Jumpgate Evolution :: Spaceships Types Revealed! (Now with more screen shots)

[Draegan]

I wish I had the energy and/or time to be a fanboy of Jumpgate.  Looks like fun.

[Mrbloodworth]

There will be a playable version at the New York Comic-Com, anyone in the area?

[Draegan]

I've been thinking about it actually.

[Mrbloodworth]

Take your camera. 

[Draegan]

Not sure if it's worth 30 bucks and a ferry ride and my whole sunday just to see the game though.  I'm not a comic book guy so the rest of the place would be uninteresting to me.

[Hawkbit]

Couple sites have launch at March 2nd - is that still legit?

[Ghambit]

Couple sites have launch at March 2nd - is that still legit?

no way

[UnSub]

Not sure if it's worth 30 bucks and a ferry ride and my whole sunday just to see the game though.  I'm not a comic book guy so the rest of the place would be uninteresting to me.

DCUO and ChampO / STO will also be on display or on panels.

[Draegan]

Not sure if it's worth 30 bucks and a ferry ride and my whole sunday just to see the game though.  I'm not a comic book guy so the rest of the place would be uninteresting to me.

DCUO and ChampO / STO will also be on display or on panels.

Yeah I saw that too.

I think I'm going to go on Sunday.  I'm actually taking my girlfriend.  She has no idea what comics or video games are.  This should be interesting.

[Lantyssa]

Frame it as an anthropological study of certain subgroups.

[Draegan]

Frame it as an anthropological study of certain subgroups.

How do you think I got her to go in the first place. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with Hermann Peterscheck, the Lead Designer on NetDevil’s Jumpgate Evolution to get a report on the game’s progress since the last time that we spoke.

The most obvious question to start with whenever we haven’t spoken with a company for some time is to ask where the game is in terms of development cycle?

“It’s a really great time right now,” Peterscheck responded, “we’re just now getting to the point where we’re going to start announcing more external people coming into the game. We’re ramping up the internal tech for that. A lot of the features are now at the point where we can play through them. We’ve done a lot of work, especially on making the game have a much more epic combat kind of feel to it.”

He went on to tell me that they have also come to the point where a lot of the uninteresting back-end stuff is getting wrapped up, things like logging on, registration systems and the like.

“We’re getting to the point where players can come in and give feedback and stuff like that.”

So, what’s new with the game that we might not be aware of?

“We’ve got a battle space scenario that we’ve been working on. It’s a capitol ship type of battle, so that’s the big exciting thing we’ve been working on lately. Then, we’ve just added a multiple mission system so that you can take a bunch of missions at the same time , you can use those to gain faction rating to get all kinds of new ships… We’ve got a lot more to flesh out.”

“There’s a lot more content in the game,” he continued. “We spent probably the last five or six months just adding a lot of content making sure there’s a complete experience all the way though.”

He went on to tell me about some of the rewards that they have planned. They seem to have taken a page out of Xbox’s book with statistics and medals and awards, following in the footsteps of other MMOs like WoW, LotRO and others that have incorporated alternate achievement paths into their games.



From here, I asked Hermann to go a little bit deeper into some of the specific features that he mentioned previously. First, I asked him if the multiple missions that he mentioned earlier were different from quest strings that we see in many MMOs.

“Most space games tend to be: you take a mission, you fly out and do it, and then you return to the station,” he answered. “We realized very quickly that that gameplay was not very conducive, especially if you’re with a group of people, so we had to change that so that you could take multiple missions at the same time.”

“Our missions break into a main storyline that goes through the game for each of our nations. Those are campaign, or story missions that are very specific and directed, and then there’s a generated mission system and those are missions that come from factions.”

The factions, we are told, are different groups in space. Working with them can gain different rewards and unlock new things in the game. Hermann said that these missions give the game more depth than a simple “I do A, B, C, D and E” to achieve my goals in the game.

The team has also identified one of the problems with what Peterscheck called “generated missions”. He noted to me that often, generated missions are unique, meaning that you won’t be given the same mission as your group mate, which suddenly makes grouping a lot less appealing. In JGE, however, you will be able to share your generated content missions with others.

These missions are dynamically created, and are created in groups. Often, with auto-generated content, players are left with disjointed missions that don’t make too much sense when taken together. NetDevil plans to offer dynamic content in the form of logical quest chains. A slightly different take on an old idea.

“The way that we do that,” he explained, “is we have designers write stories that can be put together in interesting ways. Then, we can link them by saying that these missions take place at the beginning, then these are in the middle, and then these ones would happen at the end.”

