Two Worlds II Interview

IGN's Two Worlds Vault has kicked up an interview that they did with Reality Pump's Mirek Dymek during the recent CD Projekt Spring Conference. Since the questions all deal with the improvements being made to the multiplayer component in Two Worlds II, there's a lot of new information to be gleaned:
TWVault: Can you tell us something about the PVP aspect? Will there be balancing involved, allowing e.g. a pure melee player to defeat a mage-oriented character?

-Mirek Dymek: New modes, as I said, may come in time. For now we have three basic types of online activity, with guild village, PVP and co-operative mode, and some unusual stuff like horse racing. The balancing. that is the hard part. Frankly, you can't really balance out an archer vs. a warrior, simply due to the archetypes' designated strengths and weaknesses. We did an astounding amount of mathematical balancing, excruciating spread-sheet analysis for months on end, just to balance out PVE. And it was a daunting task, believe you me. We have 3 classes of NPCs, monsters, what have you they all have different paths of development, strengths and weaknesses. We started out with a goal of making typical fights here last for 6-7 hits to kill an enemy, but the player vs AI dynamic has been further complicated by the inter-AI combat as well. I'm telling you, this was no small task, and to take it into PVP realm. Just boggles the mind. A simple archer may damage you for a small damage, that already depends on an immense amount of factors. Now, take Multihit skill into account, this damage grows (or lessens) depending on targets chosen and arrows physically landing on a target. That adds a whole new layer of complexity towards the real-time PVP combat. PVE killrate (or amount of hits to kill a typical (mob)) is quite stable and level-based, but amount of additional skills and abilities that can play into that makes it a much more intricate system and an unlimited system when those skills are rolled against one another. We're currently just starting multiplayer balancing and it's going to take us a while.