The game features many types of foes, who possess a variety of abilities. Dogs can sniff you out from hiding spots, elite guards are impossible to stealth-kill unless stunned, heavy troopers carry riot shields which make them invulnerable to your normal attacks, snipers can spot you from afar in the total darkness, and even regular guards carry flashlights which can momentarily reveal your position to everyone on the screen. As a result, all enemies remain a threat throughout the game and the composition as well as placement of their forces is the key factor in gameplay.

The enemy AI is satisfactory for the most part. Your foes react to noise and visual contact from a far distance - they go to the place of disturbance to check it out. Being discovered triggers an alarm whereby the enemies from the entire screen rush to your last seen position and inspect the area. Interestingly enough, guards have basic psychology. By default they are relaxed, patrol the area in a stroll, smoke cigarettes and chat with one another. When they are agitated, they raise their gun and carefully approach the source of the disturbance. If they spot you they become alarmed, hold the gun at the ready and move at a brisk pace - they will remain in that mode even if the alarm is called off. Lastly when they witness something horrifying, e.g. see their ally drop dead in a gruesome “accident”, they fly into panic and start shooting blindly around, possibly killing other guards.

Taking advantage of these psychological states is one of the cornerstones of gameplay. You will find yourself acting akin to an evil genius, exploiting the fears of your puppets and having them do exactly what you want: from turning their gazes away from the path to your goal, to disabling security systems for you, to killing their own allies.

[...] Mark of the Ninja is a very solid game. “Focused” is the keyword that underlies its every aspect. True, it targets a very specific niche, ignoring certain facets of gameplay which could not work in a 2D format. Nevertheless, within the limited framework it establishes, it gives no quarter - it does not know what “compromise” means, opting to be a very polished, singular experience rather than everything to everyone. It comes from developers who clearly know their own limitations, but instead of being discouraged, they are eager to work around them to deliver a thoroughly unique experience.

Mark of the Ninja is a model example of what happens when unrelenting passion meets ingenious foresight. It does have some shortcomings, but most of them result from a curious paradox: it is a rare example of a game that leaves you craving for more, even though from the very first moments it offers you plenty. It is the game a true fan of stealth games should not ignore.​

You will need to eat and use drugs to survive, some to boost your immune system and others to fight the affliction and its effects. However, when you get infected – you’re infected. You can slow down the progress of the sickness, but you’ll only be able to get rid of it very few times in the entire game, and it’s easy to catch the disease. The Sand Plague will make your vision blurry, and after some time you'll need to take painkillers and various antibiotics which slow down the development of the disease, but as a drawback decrease your health. Alternatively, you can drink alcohol, which also helps, but drastically raises your exhaustion, forcing you to sleep often and therefore waste a lot of precious time. To fight off the sedative effects of drugs and alcohol, you can drink coffee, but it has a negative effect on your health, or you can, for example, eat lemons, but they increase your hunger, and so on... This is a great system that requires constant management once you get ill, and when you finally lay your hands on a pill that can kill the microbe in your body, you will be hesitant whether it's actually a good idea to swallow it because you know you will still be in contact with the disease due to the environment.

Prices in stores fluctuate, usually going up, but sometimes going down as well... Thus, you never know if the item you're saving money for is going to cost twice as much tomorrow. Moreover, most of the food rots with time, and sometimes it may be better to save money to buy it at a later point than to purchase everything at once... but then the price might spike up. You never really know. You can also trade with children running around the town, they sometimes happen to have useful things to offer, not to mention that they are the ones you get ammunition from.

Apart from that, there's a karma system. Many actions will increase and others will decrease your karma. Sharing your food, medicine and painkillers with others will make you more popular, but you need to keep in mind that you need these things for yourself as well as for characters crucial to the story. Stealing will make people dislike you, and killing someone (except in self-defense), especially a child, will make them loathe you.

