MPOGD.com scored an interview with Jumpgate Evolution's producer Hermann Peterscheck who spilled some fresh beans on the upcoming space MMO:

MPOGD: It was announced in November that NetDevil had achieved 150K beta tester sign-ups. Do you know how many of these folks are going to be allowed in during the first round of beta testing? Do you have a date for the start of open beta?

PETERSCHECK: No to both of those. In terms of the numbers of people, it'll be the way betas are normally run. You start small and you put your toes in to make sure everything works when you let people in from the outside. Then we'll grow that to test log-in infrastructure, land-rushing, first areas, and so forth. I don't know exactly how many people that will be at this point. I see it as a reactionary process. If they find a bunch of stuff that's terrible, then you take more time to fix it. If everything's great, you let in a bunch more people.

MPOGD: In closed testing and in live public demos, where has the community been the most vocal about the development of Jumpgate Evolution?

PETERSCHECK: That's actually a really interesting question, because I was expecting it to be much more varied based on where we're testing. But it is fairly unified. We literally go to GameStop and say, "Hey, you guys want to test the game?" and the people there are "Yeah, cool!" Then we'll bring them to the office and let them play for an hour. Then we go to PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) or fan events and let people play there. The common response is that the game is pretty accessible to play and the mechanics are fun. The core game play is there.

This is why I think more extensive beta testing is so important. What do people do next? There's a lot of meat in the game that's there, but in an hour you can't really get to it. In an hour-long playtest, you're kind of rushed in an MMO. I think people are curious how we're going to keep them for 10, 20, 40, 100 or a 1,000 hours. The response has been, "This is cool. I want to play more." That's a great sign we're ready to go into that kind of testing.

(With Jumpate Evolution), people seem to be surprised how easy it is to jump in and play. I think there's an expectation that, especially with space games, they are really hard, difficult to get into and very serious. We're making a game that's trying to go for accessibility, so you can sit down and play with a joystick, a mouse or whatever input device desired.

Read the rest at MPOGD.com

I have high hopes for this game, I'm hoping it is easy to get into unlike Eve which really seems hard to get started in without hours and hours of time to devote to it.