06-26-2005, 05:07 PM
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 | News ID | | Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 25,275
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MMORPG.com has published the fifth installment to their ongoing Tactica Online Mini Q&A series with Imaginary Numbers' Luke Carruthers. Check it out: Q: I'm wondering how the faction battles will influence the Story as a whole...There would have to be some kind of balancing factor to prevent one side from dominating while still giving winners a sense of making progress.
A: You’ll rarely find one ideology battling another for the sake of it. Just like our world, there’s usually a particular issue that the feud is played out through. It’s these issues that make up the storyline, and that players have a direct impact upon through the storyline events, both Tournaments and Campaigns.
Because the storyline has no effect on the capabilities of a particular ideology – just because mysticism is going through a period of popularity doesn’t mean that mystics are any more powerful in gameplay terms than they would otherwise be – there’s no need for us to artificially introduce a balancing factor.
The natural effect of having three equally powerful factions is that even if one happens to dominate for a while, the others will sooner or later topple them. The real problem lies in us getting the balance wrong, and there being one faction that’s more powerful than the others. If that happens, then we’re not doing our job as designers properly, and we need to fix the problem as quickly as possible. Normally, of course, we don’t expect this to be the case, so the different ideologies will all exert a balance on each other.  |
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