Mage Knight: Apocalypse Interview, Part One
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Q: In 2005 Tim Johns said that newbies and more experienced players could play together the game would adjust accordingly so that the newbie still feels like he's contributing, but not be too difficult for him. Can you tell us more about how this will work in the final product?
A: Sure. Essentially, the game revolves around the concept of dynamically-scaling the game to match the player's skill level. Let's start at the beginning.
When you start playing the game you can play either Easy, Medium or Hard. If you play it on Medium then you're playing it the way we've balanced the game and the way as designed. If you play it on Easy, then everything's a lot easier.
That being said, if you're just playing on normal (Medium), as you go through your character you're going to be accumulating stats and skill levels. The different scenarios will adjust to your skill level and your power level (what we call Power Rating), so that there's still a challenge. Monsters might get tougher, do different things.
And what this allows us to do first let's talk about a game without scaling. You might be playing the single-player game, then want to go play multiplayer for a while. Well, when you go play multiplayer, you have to start a new character for multiplayer because you can't take your [single-player] character to multiplayer. If players could do that, they could go into multiplayer, gain all this experience, and when they go back into the single-player, they'd have to either flush all that experience into loot, or else their save games would be really super, super easy because they [their character] got tougher in the meantime.
With dynamic scaling, we allow you to take your single-player characters and play online as much as you want to. You can play for weeks, then come back to the single-player campaign, and the game will adjust to your Power Rating. That allows you to be able to play any way you want to.
That same mechanism is used in multiplayer to scale the monsters to be able to make younger characters more useful, we adjust the newbie level up to the veteran level so that they can still play at that level. The younger players can now play against the same monsters [as the veterans], it's just that they won't have as many skills or acquire as much loot.
