There’s been rather a lot written about Gods & Heroes at GamersInfo.net recently. I got my first look at the game at Sony’s Gamer Day event in New York, and chatted to Chris McKibbin, Executive Producer at Perpetual about their paired animation system and the squad-based combat provided by their minions system. More on the paired animations tomorrow – here’s what Chris had to say about minions and squads:

The theme of the evening and the new games being presented seems to be that traditionally, MMOGs have had a high learning curve and barrier to entry for the entertainment consumer as a whole. Tonight has been about lowering that barrier to make it easier to enter the game and make it more accessible to more people. It seems like that's one of the goals with G&H.

Chris McKibbin: Yes, and it has been since day one. We describe Gods & Heroes as an action/adventure online game and what we mean by that is a game designed in the spirit of "great" action/adventure games. So, while we have a lot of the core mechanics of MMOs, we are focusing on making the MMO portion more accessible and on really accentuating those aspects that make great action games.

Our Design Director for Gods & Heroes is Stieg Hedlund, who was the lead designer of Diablo and Diablo II. What he did when he was at Blizzard with the Diablo franchise is a very similar. Prior to Diablo, RPGs were looked at as a kind of hardcore, stats driven, niche type of game. And what Blizzard did with Diablo is strip out the inaccessible aspects, but keep all of the fun that makes RPGs a great adventuring, role-playing, leveling and character advancement/progression with a great set of mechanics and just unlocked those for people. Lo and behold you have a franchise that sells how many millions of millions of units?

Stieg is focused on doing the same thing on Gods & Heroes that he did with Diablo. He's trying to keep the things that made MMOs great and really involving and entertaining, while stripping off some of the things that make existing MMOs less accessible than other mainstream games.

I think World of Warcraft is a successful game because it did something very similar. I think that we're just taking it to the next step by adding levels of entertainment and levels of accessibility that are beyond what WoW has achieved. I think that we're going to see more and more and more game players looking to have fun in a persistent game world with their friends. And we hope that Gods & Heroes, by offering a mythological fiction, high action animation, and great art entertainment is going to be a game that people want to play.

I'm a huge fan of Ghost Recon and squad- based combat. I love how you can assault an objective using different weaponry - two teams of three or two teams of 2 - from north or east... the replayability was amazing.

Chris McKibbin: And that's exactly right! Interestingly, Stieg also worked on the Ghost Recon franchise. If there's one thing that people don't yet understand it's what you just talked about. It's that ability to build a squad with unique soldiers that you can swap out as you want to; and that they level up; they train with you as you play; that they also unlock new abilities at different levels. That all of this strategically changes the way that you choose to play the game and the way that you choose to encounter and solve challenges that you find in the game.

At a simple level you can imagine it this way. I'm a gladiator character and my gladiator character is, as you can imagine, the most powerful hand-to-hand battler/damage-doer in the game. If I choose to go into battle with three infantrymen with me, we're going to attack the situation and we're going to play a situation very differently than if I choose to go in with 2 healers and a magic caster. Same encounter, same situation, same end goal that I'm trying to achieve; strategically how I accomplish that and what I need to do in those two scenarios? Fundamentally different. And I get to do that myself. One day I get to play with three infantry guys, the next day I get to play with two healers and a magic caster.

Now, multiply that by the options in a multiplayer aspect. The maximum group size is currently five players. So, now not only do you have the ability to change up your squad and your strategy based on the minions that you bring but your four buddies have the same options. Now you're going in with a small army and saying, "How do we want to attack this? What minions do I want to bring? What do you bring? What formations do we go into it? Who do we pull? How do we strategize? How do we support? What's our main attack? What are our fallback strategies?" It's a really really different set of game play mechanics. And I think as people realize that, they're going to realize that playing Gods & Heroes is a fundamentally different experience from playing other MMOs.

That's what I'm most excited about. I love that level of thought. Let's put the archers on the hill while the hand-to-hand guys go in and it's a ravine so there's no escape laterally and let's plant people in the back so they can't turn around and run. Is that the level of strategy you want?

Chris McKibbin: It is and it's totally player driven. I would be completely mistaken if I told you that we understood the entirety of both how players will use their minions in a squad and use their squads in a group. And we play the game constantly...

I've been involved in running online games for a long time. The only thing I've learned is that players will do things and discover things and expose ways of playing that the designers and developers never even thought of. And that's one of the great potentials of Gods & Heroes. It's a mechanic that really hasn't been tried and hasn't really been explored, and I think that players are going to find strategies and alternatives far and beyond what we can imagine.