To clarify the point, Peterscheck told us that boss fights don’t generally come at the beginning of a quest chain. They come at the end. So, their system would put the boss fight part of the chain at the end, rather than the beginning. The end result of which is that the dynamic quest chains should feel more natural for players.

“It allows us to create an infinite number of things to do in the game that are still meaningful while we also have the ability to keep putting in pieces of custom content.”



From there, I asked Hermann to go into a little bit more detail on the capitol ship battles that he had mentioned previously:

“The space genre lends itself to massive space combat,” he said. “If you think of Star Wars or Battlestar Gallactica, you always envision tons and tons of ships flying around. That’s been a core drive of the game, so in addition to all of the MMO components, you want that space combat kind of feature… the way that we discovered to do that was to have lots of ships at the same time , both AI and players, and then different scales of things you’re fighting against.”

What he means by this is that instead of just saying here’s my really big fleet or army and it’s going to fight your really big fleet or army, The Capitol Ships allow many ships of a smaller size to fight against a single, enormous entity.

“We’re trying to take down your Capitol ship while we’re trying to take down yours. I don’t mean six vs six, I’m talking about fifty vs fifty.”

His mention of Battlestar Gallactica (at least the new series) earlier on can serve as an example here. When Gallactica fights, she deploys manned gunships called Vipers. Their enemies do the same and the resulting battle is a lot of small ships trying to destroy a large enemy ship (while the enemy does the same thing). Fans of the show should have a pretty good visual cue as to what Capitol Ship battles are meant to be about.

Now that we have an idea of where NetDevil’s Jumpgate Evolution is coming from, and where they have been focusing their energies as the game moves toward more public testing, we can start to get an idea of how the full game will be shaping up. We hope to be in contact with Hermann and the rest of the dev team on a more frequent basis as the game inches closer and closer to launch.

Link (MMORPG.com Warning)

[Lantyssa]

I hope their dynamic quest chains work well.  That's something I've wanted to see in games for a long time now.

[Falconeer]

Then, we’ve just added a multiple mission system so that you can take a bunch of missions at the same time , you can use those to gain faction rating to get all kinds of new ships… We’ve got a lot more to flesh out.”

 

[Venkman]

Oh please. You didn't really think every quest chain was going to be a multi-step story arc taking players through an immersive discovery of their own heritage. Did you? 

[Ratman_tf]

His mention of Battlestar Gallactica (at least the new series) earlier on can serve as an example here.

They're going to make a whiny soap opera with robots? 

[Xurtan]

Next week, on All my Circuits..

[FatuousTwat]

Next week, on All my Circuits..

Boxy, keep your prong on the trigger.

[Draegan]

 :grin:Just played this game and talked to the booth guy.  ill have a writeup later but this game suprised me.  played great, graphics are awesome, good control, ui was nice.

[NiX]

I hate you.

[Lantyssa]

Did you poke him about guild beta?

[Draegan]

He didn't even know when beta was beginning but he did mention that they had hoped that the game would of been out already but they are still in polishing mode.

[slog]

He didn't even know when beta was beginning but he did mention that they had hoped that the game would of been out already but they are still in polishing mode.

Ya they are doing the "Beta is really a public demo" meme to heart.  This is a good thing

[Draegan]

Yeah.  This game has a really sound foundation from an animation, control. gui, graphics, menus, chat system etc. 

You can send multiple items through one mail.  This was a good sign.

The booth person described to me what they want in the game and the end game.  Lets see how they implement it.  They purposely ran away from the "holy trinity" type of deal.

If they pull off a good crafting system, which they seem to have based on their description, they might have something here.  It looks and feels like a triple A title.

[Mrbloodworth]

Looking forward to the write up. 

[FatuousTwat]

Officially looking forward to this game now. It's gonna burn me.

[Big Gulp]

It almost sounds too WoWish to me.  I want more Elite/Privateer.  Y'know, EVE with actual dogfights and without the suck.  This write up makes it sound like another "go to NPC for mission" diku, but in space.

[NiX]

EVE does not lend itself to dogfights. I'd rather they go their own direction with dog fights. After playing EVE again, I have to say, people need to stop pretending EVE + anything would make for a great game.

[Mrbloodworth]

It almost sounds too WoWish to me.

What?

  I want more Elite/Privateer.  Y'know, EVE with actual dogfights and without the suck.  This write up makes it sound like another "go to NPC for mission" diku, but in space.

You say this as if Eve doesn't have typical "go to NPC for mission" quests.

[Big Gulp]

You say this as if Eve doesn't have typical "go to NPC for mission" quests.

