Jonric: What is the current status of development? What caused it to progress more slowly than you originally anticipated, and what are the main things you're focusing on now?

Marko Dieckmann: Currently we are in Beta 3, which is still a closed stage. We've been beta testing for about eight months. The game has come along a lot since the beginning of beta. We have had to rewrite parts of the rendering pipeline to allow for much more detail in the gameworld. From the initial Beta 1 until now, we have been able to accomplish a lot of performance and design improvements.

In MMORPGs, many things can only be completed with a sufficient amount of different minds. You need the beta testers to see how our new approach to player freedom really works - especially the mission system, which has been quite a challenge, and which we have had to rewrite from scratch a few times. That and adding a lot of server-side features for non-player characters, and doors took a lot of the time as well. During the testing, we often saw chances to improve certain features or to add new stuff, and that is certainly not the easiest thing to schedule.

At the moment we are tweaking general features all around and most importantly the NPCs - how they interact with the world or respond to your chat messages for a good conversation, which again is not very common in MMORPGs. Everything else is complete or very close to being complete.