Gods And Heroes: Looking Good, A Talk with Mike Hines, Sr. Art Director

Okay, so now we've got the beta stuff out of the way for the time being. Last week I spent some time with Stieg to help get a more focused grasp on the game and try to answer a lot of the questions that you guys had asked. Well, this week I spent some time with Mike Hines, our Senior Art Director, in order to get more feedback on the game's overall design and artistic feel. This is the guy who sets the tone for Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising and what you see. One of the key elements that Hines wanted to stress was the fact that with Gods & Heroes we have really done a huge amount of work to reflect the feeling and look of Roman culture and that time period, while at the same time creating this amazingly rich character design.

In fact, one of the major things Hines talked about was the design of the environment and character equipment. There is an enormous amount of historical influence that has permeated every aspect of our design process, so much so that we've focused on pulling the geometry and the shapes of the architecture into the game to validate the feel, thereby consciously steering clear of the "traditional" looks of most fantasy games. Hines and his team have spent countless hours pouring over thousands of visual references from those times and cultures and importing that look into the world of Gods & Heroes. One of the biggest challenges has been taking this look and redesigning it to do two things: look slicker and become more vivid and visually appealing than the source all while retaining the classical look and feel of the Roman craftsmanship.

A perfect example of this effort to steer away from the "traditional" fantasy realm can be found in our rogue and our mystic classes. According to Hines, the rogue will definitely throw some people off a bit if they're expecting the Aragorn-esque anti-hero. Same goes for the mystic. He was very careful to stress that the rogue will still be stealthy and deadly, but the key difference lies in the fact that the typical "rogue" of Roman culture was not this shadowy figure of mystery, but instead was a traveled and exotic individual. The rogue is known for his flair (a minimum of15 pieces, but a good pirate has 37) and is confident, almost cocky, a show-off. They have heavy Persian influence and are more closely related to pirates of the era than the traditional Caribbean concept of pirates. Meanwhile, our mystics come from a dark Etruscan background following the old magic, as opposed to the newer "Olympian" magic of the priests. They too are "exotic," in so far as they are not of a traditional Roman decent, thus yielding themselves to a richer and more diverse character than usually found in your standard MMO.

The Female and Male Mystic Concepts

The Female and Male Rogue Concepts

So that's exciting to hear, but what about you and your equipable items? Well, I talked with Mike Hines at length regarding several questions that have cropped up on the boards (and a few of my own) as of late. So everyone knows that we have 6 classes that each has their own unique armor sets throughout the course of the game. What you didn't know is the fact that we're doing something a little bit differently than everyone else. Generally speaking, in most MMOs, they only create one set of armor for the males and then simply rescale it for the female version of the same class. In Gods & Heroes we create 2 versions of the same set of armor: one for the male version and one for the female. Yes, that's right, if you find a level 20 Leggings of the Wolf and you put that on your male hunter it will have a different look than if you put it on the female hunter. The armor and the stats are exactly the same, and even the general look is the same, however they are two separate art assets, thus there's no stretching or rescaling of the artwork, and it even give a distinct look between the males and females of the same class!

Now as for tunics and togas, we're definitely going to see at least one set of clothing per class in the game at launch, possibly two. The goal is to later add new sets of clothing for each class and even different sets for males and females. As most of you know, all of this will be equipable under the armor and so you can use these items to further customize your character's look. The other piece of good news is that at the time of character creation you will be able to select a custom color theme for yourself. This theme is global and affects your clothing, armor, minions, shields, and items. It's a great way to apply that extra level of personalization to your character and your minions. Of course this brings up the question of altering the color at a later point in the game. According to Hines, it is something we want to do and we're even shooting to make it a launch feature, but it might turn out to be something we offer players for a fee at a later time (post-launch).

Speaking of the look of gear, a lot of people, including me, have expressed their concerns over the looks of items as you progress through the game. I mean, really, what's worse than getting a sweet sword at level 20 only to have it look like the level 5 starting sword you got from some rat you first killed? Well I hassled Hines a bit and he was very sincere when he told me that they are really working hard to avoid that. They're very concerned about maintaining the "vertical progression," as he called it. Basically as you progress through the game, they want to make sure that when you get something at level 20, it's more awesome than what you had at 10, and when you get something at 30, it's better than the 20th and the 10th level items. The problem comes in when you realize that "cool" is subjective, and what we think is cool, sweet, and all-together bad to the bone is not always what "leetd00dz_47" thinks is cool.

We do what we can.

Finally, I want to touch a bit on post-creation character customization before I close. The idea of post-creation character customization is that you can modify your character's base look after you've created your character and played him or her for a while. Examples of this are scaring, tattoos, haircuts, and facial hair. While these are very awesome concepts, we have not decided how we want to handle this. For the most part, post-creation character customization is not going to be available, however we have talked about the idea of allowing players to give their characters 1 tattoo or some visible scarring on their upper arms. There has not been any decision reached on this matter, and in fact, we're honestly not even sure how we'd implement this feature even if we did. More than likely features such as these would be more heavily considered for post-launch, but do know that things like this have received heavy consideration and are even, to this day, still on the list of things that "would be cool to implement."

Anyway, that's two weeks of tasty morsels for you, the awesome citizens of Rome! I hope that I have been able to answer some questions to questions previously asked and even answer some of the unasked ones! As always, feel free to give me your feedback, discuss the goodness, and above all, salivate!

Giving you my best as always,

Deodatus