Every day you get various tasks to accomplish, but you’re not alone. Many people will help you as much as they can, often doing the job for you if you fail… but they might pay the ultimate price for their commitment to your cause, and their absence may lead to your doom later on. Every day, the disease spreads and the town attracts attention of the police forces and eventually even the military, who try to do everything they can to stop the spreading of the epidemic. Decay, in both the physical and the metaphysical sense, is the main theme of the game, followed by sacrifice and the idea that everything comes at a price.​

Spare a thought for these wronged souls; it really must be irritating to keep on hearing that same tired old canard about misconduct, foul play and publisher influence in gaming journalism, just because a journalist, having made the tentative suggestion that somebody (who after five minutes of investigation turned out to have worked for Square Enix) was reviewing Square Enix games while cheerleading Square Enix products and that might look a bit bad to some people, was immediately dogpiled upon, rubbished, and censored by his own colleagues. And actually, the journalists (such as RPG Codex alumnus, games critic, and amateur PR man Ian Miles Cheong) who bleated that ordinary gamers didn’t have the whole story and were just wildly speculating as usual based on what little they could see of the inner workings of the media, are quite right to say as much. Ordinary gamers don’t know exactly how much journalists allow themselves to be affected by publisher influence, possibly because ordinary gamers don’t put in the hours at the publicists’ parties, preview events and launch events, or the various free publicist-organised jollies at castles, hovercraft classes, nightclubs, Porsche driving schools, etc, that would be required to make a fully-informed judgement on this subject. Ordinary gamers can't witness first-hand whether reporters are gently implicitly nudged towards favourable judgements, or, as in the case of Wainwright, whether they appear to have a blatantly obvious bias based upon personal relationships and career hopes; all they can see is the plethora of near-perfect scores and the meaningless superlatives that are farted out from the back end of the press machine with a disheartening regularity. All that ordinary gamers have to go on is the image the gaming media presents, which, to put it mildly, does not inspire confidence - and, every so often, a toxic story or memoir that comes seeping out through the cracks.

This is the real, harmful, bloody-minded naivety of the gaming media community; a collectively-affirmed belief that their closeness with the industry makes them specially qualified to pass judgement upon it, without being able to accept that it might also have legitimately compromised their opinions - a little in the manner of a mother who believes it’s perfectly okay for her to be a juror at her son’s murder trial because she knows him much better than anybody else. And this translates into a defensiveness on behalf of the entire profession; Klepek's article, and to a lesser extent Sterling's, takes a moment to acknowledge the inexcusable (of course it isn't right to consult with a company whose products you're reviewing) before avoiding any in-depth commentary on this undeniable glimpse of an industry operating like a swingers' party - in which journalists are invited to become PR reps by PR reps at PR events, transform into creative consultants, then turn into reporters again, jumping back and forth directly between poacher and gamekeeper without ever having their credibility questioned until a bunch of internet detectives on Neogaf happen to notice their CV details - in favour of abstracts and private reflection; really, this story is all about trust between you and me. Really, it's all about how us critics sometimes can't take criticism. Even John Walker and Rob Florence themselves issued milquetoast oil-on-troubled-waters follow-ups to their initial condemnatory statements, urging the gaming public not to think too badly of gaming journalism as a whole, since from personal experience they can testify that most of the people they know are hardworking, decent, and trustworthy.

It’s a pity. Because what the Walkers and Florences (who must genuinely want to improve the situation, indeed, who wouldn’t have spoken out in the first place if they weren't passionate about doing so) have to understand is that for them to start producing apologetics on behalf of a silent majority of honest hacks is completely futile, since nobody believes that every single gaming journalist is corrupt. What people believe is that gaming journalism is institutionally corrupt, built around an imbalanced professional relationship that frequently challenges (and, if appearances are anything to go by, frequently overcomes) writers' principles, and this image is not going to improve as a result of journalists penning earnest columns about how, a few bad apples aside, in their personal experience journalists are honest, (honest!). This image is going to improve if the wider public is provided with tangible evidence that games criticism can occur in a reasonably effective vacuum - that the clowns who announce quite gleefully that they're riding the gravy train of expensive press tours, who copy-paste press statements into their articles and use the word ‘awesome’ in their ‘previews’ and who think they might get a job in the industry themselves one day because that nice PR man gave them a business card are not the same people providing supposedly in-depth objective analysis of any commercial product, that critics are sending back or at the very least declaring the free tat they’ve been plied with (no, saying after the event that you’d meant to give it to charity all along doesn’t count), that editors never have the ability to alter review scores or excise harsh criticism, that advertising is entirely divorced from the journalistic process - and that writers can and will speak up and be heard by the public whenever they encounter misconduct both on the part of the industry and on the part of their peers. Continuing to say, ‘You don’t have the full story, but we do, and we’re telling you that aside from the specific stuff that you already know about, everything is fine, trust us,’ after everything that’s happened, is simply indefensible.​

The Kickstarter page doesn't have any information on races and classes. Could you describe them for us and explain how they relate to the game world? Will NPCs react differently to characters of different races?

