Mage Knight: Apocalypse Q&A

With development of Mage Knight: Apocalypse wrapping up, senior pdocuer Dave Georgeson offers some final thoughts about the action RPG in a new Q&A at GameSpot.

Q: How long does it take to get through Mage Knight’s single-player game? How much replay value is there? And can you describe some of the different ways you can play through the game?

A: Originally, we envisioned the single-player game taking about 25 hours of gameplay to get through. Well…we were wrong. It appears that we overshot the mark by quite a bit for what we consider the “average” player. (By average, we mean someone who talks to some of the non-player characters, loots corpses, visits stores to buy and sell, as well as someone who fights through the various battles in the game.)

We’re not precisely certain how many hours of gameplay there really are in Mage Knight Apocalypse, but we know there are at least 25 hours of completely original gameplay in the box (that estimate is for only one run-through of the single-player campaign) and probably more like about 40 hours. Let’s put it this way…with cheats on that instantly destroy all monsters touched, skipping through the cutscenes and dialogue when they occur, bypassing all looting opportunities, and never visiting a store to buy/sell, it still takes more than eight hours for one person to complete the game from end-to-end…so let’s just agree that 25 hours of gameplay is conservative.

Onto that estimate, you can also tack on the time you spend playing the multiplayer, as well as all the different character classes and skill tree explorations. Added all together, well…there’s a lot of gameplay and replay value in this little box.

Mage Knight Apocalypse is meant to be played either as a single-player game (where you run a party of yourself, plus some computer-controlled, artificial-intelligence buddies that accompany your travels) or as a multiplayer cooperative game (where it’s the same epic experience, but now your AI buddies are played by other players, instead).