Recently, Rapid Reality s brand new production---Phylon Online started its beta testing. From screenshot, we could found it was a FPSMMO with 3 optional race, vast terrain and a bunch of huge cool weapon and amazing monster. Now follow Seal, let s fire away!
You can visit www.phylon-online.com for more about Phylon Online.

MMOSITE.COM: To start, please give us a general introduction about yourself and Rapid Reality Studios. Where is Rapid Reality, how many staff do you have, and what are your game-related backgrounds?

Tracy Spaight: I m the Chief Operating Officer at Rapid Reality. We re based in Marietta, Georgia (just outside of Atlanta) and have 27 employees. Prior to joining the company, I worked on a documentary film about video game culture, solved a virtual murder case ("Who Killed Miss Norway?"), and interviewed gamers from around the world for a book called Alter Ego: Avatars & their Creators, with British Photojournalist Robbie Cooper.

DJ Cassel: I m the Creative Director... tall, handsome, good with math.  My background is in 3D Character work doing characters and cinematics for games back in the PS1 era for games like Rugrats and Die Hard.  Since then I ve worked on PC titles like Postal 2 and Medal of Honor: Breakthrough.  All very exciting experiences.  And after the management turn over I ve happily slid into the position of Creative Director where I tackle the hard core fundamentals of game design, feature list, and the joy of joys... scheduling.

Our management team also includes industry veterans like Tim Petty and Eric Webster. Tim and Eric were both senior artists at Sony Online Entertainment, where they created hundreds of art assets for Everquest I & II, and several of the expansions. Tim now serves as Producer on Phylon and Art Director for Rapid Reality titles. Eric is the Assistant Producer and Art Director.

MMOSITE.COM: Phylon is the first MMO game you are going to release. Why did you decide to create a massive multiplayer online first- person shooter instead of an MMORPG?

Tracy: Originally, Rapid Reality had planned to make a MMORPG called The Chronicle, but the technological challenges required to do so, combined with the length of time and amount of investment it would take us to complete the project, compelled us to alter course last summer.

We decided to tackle an MMO 3rd person shooter first in part because we had inherited a cool little game called Endless Ages in December 2005, when we acquired a company called X-SRC. Some of X-SRC s employees, including the engine architect and platform designer, joined the Rapid Reality team.

While there are literally dozens of medieval fantasy MMORPGs on the market, there are only a handful of MMOFPS or MMO 3rd person shooters. Those that are currently on the market have been out for years now, so we believe it s time for a new entrant into the arena. The upcoming release of Huxley and other MMOFPS / 3rd person shooter titles shows continued publisher (and audience) interest in the genre.

MMOSITE.COM: What kind of online world is Phylon like? What does the title "Phylon" mean? What will make it distinguish from other MMOFPS games out there on the market?

DJ:  I like to think of Phylon as a reality game show, a violent multi-species reality game show, where the players are pitted against each other for the rest of the universe to enjoy.  Phylon features the large scale combat of Planetside, the smaller 3-30 player arenas of Quake, and RPG elements like questing and hunting. We have three playable species:  Amphibinati Victori, Terran Protectorate, and the Bloblic Colossal Imperium.  Each unknowingly volunteered by the EXG Initiative to participate in the very popular galactic reality show hit "Phylon-Online".  Unfortunately, letting the participants know would take some of the steam out of the tuna.

MMOSITE.COM: As far as we know, MMO shooters are more demanding in technical issues than MMORPGs. What sort of technology are you using for the graphics engine for Phylon? So far, how do gamers feedback on lag? What have you done to ensure smooth game play?

Tracy: The technical challenge in creating an MMO 3rd person shooter is to make the twitch-based combat of a shooter work on the scale of an MMO. Most FPS titles can fit 16 or 32 or (on a good day) 64 players on a map before lag and dropped connections ruin the game play. We re putting hundreds of players in the same zones and battle arenas, without slowing the world to a crawl. We re able to do this thanks to our game engine. Phylon is built on the Aura-3D engine, which has an efficient render pipeline and a robust server layer. It does some very cool things. We could tell you how it works, but then we d have to kill you with an IEM Phased-Plasmatron pistol.