Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising Interview
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Q: A lot of games-in-development are trying to get away from the easy descriptions of class roles: offensive tank, melee DPS, healer, and the like. Are you happier with players using these kind of descriptions since Gods & Heroes isn't so much about the role of the player's class, but also the composition and leadership of the player-commanded (and AI-controlled) minions?
A: I think that's kind of twofold. Obviously, if you break too far away then players are thrust into an unfamiliar environment. If we were just doing a solo game, it'd be a little different. But our soldier could become a tank, our gladiator can become a DPS'er, obviously our priest is a healer. so even within those contexts we have different templates. We've gone through all the feats and said, 'This is how I want to play this particular class,' and we've tried to open up as many possibilities as we can even within the player's class itself. You're not going to see a soldier that's the same as every soldier.
When you bring in the minion system, it really lets you play your character as you want to play. Your desire to play a particular style dictates gameplay, not the other way around. One of the things we've been really careful with is this: we're not trying to make the minions dictate how a player plays. We're trying to let the minions open up new ways for the player to play. What I mean by that is: if I play a priest, in most MMOs I mostly have to DPS when soloing or else you'll never kill anything. In our game, you have several options. I can take that priest, optimize their skills how I want within my character template, but when I add minions, I can command a variety of minions. I can actually spec my priest to be more of an offensive caster and have healers [minions] to actually heal for me. Or I could spec my healer to the healing spec and I could add all DPS to the party and I could actually heal them. It really offers a ton of flexibility.
