they shouldn’t be doing because there are no penalties for doing them. If you could simply always rush in to the lair of the dragon and get yourself killed, why is that a good thing for the game? If you could rush in and use that to distract other players, these guys are fighting and you rush in because you don’t care if you die and that ends up hurting their experience. You haven’t done anyone any favors. You’ve hurt the games playing for the community. We’ll have something but we hope we have a different way. I have some ideas. We’ll mess around with it. We’ll be typical Mythic. You got to take some chances and sometimes things don’t work out the way you hope they do so what do you do? You either do nothing about it and say everything is fine or you do something about it. We believe in saying hey yeah, this is broken, guess what, we’ll fix it.