EVE has a lot of things that I ignore completely.

[Zzulo]

EVE is good because of the player created politics and metagame. The rest of the game is pretty dry and dull

[Venkman]

EVE is good because of the player created politics and metagame. The rest of the game is pretty dry and dull

This. You don't play Eve for WoW. There is no WoW in space. If JG:E just does that, big win to be had.

[Draegan]

My writeup:

www.Rerollz.com

If you were in New York City this weekend you would of had the opportunity to go to the New York Comic Con. Inside there were demos of many new up coming games from EA, Atari, THQ and more importantly, NetDevil’s up coming title Jumpgate Evolution which will be published and distributed by Codemasters. Jumpgate is a spacetime MMOG that will put you in the pilot seat of your very own space ship to take on the universe at large.

Many of you may already be thinking of EVE and losing interest. Stop right there because this game may bring the fun back to space. If you are the type of person who has tried EVE and fell asleep before the tutorial ended then keep reading.

In Jumpgate you actually control the movement of your ship with either your mouse and keyboard combo or a joystick so let’s take a second to go over the feel and control of both.

With the keyboard and mouse it’s relatively simple. W and S control your throttle. Hold down W and you speed up to whatever level of thrust you want and you would let go and you would stay at that speed. Going too fast? Hold down S and slow yourself down until you’re at a comfortable speed. Both A and D allowed you to strafe in either direction while Q and E allowed you to spin around a central axis. When this was demonstrated calls for a barrel roll could be heard from the crowd.

In order to control the direction in which you were flying you would move your mouse and lead your ship wherever you started pointing. Control was very intuitive and easy to master. The left button fired your primary guns, C sent of missiles if they were equipped and you had a lock on a target (you locked on easy enough by keeping up with your target), and holding down shift gave you a boost in speed. Your mouse wheel scrolled you through all the targets in your area for easy targeting.

After testing out the mouse and keyboard the joystick was brought out. Now things got a little interesting. Codermaster’s representative at the show said that there are two large groups at NetDevil that represented strict ideology of Mouse and Keyboard vs. Joystick. Each side played with strictly that setup which, hopefully, meant that the game was being developed equally with each side in mind.

The joystick control, however, was very difficult. This was perhaps because of the unfamiliarity of it’s use. Throttle was controlled by a lever and the flight of the ship was much like you’d expect any other flight sim. Up took you into a nose dive, while down brought your nose up. Left and right banked you in either direction while twisting the joystick strafed the ship. It felt very uncomfortable and took three times as long to destroy an enemy when compared to a mouse and keyboard. Looks like it will take a lot more practice.

Jumpgate Evolution offers assisted movement as well as Newtonian movement (like you see in shows like Battle Star Galactica). Unfortunately it was disabled in the demo and there wasn’t an opportunity to try it out.

With the controls being laid out lets go with a little bit of how the game is played. A new player starts off by choosing to be part of three different factions. This isn’t like World of Warcraft where it’s Horde vs. Alliance, it’s more like EVE where you pick a race but you’re not restricted with who you interact with. The faction you pick dictates which starting area you begin in. After you progress for a short period of time each faction is funneled into one common area, zone or system. From there you can choose to enter into a PVE or PVP area. The PVE areas contain missions and other trading posts. Check out this video as what to expect as a large PVE encounter early on.

What you see is fairly simple; taking out a enemy complex. Early on you have stationary objects that are easy to attack. You can observe that the NPC turrets arn’t very accurate and when they do hit they do little damage. As you progress through ranks and open up different ships and abilities NPC ships get faster, maneuver quicker and become more accurate. Basically the AI get tougher. Early on you’ll see enemy NPCs just sit there waiting for you to hit them or maneuver slower so you can get behind them and take them out. Some of the higher end PVE encounters take precision, patience and apparently organization. Think about a typical MMORPG raid.

This is where things change. If you’re familiar with typical MMOG raids you think of Everquest or World of Warcraft where you need tanks, healers and dps, a.k.a. the Holy Trinity (I will recognize that the Holy Trinity could be Control, Healing and Tanking as well). NetDevil has decided to stay away from ships that have “repair beams” or ships with strong shield to stand in front of an enemy barrage. Instead you have ships that move quick with light weapons or ships that are considered bombers, or ships with heavy weapons. Certain targets can only be hit with a heavy “nuke” and not lasers while you have faster ships that are needed to take out turrets and enemy fighters. Everyone should be moving at all times destroying targets.

