Loki - Interview @ GameZone

Cyanide's PR guy Joe Ryan has been interviewed at GameZone about Loki, covering fairly general territory:

What do you consider to be the best features of the game that will, initially, attract gamers, and then hold them?

Joe: There are plenty of features that will attract and hold players. We've seen from initial reactions that the multiplayer is a major success. The numbers connecting took us a bit by surprise and we had to ramp-up server availability overnight. Today, Loki far outweighs all our other games in numbers of players connected. Outside the various multiplayer modes, we expect the thousands of collectable items to motivate many players. We put special care into the graphics to have as many 3D representations of such things as weapons and armour. Some of the rare items are really spectacular ! And, of course, a player can visit the forge and take weapons apart; build new ones or reforge existing items with new metals. The skills system should also appeal to many people. Not only does the player have to make a trade-off between growing his XP versus his skills, but once skills are acquired, they have to be actively managed. There are few passive skills so there is plenty of work to adapt skills to the current opponent. And, of course, there is the random generation of levels to guarantee maximum replayability.