Jumpgate Evolution ,a space combat MMOG,is based on NetDevil's first game titled Jumpgate Classic. Jumpgate Classic was released in 2001 as the world's first massively multiplayer online space combat game. In Evolution, players carve their own space hero experience representing one of three factions: Solrain, Quantar or Octavius. Now let Hermann Peterscheck, Producer of Jumpgate Evolution, tell us more details about Jumpgate Evolution.

MMOsite: Why did you select Coademasters as the publisher for Jumpgate Evolution both in North America and Europe? Will there be some differences between the North American version and the European version?

 
Hermann Peterscheck: Having one publisher to do the boxed distribution in both markets is a very nice situation to be in. Codemasters has a long history of shipping successful boxed products and they are certainly much better at it than we would be. Codemasters also has had a lot of experience running MMOs which puts them among the small number of companies that can do both of these things with proven success. As far as differences go, aside from localization and any legal issues which may come up we plan on treating Jumpgate as an international product. That means that we will keep the game the same, update simultaneously and so on. Obviously things can happen that may change that, but the plan is to have one game.

MMOsite: We know Jumpgate Evolution is based on Jumpgate. What are the major features it will inherit from Jumpgate? And as an evolution, what will be the major improvements?

Hermann Peterscheck:At it's core, Jumpgate Evolution is a massively multiplayer space combat game, which is what the vision behind classic was. So the spirit of the game is the same. Obviously MMOs have advanced in the past 10 years, and NetDevil has learned a lot. Jumpgate Evolution is a new game which will take the best of classic and add all of our knowledge and experience to make a truly great game.
As far as specifics go the major updates are a new graphics engine, a whole new AI system, increase accessibility and a player driven economy. Within that "major" feature set are probably about 10,000 little things.

As a side note something that I have been a believer in is that it is the details that make or break a game. For example, there are tons of Diablo clones, but almost none of them sell nearly as well. Why is that? Is it because Diablo has some killer features? No. It's because the implementation is so excellent that it pushes it into a different quality bracket. What we are trying to do with Jumpgate is push the quality of all the features as far as we can as opposed to having some arbitrary list of features which end up being half implemented and never used. Hopefully we can meet that high quality mark.