March 3, 2009

[GDN] Runes of Magic has been in development for some time. How far would you say there is to go yet before full release?

At the moment we are one month away from officially releasing the game and we are confident that Runes of Magic is in good shape. During the final stages of the Beta we are carefully tweaking and polishing the game and are adding more content. We are not expecting that we have to make any dramatic changes and will have a stable and well-playable game ready for release.

[GDN] What has been the major focus of development during this stage of beta?

We have left Closed Beta on December 15th 2008 - right now we are in Open Beta.

During the closed beta we were looking at our players’ feedback on the basic gameplay, the features and content. We got a lot of good and valuable feedback and have already implement many of these suggestions or changed what our players disliked.

Just to name to very prominent examples: Some of the NPC models in the first zones were not very popular so we replaced them when we opened the beta. Another thing is the death penalty system. Instead of "de-leveling", we introduced the debt-system - i.e. characters no longer lose experience but accumulate XP-debt that effectively reduces the amount of XP that goes to level progression by a few percent until the debt is paid off.

Now in the last phase of the Beta, the major focus lies on bug-fixing, polishing and balancing.