There are 5 races: Human, Lynx (the cat-like creatures), Elves, Orcs, and Necrophils (the demonic beings). Each race has its own set of strengths and all are inextricably tied in with the game world and storyline. Humans are the most politically powerful race and the de facto rulers. Elves are a noble race and are widely admired for their beauty but have little influence beyond culture. Orcs, once a great race of warriors whose warlords ruled over Antharion for aeons, are now taken and sold as slaves by Humans. Lynx are subterranean and reside solitarily on the fringes of society. Necrophils, originally the magical creations of adept Wizards, gradually improved their own powers through magical self-replicating techniques, eventually becoming more magically proficient than their creators. Some NPCs will react to your party differently depending on its racial makeup. Sometime favorably, other times disfavorably.

Antharion seems to be very dungeon crawling-heavy and action-oriented. Are there any non-combat skills such as thievery skills, alchemy, speech skills, etc.? What sort of interactions are there with the gameworld aside from killing monsters?

There’s definitely tons of dungeon crawling, but it’s not all about that. One thing we’re really trying to do is to create the sense of a living world. NPCs don’t just wait around for you in their shops. They go home at night, go to lunch at the nearby tavern, that kind of thing. There’s also a big stealing component. Get caught stealing and you’ll either be attacked or the npc will flee to alert a guard. The guard will alert other guards and chase you down, throwing you in the nearest jail if you’re caught. As far as non-combat skills go, we’re definitely adding alchemy and are considering adding persuasion, pick-pocketing, crafting and a few others.

How diverse are Antharion's quests going to be? What other types of quests apart from kill and fetch quests are you going to put in the game? You also call the game world of Antharion "open-ended". Does this include alternative endings and multiple quest solutions?

There’s a lot of diversity. Of course you’ll have the standard Fed-Ex style quests, but you’ll also have some pretty unique stuff. For example: you meet a local slave trader in one of the sleazier taverns on the wrong side of town. He tells you that he’s just had a shipment of Orcs stolen by a rival slaver and asks you to go retrieve them. From this point there are a number of possible outcomes: (1) you could go and retrieve the Orc slaves and return them to the quest giver; (2) you could go and free the Orc slaves; (3) you might happen to run into the rival slaver who would then offer you money to kill the quest giver; or (4) you could just kill all of Orc slaves for the heck of it. Personally, I love these types of quests and will put as many of them in as possible. The decisions that you make in a quest like this will have a direct impact on your party’s alignment which in turn affects the world in all kinds of other ways.

So definitely, Antharion has multiple endings and lots of multiple quest solutions.​

RPG Codex: One significant departure of Hero-U from Quest for Glory is the turn-based combat. What motivated your decision to make combat turn-based this time and apparently give it a more prominent place?

Corey Cole: Two of our inspirations for the game were Rogue and Wizardry; both used turn-based combat. We want to focus on tactical options and not make this a "mash the button fast" game. There are plenty of that type out there! By keeping combat turn-based, we will have more of a thinking person's game.

As for the prominence of combat, we think it's fun, and it makes sense in this game. We watched some play-throughs of Quest for Glory and felt people were avoiding monsters all too easily. You'll be able to avoid some fights in this game – especially since you're a Rogue – but might not want to do that too often because it will be both fun and useful.

RPG Codex: Can you talk about the combat system you have in mind for the game and the combat mechanics involved? Just how tactical do you want the combat to be? Are there any games, computer or pen-and-paper, that you take inspiration for Hero-U's combat from?

Corey Cole: We're looking at in-place combat on the dungeon map rather than the special screens we used in Quest for Glory. We used those because we didn't want the player or enemies to get stuck on room terrain. For Hero-U, we'll set up some of the combat settings to make combat more tactical. You will be able to move around, shift things in the room to channel your enemies, and so on.

If you look at D&D 3+ vs. AD&D, they went with more options such as flanking opponents. In CRPG's, I liked the Betrayal at Krondor tactical combat interface. I'm undoubtedly being influenced by World of Warcraft boss battles after spending several years raiding. : ) But we're trying to come up with a unique system that has intuitive UI, but also gives the player real choices.

We will have an Action Point system so that you can choose between doing a single, powerful action during your "turn" or a couple of smaller actions (such as stab and dodge) or move to improve your tactical position. I won't allow combats to turn into 10-minute marathons, but there will be more choices than in Quest for Glory.

The main feature of the Rogue character will be item use – Your Rogue will supplement his basic skills with a variety of items that let him do some unusual actions. We plan to keep the same basic interface for each game in the Hero-U series, but each character type will have a different flavor in combat.

