WarCry: Individuality is a core feature for MMOs. What are you doing to make sure players are their own unique flowers from an artistic point of view?

Marco van Haren: Individuality is indeed a core features for MMOs, but only few MMOs actually succeeded in offering real individuality. With Spellborn we wanted to go all the way and give players total freedom. To accomplish this we made numerous changed to core MMO gameplay features. The most important one is that we completely removed statistics from armour and weapons. No more tier 3 rogue sets and so on, just grab any armour piece or weapon that you like, give it your preferred colours and wear it. We even went as far as removing all class restrictions; a spell caster can now wear full plate armour. Once a player is satisfied with the way he looks, he can imbue his items with statistic enhancing sigils. This way we could offer complete individuality look-wise and still attain the statistic tweaking that most MMO players enjoy. Of course the game will have tons of additional armour, weapons and sigils that need to be obtained during the many adventures all the way up until level 50. So over the course of the player's career there will be more then enough things to be found to keep things interesting from a item point of view.

Exclusive ScreenshotWarCry: ...and as characters (internally, skills, etc.)?

Marco van Haren: Individuality doesn't stop at the player's looks. We really tried to make the individuality a deep part of the gameplay. We didn't want every player from the same class to act the same in combat. To achieve this we added some interesting features. Spellborn has a skill based combat system. Some skills can be used by all classes, some skills can only be used by certain archetype classes and some skills are class restricted. All the skills that are available to a class are kept in the player's skill library. Divided over multiple sets, these skills can be unlocked when players reach higher levels. It is up to the player to deicide which skill he wants to learn when he gets offered to learn a new skill. Once a skill has been learned from the library, it is moved to the player's skill book. The skill book doesn't have space enough to contain all the skills that a player can learn from the library. Players will need to make choices here and pick the skills that fit their play style. Once skills are in the skill book, players need to put these skills in their skill deck to use the skills in combat. How players setup their skill deck is again depended on their play style and experience. Experienced players can line up their skills in their skill deck in such ways that they unlock combo attacks.