Introduction

Last year developer Perpetual Entertainment announced Gods and Heroes, a new fantasy MMORPG based on the Greek and Roman mythology. Last March the company announced that Sony Online Entertainment would be distributing the title for release this fall. To get more info and an update on the game's progress FiringSquad got some answers from Perpetual's design director Stieg Hedlund.

FiringSquad: First, what can you tell us about the origins of Gods and Heroes?

Stieg Hedlund: At Perpetual we’re really interested in doing new and different things in the online space. GnH is the first product of that direction. We wanted to present an MMO experience that broke with the both the gameplay and setting that have thus far dominated the category. We decided the main elements we wanted to pursue were a more visceral combat experience, and squad-based play. The Roman focus on the military as well as the other interesting elements of the setting—and the other game elements that naturally fell out of that choice—made it an excellent backdrop to wed to our gameplay. Greek and Roman mythology have been used so much in a number of games.

FiringSquad: How hard was it to develop a title that not only uses material that spans millennia but also has been use quite a lot in recent games?

Stieg Hedlund: The material we’ve focused on really hasn’t been very well explored. First, we’re in a different time period than the one that most games and even movies center on: Rome is a small republic whose very existence is threatened by powerful rival peoples, such as the Greeks, Etruscans and Samnites. Then we’ve additionally incorporated the element of Myth, bringing the gods and creatures of legend together with the historical aspects of the gameworld. So our approach differs greatly from games that seek to present historical fact, as well as games that deal with mythology, but only in a fairly shallow way. The result is something I think people will really enjoy: a gameworld where these two aspects are seamlessly fused, exhaustively explored and presented in a way that is pure entertainment.


FiringSquad: How does the back story for Gods and Heroes differ, if any, from the traditions of Greek and Roman myths?

Stieg Hedlund: What’s great about having these Myths as our source material is that we didn’t need to make anything up, but instead simply to choose things to reinforce and add depth to the themes of our game. Our game takes the Titanomachia—the epic war between the Olympians and the Titans and something directly out of the literature—and uses it as its basis. There is certainly new material, as well, but it flows from the myth: in the timeline of the game, the Telchines, a mysterious race of sorcerers, and who sided with the Titans and were banished after the Olympians secured victory, have escaped from banishment, and mean to begin a second cataclysmic showdown with the gods.


FiringSquad: What kinds of decisions were made in order to nail the kinds of playable character classes in the game?

Stieg Hedlund: There were a couple of things to balance there: we wanted to make sure that we represented different play experiences that would be fun and compelling in the style of game we are creating, but also to present distinctly and recognizably Roman characters as well. After that we made decisions about the abilities, usable equipment, and visuals that made each character class unique. This is something that we’re really working hard to balance to avoid the “ping-pong effect” that is often seen in successive patches in other games.