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[krypt0nian]

Stumbled on the official Untold Legends message board on station.sony.com.

Direct Link

So far we've gotten direct Q&A from Jon Wiesman, the lead engineer on Untold Legends and Bill Trost, the lead designer.

Some tidbits:

Well, a lot of the spells are designed with four-player action in mind. For example, buff spells not only affect the caster, but the other players as well. And different classes have complementary skills, of course. Some of the spells are just plain cool. My two favorites are: Quagmire (Alchemist) and Tempest (Druid). Also, a lot of the skills can be combined in various ways that you can experiment with to figure out the effects. Of course, if you'd rather just jump in and start hacking and slashing, that works too.

Characters are customizable. Hair style, skin tone, starting statistics, the works... the bulk of your customization will come as you level up and get all the rad equipment and special abilities though.

There are literally tens of thousands of items in the game and some of them are very rare.

The Druid has two really cool pets. The Thorny Decoy and the Tempest... the Tempest effect looks freakin' awesome... thanks to Mike Chubb, one of our talented artists.
The Alchemist can build a Golem.... the cool thing about that is she can also get a skill that lets her command her golem to self destruct and cause massive damage to those around it.

All of these pets have their own unique UI.. you do not control them directly... they are a blast to play with.

Would we like to have been able to offer online play as well? Sure thing. But game development is full of decisions like this. There were just too many unanswered questions to make online a priority for UL this time around. Focusing on wireless multi-player and single player was, for sure, the way to go for Untold Legends. Our top priority was and is to deliver a super-fun, multiplayer, action, role-playing game for the launch of the PSP. And believe you me.. Untold Legends ad-hoc play is a BLAST, and communication between players in this mode is super easy. I can still hear the cries of "Ninja looter!" echoing through the halls of SOE...

WAY too excited for this game now. Dev interviews on Gamespot.com and these excerpts have me drooling.

 

[DHGamer]

Nice find! Definate buy for me on launch day.

Thanks

 

[ManaByte]

Cool that they put up forums for Untold Legends. This dev imput thing is nothing new though, it's like that on the forums for every SOE game. SWG, EQ, EQII (Devs, Mods, GMs,), and CON/RA. They've gotten really good at communicating. On the EQII forum if you post about a bug or something the dev responsible will usually post about how it has been fixed, if it's on Test or not (so you can check it out if you want proof), and when the fix will go live.

 

[newsguy]

I can't help but think that this is a title I would only enjoy with friends. I get tired of these hack and slash games quickly, but when playing co-op they're much more fun, especially now that the designer is saying certain aspects are made with 4 players in mind.

 

[krypt0nian]

I love the fact that single/multiplay is seamless. The game re-sets the mobs according to who is in the game at the time on the fly.

So if you join, it adds you without stopping and re-calcs the enemy difficulties.

<from the Gamestop.com Dev interviews>

 

[Gattsu25]

I love the fact that single/multiplay is seamless. The game re-sets the mobs according to who is in the game at the time on the fly.

So if you join, it adds you without stopping and re-calcs the enemy difficulties.

<from the Gamestop.com Dev interviews>

Never heard of that feature before!!

 

[kaching]

One thing that bothers me about Untold Legends from the videos I've seen is that animations for characters, enemies and spell effects seem to be missing frames of animation that make them appear to be moving around under a strobe light. I love a good dungeon hack but the effect is disconcerting enough in videos that I can't imagine playing like that for an extended period of time.

 

[krypt0nian]

Never heard of that feature before!!

Is that on handhelds? Cool! =|