Heatwave Interactive recently announced that Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising will launch in North America on June 21. In response, Executive Producer Anthony Castoro has published a lengthy State of the Republic address to outline which features will actually make it into the game at launch.

Castoro starts his letter by stating that the Gods & Heroes team is still growing, since they realize launch is only the beginning. He says that they've decided to abandon their target of a full "M" rating, but they'll "continue to go edgier on the combat and storyline." He also confirms that the crafting system may not make it in at launch, but it will eventually be added to the game.

For more details, check out the full letter after the jump.

State of the Republic II

Greetings Romans!

As most of you are well aware, today we announced that the official launch date for Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising is June 21, 2011!

We hope you are excited about the fact that the game will finally see the light of day, but also expect that you have some questions about what it all really means. Therefore, now is the time to reflect upon what we said we’d do, what we’ve done and what remains to be done.

First and foremost, you should all know that the team is committed to continuing our practice of being transparent about what we are doing and why and that our number one priority is to deliver G&H as a fun, high quality experience from the start. We’re a small team, but we’re not nearly as small as we used to be!

Back when I wrote the “State of the Republic” in February there were about 15 people working on G&H. That number has doubled in just two months as we’ve add all of the following positions:

6 programmers (including a 3D Graphics specialist)

2 game designers

2 artists (including a bad-ass animator)

2 quality assurance testers

a European community manager

and a production assistant

And we’re still hiring!

In addition, we now employ contract services in Texas, California, Washington State, Russia, the UK, Germany and Canada adding about another 50 people working full time on G&H. Having recently compiled the official credits for the game, it is clear that over 300 people have contributed significantly to this project. I’m telling you all this for two reasons.

First, we’re committed to launching the game in good shape and we want you to know that we are applying the resources necessary to do so. Second, we know that launch is only the beginning. We’re putting together a world class team capable of blowing Gods and Heroes up into the kind of game that people speak of in a tone of awe. “Can you believe what they’ve done with G&H? They came out of nowhere and now they’re the game all my friends are playing.”

That being said, let’s talk about what we said we’d do.

In the original State of the Republic, we laid out a list of what we wanted to accomplish (nod to Pseudonym for doing his own).

So here’s a list of all of those items and their status. I’ll be upfront, we aren’t going to be able to do all of it, but we are going to accomplish the vast majority of it. Where we don’t accomplish the stated goal, I’ll try to be very clear about why.

Playability

• Make combat more fun (animations, timing, systems interaction)
  • This work is on-going and will continue up-to and through launch. We’ve made two broad changes to combat so far.
  • Now our art team is actively revising the combat animations and working with the programmers to improve the overall look and feel (the death animation bug is fixed for example). At the same time our Systems Game Designer is tweaking and improving all the class abilities including timing and interactions, while also adjusting where you get the abilities in the level curve to make the game more fun, sooner.
• Make minions more interesting.
  • Likewise, behind the scenes there’s work going on to improve the minion AI, much of which dovetails in with the combat changes.
• Improve the UI (scale and functionality)
  • The UI now scales
  • New Map Art is in QA
  • Quest Tracker has been added
  • Quest Guide UI is in QA testing
  • Level-up notification UI has been added
  • Item comparison UI has been added
• Overhaul the new player experience (content, storytelling)
  • We’ve tightened the storyline and made it more prominent.
  • Always do the beginning at the end. Much of this work is slated for May.
• Improve the fast travel system
  • Should be in QA next week
• General bug fixing/polish
  • Most of the team will be focused on bug fixing from now until mid-June.

Content

• 30 complete levels
  • Done.
• More “mature” content (blood & gore, context appropriate storytelling, context appropriate nudity & sensuality)
  • While we did add some mature content, after a deep conversation based on the feedback from the community, input from our territory distributors we decided not to go for a full “M” rating. This is a very recent decision that I now regret not having separately with all of you. Ultimately, the team came to me and said they didn’t believe they could do an “M” rating justice in the time remaining, and they didn’t want to put in boobs and bad language just for the hype. I couldn’t argue with that. We’ll continue to go edgier on the combat and storyline.
• Questing (revised quest content, quest integration with the world map, a heads up quest tracker)
  • As mentioned in the UI above, all of this is either available in the BETA or almost ready to deploy.
• German Language game client
  • The game is actively being translated and the code is being localized. This will be done.

Game Features

• Estate Game (Expanding the “Camp” concept)
  • The Ancestral Estate is in QA testing and will deployed to the Beta next week. There’s a lot more work to do, but we are looking forward to your feedback.
• Crafting system (Loot economy, item creation)
  • Honestly, this is the one feature that may not make it for launch. At some point, we have to stop the engineer working on it and have him work on polish and bugs and it’s going to be very close. The crafting system WILL go into the game, but it may not be done to the quality we require for ship. Just being straight with you.
• Auction House
  • Slated for QA testing next week. It’ll go in.

Community Features:

• New website
  • We’ve been continually updating the site, our biggest deployment for this will be open Beta
• New forums
  • Should be turned on no later than next week.
• New social integration
  • We’re working with a third party to implement a pretty substantial social feature set

Publishing/Marketing Features:

• New Key Character (actor soon to be announced)
  • We’ve hinted at him. The actor is Dominic Purcell and he will be portraying Atellus (the guy holding the minotaur head)
• Planning for a retail box full of goodies as well as digital distribution.
  • That’s why we’re talking! Details on the distribution agreements forthcoming.
• Near-simultaneous European Launch
  • Indeed, including servers hosted in Europe.

That was the entire original list. The biggest issue is crafting and the team desperately wants to put it in, but we have to be disciplined about quality and everyone has a budget to operate within.

In addition, there’s a ton of other work the team has done that you don’t see in support of running the commercial service, setting up customer service, the NOC, the billing platform, etc. For example, the server team has double the server capacity in the last two months.

Next week, I’ll update you on our post launch plans, which remain consistent with what we said in the State of the Republic, but we’ll have more details. Also, you’ll be seeing more information soon about purchase options at retail and online, as well as pricing.

Now, we’re focused on making Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising as polished as possible for launch. We’re going to be improving client stability, graphical quality, quest bugs and all of the issues we discover with the new features that are coming on line. The game is going to be in great shape and it’s only going to get better. Just remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Please feel free to respond here and I’ll jump in and answer as many questions as I can.

Regards,
Anthony Castoro, Executive Producer
The Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising Development Team