Designing an MMO is no mean feat. In order to have a product that doesn't inspire the fury of the masses, all the various systems that comprise it must be on point. Ask Toby Ragaini -- he has the enviable task of being the head man when it comes down to MxO's game design. It's a high-profile license with an insanely devout following, and it has the dubious distinction of following two very high-profile entries in the genre. Many people are watching, no doubt, so we wanted to see where the game (and his head) were at.



GameSpy: What's the status on the game? What are your day-to-day duties, at this point?
Toby Ragaini: Right now, I am busy working hard to balance the game, listening to the feedback provided by our beta testers, preparing to launch the game.
GameSpy: Can you break down the MxO experience in its essence?
Toby Ragaini: The Matrix Online is the continuing story of the Matrix universe, so if you saw The Matrix movies, and felt that you wanted to participate, and not just retell the stories that you saw, and actually tell your own, MxO is the place for you to do that. We're creating an environment where thousands of people will be able to collaboratively role-play and essentially participate in the Matrix universe in a way that no other game has allowed.

GameSpy: What is it about The Matrix property that you guys think will create a unique MMO experience?
Toby Ragaini: The Matrix has a lot of appeal from MMO perspective, simply because so many of the problems that MMO developers have to deal with have already been solved. It's very clearly a computer-simulated reality, and the characters in the films come in and out of the world as they see fit. In this way, it works perfectly for an MMO. When you're playing MxO, you're logged into the Matrix. Your character appears next to the phone booth, and that is perfectly in synch with the fiction from the movies.

A lot of other MMOs have to come up with all kinds of conceits as to why the player is leaving the world [when he logs off], and things like that. In addition to those, which are interesting reasons, but not altogether compelling reasons, is that MxO will set the bar for what people will expect from action sequences in these kinds of games. We really saw that as a challenge to the MMO genre itself.

We needed to figure out how we could depict these incredibly choreographed, moment-to-moment, hit-by-hit martial arts sequences. We realized that fans of The Matrix would not accept the typical, stilted combat that you see in other MMOs.