[RGD]Kroll: It’s a funny question, and one we have been asked many times. Nobody making single player games with no combat gets asked that question. Anyway: Why no combat ? Well, because Seed is primarily about story, roleplay and ingame society: thats the creative reasons.
The business reasons include the fact that the MMO community have been pining for change, for innovation in the MMO genre. Combat is one of the things everyone does, with more or less variation, and with combat comes monsters to fight, and loot to get from the monsters you fight. And that is exactly the cookie cutter model of current MMOs. I do not dispute that this model works, it clearly does.
But it has already been done very well by other companies, so why add yet another combat game to the fray ? The thing is, that if you do include a combat gameplay you had better do it very very well: That means putting development focus squarely at doing that, and that would make *our* focus, stories, roleplay and society on the fringe. And we didn’t want that, so therefore, no combat and actually, we have never seriously considered changing that decision

[RGD]HateTank :Â I think there’s a fair chance that some people will be turned off by the graphics novel style of Seed. It’s impossible to please everyone, so most likely someone will find it’s not their cup of tea. You can’t really avoid that I think. I personally believe that the style of Seed, will actually help the players immerse themselves. If you think about it, lots of MMORPGS, being fantasy-based, are not very realistic either. It’s not very realistic for big-breasted women with pointy ears, wearing nothing but a g-string, a much too small chain mail bra, and a sword weighing half their body weight, to be battling against dragons in mountain caves. It’s actually quite comical if you think about it - and not very realistic. But it is still very captivating because it is so far from “everyday life”. The problem with realism in games is : It does not exist. Even some of the latest games with the newest technology doesn’t come close. Yes, they’re closer than they were 5 years ago - but there’s still so much road to cover. They’re still using low polygon models. Water and glass does not reflect and refract properly, skin is not translucent, shadows are crisp and sharp even in dim light. But most importantly - animation and more specifically facial animation is lacking. Nothing breaks immersion more, than an otherwise “realistic” character talking to you, with the facial expression of a fish gasping for air, because of the very limited amount of morph targets or bones used to mimic the many, many facial muscles in a human face. The point is - why not go the other way around? We’re dealing with fiction and fantasy. What good will realism do us, with no clear reference anyway? And with Seed not being a hard scifi styled game, we might bend the rules a bit here and there, if it serves the stories because they are more important. There’s no room for that if you’re aiming for realism, and it quickly becomes boring and tedious. Why settle for realistic when fantastic is so much better? If you take away the realism, you’re no longer bound by everyday rules, and then you can really immerse yourself. We set out to create something different. Both in gameplay and visual appearance. And like it or not, you will remember Seed by its visual appearance. You will be able to single it out based on visuals alone and say “Hey - that’s Seed”. Wether or not people like it is a matter of personal taste, and rather hard to debate. Most likely people will think about it for the first 30 minutes, and then they’ll be too consumed in the actual role playing.