The Enclave of the Five Sacrifices would be nothing without the commitment of the people that lead the various factions and High Houses. One of those people is Doyen Sellgret, dedicated commander and leader of a group of researchers and soldiers calling themselves the Marksmen.

The Marksmen have put the focus on a race of birdlike creatures known as the Vhuul and do everything in their power to come to understand the very nature of these creatures and why they hate the Enclave with such extremity.

Doyen Sellgret swore his allegiance to House Rune at an early age and was fortunate to have wealthy parents that hastened his rise in ranks quite considerably.

Frogster Studios Co. Ltd., Seoul, 50% subsidiary of Frogster Interactive Pictures AG, did win a prominent Japanese company as partner for the highly anticipated MMO Game The Chronicles of Spellborn on the Japanese market and sold them a sublicence. On top of a percentage of future subscription revenues the partner company pays a non-recoupable advance license fee of more than 1m USD. According to the CEO of Frogster Studios the license deal is thus one of the largest closings for a single product for the territory of Japan in pc games history. The very strong opinion for the title by the experienced Japanese contract partner confirms the conviction of the management of Frogster Interactive that TCoS is one of the most promising next generation MMO Games worldwide.

More details of the future cooperation will be announced by the Japanese partner and Frogster Studios during Gstar, the most important international MMO Game show to be hold during November in Seoul.

Today I had an NPC fleeing from combat, which was unexpected because it was configured to fight to the death. It turned out it had no skills to attack with, so Tijmen's tactical movement made it focus on staying away from the attackers, which was indistinguishable from fleeing straight from the fight. This is what AI researchers call emergent behaviour. Something that is recognized by us humans as a specific type of behaviour, without it being explicitely designed to do so. The scientist in me was happy, the programmer in me had to fix this bug because it broke the strictly scripted behaviour this NPC should be doing according to the design. Algorithms that model nature do not play well together with those that are designed to be rigorously controlled.

As you might have noticed already on our forums, a press release sent by Frogster Germany has been posted mentioning a new timeframe for the TCoS release. The mentioned delay is indeed correct and the new release period will indeed be Q1 2008. This extra time will gives us some more flavour content and give us more time to QA all features. Next to that it also gives our publishers time for an extensive upcoming marketing effort.

Can you give us a very brief explanation of your combat system?

The first one would be the Skill Deck system. Before battle, players need to configure their Skill Deck (action bar which is 6 tiered and 5 slotted) with Skills they learn during their leveling. Being 6 tiered, the Deck rotates to another tier each time one of the 5 skills on a tier is executed by the players.

The other unique feature of combat in Spellborn is the Targeting System. Since there is absolutely no auto lock on targets, players have to manually aim at the enemies with a reticule displayed when entering combat. This creates a very fast paced and very challenging combat system.

The basic model of the High House was fairly easy since, as described in the concept art blog, the building needed to reflect a certain characteristic and a more robust yet simple architecture suited the characteristic of Torque just fine. So we started of with a simple mockup of the building. Using mockups is a great way of testing a design. A mockup is a very, very simple version of a design and mainly consists out of cubes and cylinders and basic colored materials (in our case… one of the default materials is a very, very bright pink texture. If you don’t already have a headache, you’re bound to have one real fast). We then placed that mockup in the environment to check if it would fit. We can see the composition of the area; does it fit within the rest of the environment and if not, what do we need to tweak to improve it? But we can also playtest it.

Will there be any form of Crowd Control and if so, how will it work?

One of the key elements of combat in Spellborn is the always present combat effectiveness of a player. There are no skills which reduce a players’ combat effectiveness to 0, so you will always be part of the combat until you’re dead. No traditional mechanics to stun-lock, root, fear and polymorph. However, it is possible to influence player movement speed, disarm etc. but these skills merely reduce the combat effectiveness, not nullify.

The one Quest Chain that can't be skipped is the one at Parliament leading to your choice of High House. Basically, if you live within the Enclave you aren't automatically a Citizen as well. Only those who agree to a conscription period into the Enclave Militia are ultimately allowed to choose a High House allegiance and with it gain the rights of Citizenship. Why? Because only Citizens are allowed to make personal use of shardship travel. (A law meant to both bolster the Enclave spirit as well as to make sure that any Ousted could be immediately and without pardon be thrown off a shardship, often mid-flight. Woe to those who forgot their boarding papers.) The only truly 'public' shardship travels available are the ones who bring new recruits to Parliament.

Working on the track and putting all the elements together, I began thinking about using this track not for SlyWood, but as an ambience for the Deadspell Storm. Currently, the sound in the Deadspell Storm is literal with lots of thundering roars, whale like high pitched notes, passing rocks and wind…a lot of wind. It fits the visuals and works well as such, however, it doesn’t do much more than to re-enforce what you already see. Given how important the phenomenon is for the current world and our future extensions/expansions plans, the aforementioned approach began to feel a bit flat. Certainly this new track has put things into a new perspective (what we call a happy accident).

The bigger a game project the harder it is to keep the complete picture. Even the producer who is usually at the top of the hierarchy can't oversee all the parts of a production and how they interact. Even the programmer who only has to be responsible for his little corner can not foresee every implication of every change he makes to his code. Something superhuman is needed to avoid breaking down and at the same time avoiding stagnation. This something is a process that carefully passes an idea through several layers of testing. It's like a conveyor belt only it goes back more often than it goes forth. The first person on the belt is a designer, the middle one a programmer and the last one a tester.

I expect a lot of players to be leveling towards this end-game feature. Access to the Arena system is granted at level 40 via NPC’s, not earlier, and only in Quarterstone. The Arena will come with a wide variety of features on release, but will receive a lot of content from future updates as well. In this journal I will handle the basics of the current features, post-release features and reveal images of two ‘new’ maps.