>Kester: And how about the AI? You were telling me a little about the AI earlier. > >Jorgen: With online games, you're playing a lot of hours in the game, and we really worked on the AI to make it dynamic. So not everything becomes static, and becomes the same every time you meet it. We implemented something called a need-based AI system. And it's based upon Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So that means that pretty much every imp you meet in the game has certain needs to fulfill. This means that they have a need to sleep, they have a need to get food, and they have a need even for social needs, some of them. It depends on what we program them to do. It means that there will be dynamic behavior based upon, for instance, time of day, or if it's night or day, based on if you're alone in the world or not. Like if you run out in the wilderness, and you see a pack of wolves, they're more likely to attack you if you're alone than if you're traveling in a group of players. It means that we really can scale the AI. And you also use artificial intelligence for instance, for enemy camps, where the gameplay will scale and differ, based upon who you are, where you are, what kind of group is there - it just gives more randomness to the encounters, instead of knowing what exactly will happen in each region. It gives more unpredictability, and hopefully more gameplay variety and replayability. It is really cool, and it becomes a bit more humanized. You know, games in the old times, you could really find out the pattern. That's important you find out the pattern in this game too. It's not like it's going to be completely unpredictable, because it is a game, and people have certain expectations of what a game should be. But just by what you saw in there - just by changes between night and day, and how the whole scenery changes - the drunkards come out in the street, and different kinds of shady characters come out, the guards change with it, etc., it really makes the whole world come more alive, I think. Instead of having the same guy hang on the corner regardless of what you're doing. We know people will spend a lot of time in our cities and our environments, so we try to give them something unique. > >Kester: And when does it come out? > >Jorgen: It's coming out this spring. The launch window is set for March to May. We're in a closed beta at the moment. All our partners are testing, we are testing. As we move into the spring, we'll get more and more people into the beta. In the final stages, we're going to open up to thousands and thousands of players. Right now I think it's a fantastic game to work on, because it's quite different from all the other games out there, and we've been able to achieve most of the goals that we set a few years ago. Read the full interview here!