RPG Codex: Corey, in a comment on your blog you recently said, "we also want to make sure our new games are very distinct from the work we did at Sierra. We’ve moved on, and learned more about game design." What are some of the things about game design, and adventure game design in particular, that you have learned since Quest for Glory?

Corey Cole: We were really pretty naïve when we made at least the first two Quest for Glory games. We based them on our paper RPG experience (including our custom skill-based RPG system), the few CRPG's we had played (Rogue, Wizardry, Dungeon Master, Ultima IV, and Bard's Tale), and a few days spent playing through older Sierra games.

Specifically, we'll be going back to our paper RPG roots to simulate and balance combats so that they will be challenging, but in the player's favor. Also, we will add some puzzle elements to combat – Using items or abilities to negate your enemy's strongest attacks and get through their defenses, and using the terrain to survive combat against multiple opponents.

In addition, Lori and I have to be particularly sensitive that we are *not* making a new Quest for Glory because Activision owns the series license. We may be able to work with them in the future on new QfG games, and we don't want Hero-U to feel like a clone of anyone else's game, including our own.

RPG Codex: Hero-U will be broken down into five episodes, one for every character class, of which "Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption" will be the first. In terms of play time, how long do you want each episode to be - is it one-fifth of a Quest for Glory game? Do you plan on doing a Kickstarter for every episode? When all episodes are released, do you intend to "merge" them into a single game with different routes where you choose your character class in the beginning, RPG style?

Corey Cole: Each Hero-U game is a complete game in its own right, probably about the size of the original Hero's Quest. In fact, whether we even do more than one game will depend on the response we get to our Kickstarter and our sales of the first game. I can't put a number of hours on that play time.

We don't intend to merge the games, but they will all tie together in thematic ways and in terms of events going on in the world around you. If we are able to pull it off, your actions as a Rogue in the first game will affect some things that happen in the Wizard game, and so on. In the fifth game, we want to make it so that you play all of the characters, switching between them as needed to solve certain puzzles or win some of the battles. It's an ambitious plan, and we will have a lot more discussions about the interface and design for that game when we get closer to it.

We might or might not do a Kickstarter for the future games. The major advantage would be as a presale and publicity vehicle – Kickstarter gives us a way to reach more fans. But if we have adequate funding at the end of the first project, and sales of the first game go well, we might fund future games from the proceeds of the earlier ones. A Kickstarter drive is time-consuming and potentially expensive, so might not be an appropriate way to fund a sequel. But it will depend on our bank balance after the first game.​

What inspires the game's concept? Personally I'd say the videos you've released give me a Battle Zone vibe, and the defense against the enemy hordes reminds me of Harvest: Massive Encounter. Also the spherical play surface recently made an appearance in the successful Planetary Annihilation Kickstarter campaign (and has been toyed with in various game development communities around the web for some years). Am I correct in my impressions? What other sources of inspiration have you had for Blackspace?

We were avid Total Annihilation players and the one aspect we loved the most is how the terrain and physics would sometimes determine the outcome of whether or not a projectile would successfully hit its mark, or sometimes a shot aircraft could crash land onto a structure damaging it in the process. That said, when we started to think about the gameplay design aspect of Blackspace, we did not want to be influenced by other games upfront. It was only after we figured out what we wanted on a high-level design that we then started to notice some similarities with our design vs. other games like Battle Zone, so we made sure that we are not re-inventing the wheel if we don’t have to. As for the spherical play surface, we have been working on this game for quite sometime now, and even though a number of games have used a similar approach, I don’t think I have seen any that have implemented a spherical play surface with full physics interaction. Games like Spore, Populous and the likes have used a fairly rigid set of rules when interacting with the environment.

Leaving aside the impressive visuals and physics, have you already decided on the gameplay mechanics or are you still working on that?

When it comes down the second-to-second game play mechanics (lander flight), we believe we have nailed down the majority of them. That said, there are still various aspects to fill in and we also want to make sure that the mechanics we have in place will work nicely with different set of varying conditions such as different gravitational constants or different lander upgrades changing the engine thrust power. Menu interaction is a piece that still is under heavy construction. There is a lot going on in this game and we want to make it all as quickly and easily accessible as it can be during gameplay.

One of the game's features is the Lander, the ship you customize to your play style. Is there going to be a first person option (Battle Zone-like) and/or a strategic viewpoint option (Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander/Planetary Annihilation-like) for controlling the Lander?

