Games Fusion talks to Lead Designer Toby Ragaini about Monolith's & Warner Bros. forth coming MMOG, The Matrix Online.
Q. Can you tell us a little bit about the game and what you are aiming to achieve with this title?
A. The Matrix Online (MxO) is a massively multi-player role playing game that takes place immediately following Matrix Revolutions. In the game, you are a newly awoken red pill who has just been rescued from the body pods.
One of the main goals of MxO is allow players an opportunity to participate in the ongoing saga of the Matrix. The creators of the movies, the Wachowski Brothers, have created a story that will unfold in periodic episodes. It is our intent to allow players a chance to interact in a changing world where they can help shape the outcome.
To this end, individual players must choose who they wish to support.
The humans of Zion have been granted the opportunity to free people in the pods, provided they are ready to leave. But if too many people leave the pods, the Machines risk a power crisis; something that they may be forced to prevent. Added to this tense situation is the Merovingian; an Exiled program who wishes to preserve the Matrix for his own selfish reasons and will attempt to exert control wherever possible.
Players being powerful operatives in the Matrix will be recruited by each of the main sides. Perhaps they choose to remain loyal to Zion and attempt to free the rest of humanity. The machines, however, can make a compelling case that humans have historically been very untrustworthy. And of course, the Merovingian will remind you that in the Matrix, you can live like a god among men.
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Q. What is the main storyline of the game and at what degree will the storyline fit in with the Matrix movies?
A. Essentially, you can think of MxO as the fourth Matrix movie. Neo has apparently sacrificed himself in order to secure a truce between man and machine. But it’s a very delicate situation.
In many ways, the Matrix is similar to the Cold War. The all-out fighting has stopped, but none of the sides trust each other. Some may even occasionally attempt to test the bounds of the truce.
The theme of the story for the first year is Peace, and the things people do to wreck it.
Q. Can you tell us something about the physics of the game engine? What unique characteristics will it have and at what degree will the player be able to interact with the environment?
A. We had to solve a lot of challenging problems in order to create a dense, seamless modern city. In MxO, you can Hyper-Jump from rooftop to rooftop while traffic rushes underneath you. From the rooftop, you can enter a building, run down the stairs, look out a window at the city, and come out into an alley, all without encountering a single load-zone.
Q. There must be a lot of anticipation surrounding a game which is based on a popular movie franchise. How hard is it to deliver a game which manages to please a majority of its audience, particularly the Matrix fan base?
A. We identified what we thought were four key goals in meeting the expectations of Matrix fans. The first was creating a rich, urban environment. The second was capturing the trademark Matrix sense of fashion and style. Thirdly, we had to depict the smooth, choreographed wire-fu combat. And finally, we had to wrap all of this up in a story that was so compelling that people would want to stick around to find out what happens next.
Meeting these goals was challenging, but I believe that fans will be pleased with what they find.
Q. How have you adapted the in-game effects to closely depict those of the effects seen in the Matrix movies, specifically the bullet-time effects?
A. We worked directly with the film studio and their special effects house in order to insure that the Matrix visual and sound effects are as true to the movies as possible.
Bullet time was of course something that we simply had to accommodate. The problem was that we couldn’t slow down the whole game world, simply because one person was in bullet time.
The solution was to slightly speed up the character’s animations that were being played on the client, and then dramatically slow them down for bullet time. By speeding up and then slowing down, the individual player can experience bullet time, without other people having their game interrupted.