VideoGamer.com: What kind of big “in-world” events can we expect to see in Jumpgate? Are there going to be pre-organised wars and the like, or do you anticipate that this kind of thing will happen organically?

HP: Both, again. I’ve been doing the MMO thing for quite some time and if there is one thing I’ve learned is that players will never, ever, do what you expect them to do. People are creative and intelligent. They see these games as new worlds to explore and figure out and no amount of guiding or planning will ever tell you what thousands of individuals will come up with. Thus, we are very interested in looking at what people do and say and responding to it. So, specifically, let’s take the beacon system. This was very popular in Jumpgate Classic so we’re putting it on steroids. Now, instead of just flipping a beacon and that’s it, there’s a Battlestation system built on top of it. Thus, beacons become focus points for large scale combat. Battlestions are cool, large scale combat is cool, so we just put them together. So that is a constructed event that comes from an organic experience. I can assure you that players will find interesting ways of interacting and we will be actively encouraging that with reasons for doing those things. I think too many developers see their games as a way of creating some kind of adversarial relationship with players. If a player finds some kind of cool unexpected thing, they kill it off. I never really understood that. If people figure out that flying through caves is cool, then why not build something like a fly-through-the-cave race that happens every two hours or something? If people figure out that by getting 70 heavy fighters together to take out a conflux hive, then add a new map that combines 6 hives together and see if they gather 140 heavies together. In my mind, we should always be chasing the cool.

VideoGamer.com: What is the biggest ship you'll be able to pilot, and how does it compare to the more common vessels?

HP: Right now the biggest ship is a double hauler and it’s around 8-10 times larger than a basic shuttle craft. To put that into perspective, that kind of ship would be about 200-300 m long. In PVP there are capital ships that you attack and defend that are 3-4 km long. We’ve also got interior maps we are working on that are even larger than that. Lots of people want player flown capital ships so you never know what we’ll do next.