First person control of the Lander has been something we’ve been thinking about from time to time. The peripheral spatial awareness of the current third-person view of the lander helps when the user is flying around as well as using certain aspects like tethering something underneath the lander. There may be an option for first person perspective, it is still something were working out. As for strategic views, we will likely have overviews / map views where you can clearly see what is happening, but any interaction with the play surface is done from the Lander perspective. This is one aspect that differentiates us from classic RTS games. Its YOU, you are there doing things and making things happen, not your mouse.

In your second video you mention that units which survive combat level up. How much customization will the leveling-up mechanics allow? Are we talking RPG-like customization or rather TA/SupCom-style unit veterancy? Do the RPG fans have anything to be excited about on this front?

I think the RPG fans will most love the customization on the Lander itself, armor, weapons, tools, communications, sensors, engines, will all be customizable and something that each player will purchase to suit their preferences. We have not yet settled on the extensibility of the building customization. There are some game designs that have yet to be tested before we can nail down how much worth we want to assign to the buildings individually. I would say there is a potential for deeper customization but were still under pretty heavy construction in this area.​

RPG Codex: When did you start preparing for the Kickstarter campaign, and what were the main points of debate and the major challenges involved in coming up with the campaign's concept? Were there any strong alternative ideas for this Kickstarter?

AB: We started working on the Kickstarter pitch a few months ago. Initially we had a brainstorming meeting with Chris Avellone, Feargus, Tim Cain, Darren Monahan, and Josh Sawyer, to toss around ideas on what we wanted to move forward with. We had a few different ideas, but one that we all were really excited about was revisiting the top-down isometric RPG, and we felt it would be a great fit for a Kickstarter too. After the meeting, I got working on the logistics of doing the Kickstarter, assembled a team, and started to prepare the pitch presentation.

There were long discussions and meetings about the name, the concept of the world, and how to pitch the game - It's been an unusual (and sometimes scary) process, since these decisions are typically made during pre-production, but we had to go public with our ideas immediately.

RPG Codex: When you say you're the point man on the project, does that mean you also oversee all systems design decisions and get to decide on the mechanics that designers suggest? What are the guidelines you have in mind when approving or rejecting the ideas that flow your way?

AB: My philosophy is to let the designers design because they are much better at it and I trust their decisions. My role is to make sure that they are staying true to the overall vision and plan. As a project director, I have a high-level view of the project across disciplines of art, design, and programming, and it's my job to make sure that all the departments are working well together. It's always a team effort though, and games are never designed by one person. It's a large collaboration from everyone on the team, and we are in constant discussion and debate to make sure we make the best game possible.

RPG Codex: Do you think it's a risk going with a "project name" rather than the game's actual name? You're getting all this publicity for "Project: Eternity" and all the google links, and then you're going to change the name. Why not just come up with the name first and get as much publicity for it as possible?

AB: Project Eternity is the best name for the game right now, and I think it's a perfect fit for the type of game we are making. It's fantasy, IE-like, and has a connection to our world. The team went through a process of trying to name the game with an actual name. However we felt that it was too difficult creatively, because the story and themes of the game are in such early stages of development. We don't want to be stuck with a name that doesn't fit the game. We put "Project" in the title to make sure people don't confuse the title with something that's final.

RPG Codex: How much of the project can we reasonably expect to see before the Kickstarter campaign is over? Do you plan on sharing anything like screenshots, tech videos, or design documents with the community, or will it be too early for that?

AB: We have more things in store for you before the Kickstarter is over, and even afterwards we plan on keeping everyone updated regularly on what we are up to on our website and forums. This is something new to us, so please give us feedback on how we are doing our updates on the Project Eternity forums. (Most of us lurk on the Codex too).​

$5,000: NAME AND HELP DESIGN AN ENEMY ADVENTURING COMPANY. What beats the classic RPG challenge of squaring off against a diverse enemy party with skills, abilities, and equipment to match your own? Nothing, that's what! Now you can design a crew of knuckle-cracking skull-crushers to ambush players at the worst possible moment. Ha, HA! You are the devil himself! We will send you six PROJECT ETERNITY NPC character sheets for you to fill out for our design team. We will turn your personalized party design into a lethal wrecking crew to oppose the player in the shipped game (within reason of course). You will also receive The Complete Kickstarter Obsidian Pack ($500 reward tier) + 15 EXTRA DIGITAL DOWNLOADABLE COPIES OF PROJECT ETERNITY to gift your friends and family. You also get the top tier WATCHER FORUM BADGE.​

*** DONATE HERE *** ​