Massively^™

In part three of our interview with Cheyenne Mountain's studio head Dan Elggren, creative director Chris Klug, art director Howard Lyon, VP of technology Demetrius Comes, and senior marketing manager Kevin Balentine, we discuss endgame content and go into great detail about the graphics and combat.

In part four of our interview with Cheyenne Mountain's studio head Dan Elggren, creative director Chris Klug, art director Howard Lyon, VP of technology Demetrius Comes, and senior marketing manager Kevin Balentine, Lyon describes the philosophy behind the game's artistic style, and we learn more about the company's plan for launch and post-live content.

G4's X-play gained access to the FireSky Studios where the developers are hard at work on Stargate Worlds. G4 was allowed to open the Stargate and returned back with gameplay footage, while undergoing their mission they infiltrated Studio Head Dan Elggren, Creative Director Chris Klug and Art Director Howard Lyon. As for game footage Elggren took a character through several environments of a pre-alpha build and played through an assault on a drug lord stronghold on the alien planet Lucia. The game is looking great, albeit some video lag in some parts. No earth-shattering revelations were disclosed, but if you'd like learn about the game be sure to check out all our SGW coverage.

In a new (and very lengthy) interview with IGN, the guys at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment (Chris Klug, Dan Elggren, and Howard Lyon) keep the PR machine rolling with more new info about their upcoming sci-fi MMO, Stargate Worlds. It's a fantastic read that includes some very intriguing nuggets 'o knowledge.

• Over the course of the game players will acquire many gate addresses (which are required to travel to other worlds via the Stargate) in various ways -- sometimes via quests (either as a reward or given when a player first gets a quest), and some are just given automatically.
• Each archetype starts out in different location and gets a short solo experience to help define who their character is. CME does this to bring all players (not just hardcore TV series viewers) up to speed with Stargate lore, as well as being able to walk them through the game play mechanics.
• PvP will have a staggered launch. Events and battlegrounds will be brought in slowly as the game matures. Some servers will be PvP only, and it will eventually have "world PvP" as well. According to Klug, players will enter queues to join staged battlegrounds with certain win/loss conditions. These battlegrounds will be military-styled battles rather than open melee (ala WoW).

Perhaps one of the more reassuring statements (for me) came during questions regarding how the shows story was implemented into the game and how it was going to be presented. Dan Elggren said that one of the biggest hurdles for them was figuring out how to tell the story without players having to read the story via text. Chris Klug followed by saying that players will in fact be doing things during the missions that reveal the greater story instead of having it told via boring NPCs.

I'm a writer, and one of the major tenants of writing fiction is show, don't tell. Thankfully, that seems to be exactly what the CME crew is doing.

TenTonHammer's Cody "Micajah" Bye and Garrett Fuller got a chance to sit down with Stargate Worlds' Dan Elggren (Studio Head), Chris Klug (Creative Director), Howard Lyon (Art Director), and Jeremy Taylor (Product Manager) to grill them about the game's first trailer seen during the season premiere of Stargate Atlantis. The rather lengthy interview breaks down virtually every detail of the relatively short trailer (which is good for those of us obsessed with minutia) and is chock full of great information.

Two planets were revealed in the trailer. According to Klug, Agnos is basically just a giant artificially intelligent entity. "It takes the form of a location in space, but it's really just a construct of the artificial intelligence." Whereas Anima Vitrus is a "living world" (the planet is actually a living entity). Both are locations for high-end players (late 30s to early 40s level range) and are set up so that you go from from Agnos to Anima Vitrus in sequence.

When asked about game play ratios (combat to exploration, etc.), Klug said that combat will take precedence, with a 60/40 or 70/30 ration. Dan Elggren chipped in by saying that they wanted to give players different ways to play the game, so if you're bouncing around as a scientist or archaeologist you won't have to fight if you don't want to. Those archetypes will be much more heavily geared towards exploration and playing out mini-games. I'm an altaholic by nature, so whenever an MMO offers me a variety of ways to play the game, so much so that the game itself is different, I'll take part in it. And since I'm also a big shooter fan (man can not live by frags alone however), I'm very curious to see how these different archetypes play out.

For the whole scoop be sure to peruse "Stargate Worlds: A post-trailer interview with the team" on TTH.