When most people think "MMO", images of a lone hero doing battle against a handful of enemies spring to mind, or perhaps there's an image of a "large" raid or that of stalking an enemy player in a PvP battle. Saga is another animal all together. This upcoming MMO is a real-time strategy game pitting thousands of players against one another in a persistent, real-time world. It's certainly an interesting concept but it also leaves open a lot of questions. We recently spoke with Producer Jason Faller for the answers.

Can you tell our readers a bit of what Saga is all about, where it's set, the size of the world, etc?

I suppose Saga is all about delivering a persistent MMO RTS. What MMORPGs did to the RPG, we want to do to the RTS genre. Traditional RTS hasn't changed in fifteen years (since Dune 2, really), and the clear future of RTS is all about more realism and higher stakes. MMORTS means your battles all count towards your empire's progression. Your guild declares and fights in wars that are ongoing. Your troops can really die, and it matters. Your buildings take damage and it matters. The resources you collect, the treasure you find, the upgrades and experience and weapons and armor for your troops all matter, because your empire never goes away. Like an MMO character. It changes the way you play RTS, and it's incredibly fun and addictive. Just think if all your StarCraft battles were part of a real permanent empire you were building online, in competition with thousands of other empires and you'll start to see what Saga's all about.

We've set Saga in a typical fantasy setting: Orcs, Elves, Giants, Dragons... Other attempts at MMORTS have tried to create a wholly original universe with creatures and languages we've never seen before. But to launch the genre successfully, we thought it best to stick to what we already know and love.

The world is big, with five continents, so to speak, one for each faction/race: War (orcs), Light (giants), Magic (dark elves), Machines (dwarves) and Nature (elves). Each player has a nation in the lands of their faction; your nation is sort of your 'character' in Saga. We are continually adding new quests and new maps (over 500 maps so far) into the world..

I'm sure a lot of people are curious as to how an MMO-RTS can work since you're managing a kingdom and not a lone hero. For instance, if you haven't played in a few weeks, what happens to your kingdom? Does it stay the same as when you left it or does it continue to grow or shrink with time even while you're off-line?

Most of the action takes place while you're online. You set challenges and accept challenges to battle with other players. However, a complex espionage system allows for raids on offline players, where you can assassinate, burn buildings, steal resources, spy to gain tactical information, etc. The buildings build slowly, the resources collect slowly over time. If you leave for a week and planned for it by setting your peasant management carefully, you'll come back to a happy nation that has amassed a tidy sum of resources for you to spend in the market. If you left for a week and threw caution to the wind, you'd come back to a sluggish economy, unhappy peasants who may have rioted a bit while you were away, and only a few resources collected into the storehouse. We focus on rewarding the wise rulers, but we don't punish the foolish ones too much. If your guild is at war, you may have come back to a fair amount of covert ops against you, and some serious repairs may be in order.

But no one can conquer you or destroy your whole nation or anything like that. Other MMORTS games have gone that route, and it ends in frustrated players who cancel their subscriptions because most people can't be online 24-7. Saga has a lot of fairly steady progression with bursts of intense action when you feel like it (or for the hardcore players, sometimes it's PvP all day long...).

For those that are not aware, the person behind Saga, Dallan Christensen, was the Lead Programmer for StarCraft: Brood War. Will the gameplay in Saga remind players of Brood War? Is it a matter of gathering resources and building armies like in a traditional RTS? Are there any interesting twists worth mentioning as far as basic mechanics are concerned?

Dallan built Saga, and a lot of his StarCraft-building experience was put to use, but I would say that Saga is a completely new creation. Other than the typical RTS commands and features which we employ (drag-selecting multiple units, right-click to attack, etc.), Saga is its own animal. However, we have tried not to reinvent the wheel here. What's been done right has been implemented in Saga. It's still about city building and battle strategy and putting together the best army. But Saga takes all of these a lot further. In StarCraft, you build your city, but you don't really care much if it gets damaged, so long as you win the battle. In Saga, you've got long-term strategy to worry about. It's not always worth winning the battle if Orc hordes have torched your houses to the ground and siege giants have punched gaping holes in your walls, and a third of your army is dead (which will take some costly resurrection to bring back). Traditional RTS doesn't offer that kind of realism or high stakes. When you're building your cities, you have to decide whether you want houses (which can spawn peasant militia in battle) or watch towers (which shoot arrows, of course), farms (increases troop stamina) or quarries (strengthens structural defenses).

So, all the same elements of traditional RTS are there, but with some big twists. And of course there are a host of features that you won't find in traditional RTS games, like the auction house / market, the chat interface, the in-game email system, the espionage system, etc.

How will the quests and campaigns work? Are you presented with specific missions or is it a free-for-all?

Quests and campaigns can be done solo or with a 'party', so to speak, where others join armies with you to fight battles. We're working on the multiplayer party system to expand it to allow up to four teamed players vs. the quest/campaign. You do quests and campaigns to gain resources, treasure and weapons and armor to upgrade your units. Some quests are in linked campaign trails, where one leads to another and so on until you finish the campaign (and take home some impressive booty). Other quests are stand-alone. Certain campaign trails lead to new territories with new resources and build sites you can add to your empire.

The press release mentions an auction house. What sort of things can be bought and sold there? It sounds as if the auction house is an integral part of the design.

The auction house is a big deal to Saga. You start off with enough troops to get you started, but sooner or later, you're going to want to customize that army, get new troops that you don't have, trade away ones you don't want or that can't be used by your faction. The auction house lets you trade your way to a better army. Consider baseball cards, or better yet Magic: the Gathering. If you trade smart, you can amass quite a deck of great cards, even starting from a few commons. My marble collection as a 6-year-old is a good example. Start with nothing, play it right, and you'll have a good size collection in no time. Also at the auction house you can buy some troops with gold you've amassed, sell troops to the market, and buy-and-sell weapons and armor you've won on quests (oops, spoiler, we haven't sent that last patch yet with buying and selling items...).

There is also a "collectible" angle to the game; you even mention games like Magic: the Gathering and Heroclix. Some people hear that and immediately think that you can just spend more money to get the better stuff. How is this going to work without forcing players to keep up with the Jones' by spending more money? Does a player that spends, say, ten bucks, have any shot at all against a player that spends 100? Are players divided up at all based on their kingdom strength?

The auction house is part one of the answer: you can trade to get more troops instead of buying boosters. Part 2 is that you can collect resources until you have enough to buy troops from the market or other players (takes a bit of patience, but it really works after a couple of weeks when your economy is rolling). Part 3: Those who work hard are rewarded. If you quest a lot, you'll get items that will make your troops more powerful than those who just buy boosters. Part 4: Join a guild and you'll be amazed at what help they will be in giving you great troops that you need. Every player has troops they aren't using and are willing to trade away cheap or even give away if you're guild-mates. Part 5, the last part, is that we're a strategy game, and in the end, your strategy skills are what really count. A slight advantage in having the 'best' troops won't help you much against a superior player. Check a player's rating before you do battle. If it's over 1500, you're going to need more than Dragons and Mech Giants to win! It takes practice and careful strategy.

What this all boils down to is that there are a lot of ways to even the playing field. On the other hand, we have to fund the game somehow, so we hope players will buy boosters. It's fun and exciting; beats paying a monthly subscription just for 'access' to the game!