It was explained that in typical raids in other games, most people are standing while doing damage or staring at player panels waiting to heal. In Jumpgate, the developers wanted to change this. Since you’re in a 3D space you are constantly moving up, down or to the right or left you shouldn’t have to be staring at one spot the whole time. This is truly an action game where you are busy playing the game rather than playing the UI. You have to be constantly doing your task of keeping a target busy or destroying it. You may have to keep enemy fighters busy as you protect your bomber group so they can do their job. Some of the larger end game events are going to be capitol ships that you are either protecting or engaging. You have to take care of enemy fighters to allow your bombers and your heavy fighter ships take care of shields and defensive positions.

This leads to the question on character classes. There are none. Much like EVE Online you can own multiple ships depending on what licenses you have. Some days you may want that quick agile fighter vs. the heavy bomber. The more you do one role the better you get at it. The higher the rank the more possibilities you have at what you can fly. You can bring up a character profile and view what you can and can not do. Your time in game is spent getting those different licenses.

But what if you don’t want to be that guy that is constantly killing things? You can also have hauling and mining vessels to work on crafting. There are specific zones in the game where you can farm the consumables to create certain ships, weapons and ammo. This is where you might see some PVP come in to play. Since certain materials can only be found in the “outer areas” that are flagged for open PVP, you may see convoys protecting ships that can mine those materials. Also manufacturing stations for certain plans can only be found in PVP areas. The best items or tools in the game will come from elder game fights and player crafted items. It’s not clear which is better or if they are equal, but this point was mentioned when the question of a player driven economy was brought up. Jumpgate wants to create a marketplace for player created items and drive the PVP areas in the game with the motivation for crafters to create what is needed to fight.

However unlike EVE, items are not lost upon death. You can not loot what other people have, or even partially. Items and materials will drop from PVP players but they will be from a loot table rather than their inventory. Other motivations for PVP will be for guild/clan controlled areas that give bonuses and statistical improvements. Information is sparse on this aspect, but players will be able to control certain areas in the game much like the meta game played on EVE forums. Whether it’s player driven or assisted by game mechanics is yet to be seen.

There are tools that bring players together. There are your typical tools such as a fully function auction house, that was seen by your author’s very own eyes. You can also send mail to each player (where it’s delivered in real time by a mail bot) and you can even send multiple items with one package, which is often overlooked by many game developers. There is a fully customizable chat system. There is support for a guild/clan/corporation system and if you don’t like large groups you can form squads of smaller groups of players for missions and smaller group play. There is also online leader boards that are tracked in relative real time. Such as kill scores, accuracy ratings etc.

Inventory is very similar to EVE Online. Each station has it’s own limited storage space with access to different ships you have available. Your character sheet is also just like EVE where you have energy points to use to allocate different shields, weapons and other items you can equip your ship with. Other features include an in-game voice chat system, fully customizable keymapping system and one thing that is unknown is whether or not you can customize the placement of the GUI elements.

All in all, NetDevil thought their game would be out by now. However they are going through iterations and making sure their game works, is polished and ready for the public eye. The graphics are amazing and the zones are well populated. The scenery is impressive as you can fly around astroids, large industrial planets giving off gas emissions or lazy asteroids floating through space with mining stations build on them. If you like science fictions and are dieing for a game without elves, this is something you definitely need to keep up to date about.

Things to be concerned about:
1) Is the map large enough to support full on end game PVP?
2) Is the game too instances or too small to give off the feeling of a real, living universe. I.e. EVE has one server, how many players are in one server in Jumpgate?
3) Does the game get stale? Is there enough things to do while playing to keep you motivated to play more and more? Warhammer was extremely entertaining until you hit the third tier and progression stopped while PVP and oRVR become lame, boring and repetitive? Is there a big enough a carrot to maintain a decent population?

We welcome comments and questions regarding our visit to NYC Comic Con. Please post them and we’ll try our best to answer as much as possible!

Make sure you sign up for beta at Jumpgate Evolution.

I have two videos I posted on my blog if you want to see them.  They are shoddy camera work but show a little bit of the game play.  Don't kill me with the grammar snake.  It's late.

[Triforcer]

Umm, how can you have a working economy when your ships are never destroyed?  Or is the system that you can't loot, but the ship actually is destroyed? 

[Draegan]

Umm, how can you have a working economy when your ships are never destroyed?  Or is the system that you can't loot, but the ship actually is destroyed? 

The game rep was a little fuzzy on that.  He mentioned something with insurance but couldn't elaborate.  He was banking on ease of death and re-entry into the game.  Economy comes from weapons/ammo and higher end ships.  Maybe they can be destroyed but it wasn't explained properly to me so I didn't elaborate.