Once a player leaves Terra Nova, organizations will offer another means for character development. Organizations will offer a variety of benefits, including abilities and equipment (such as power suits). As of this writing Mythic is still fleshing this concept out, but they did mention that joining organizations will play a part in the way that life events unfold for players.
Organizations make up much of the political structure of the world, and all are competing for power and influence in Rome . The organizations may be rivals, but they are not enemies. Building up a lot of goodwill with one organization will not prevent a player from doing missions for others, but it may affect their willingness to offer the most prestigious assignments.
 |
 |
Along with character development through life events and organizations, characters also develop by learning skills. Imperator has both a skill based and level based advancement system. Skills are distributed via a skill tree: depending on the profession of a character, there will generally be 3 choices available to advance, with the available skills potentially changing as the character's life path progresses. The wide variety of choices and paths allows players to develop characters which grow from their play style and not be forced into adhering to the cookie cutter class templates that are the standard in most MMORPG's today.
Advancing your Character:
The character centric focus of Imperator is carried through the mechanism for character advancement. Mythic wants players to feel that what they do in game is relevant to the story of the game: helping the Romans to defeat the Mayans. They realize that killing rats, wombats or other generic newbie fodder repeatedly at lower levels is not fun. Mark Jacobs remarked that “ The important distinction is that killing rats is just not fun. When you join a MMO, including Camelot, you are killing little animals that are basically there to provide experience points for you to level. That's great, but in this MMO you are actually helping Rome from day one defeat the Mayans. There is no killing rats: you're out there at war from the beginning.”
Imperator uses a Mission-based content system for advancement, which ensures that players can find something to do quickly if they desire. Missions, which are basically quests and tasks, can be completed in several different fashions. It is possible to perform a mission without killing everything in your path, but there will certainly be the option to go in and annihilate everything in sight. How you manage to complete a mission is up to you.
 |
 |
Missions have been designed in three tiers. The first tier is missions designed to be completed in 30 minutes or less. The second tier of missions take about an hour to complete and the final tier are dubbed “Super Missions” - which can take several hours to complete. The time a mission is going to take to complete is spelled out for the player in game. It is apparent that Mythic has taken care to design Imperator with the casual player in mind. One of their philosophies for game play is they want a player to be able to jump in, find something to do, have fun, and jump out if they have to. “ If a person only has a half an hour or an hour a day to play, we want them to actually use that time to do something other than running across the terrain.” explains Matt Firor.
Travel times will be short, even to other hubs and planets. It won't be necessary to run around looking for something to do or checking with an NPC to see if they have a mission to offer. Matt tells us that there “ …are communications arrays and interfaces in the game that let you see what missions are available. You don't have to run around the world and find an NPC that tells you. Although you can do that in certain circumstances, basically you're told what you can do and you go do it. With that comes the content, little down time in the game. This is a game where we want you to sit at your computer, log in, and go right to content. Not a lot of time looking around for something to do. ” The mission window will show how many missions are available for the current zone, along with a map of the area. When a mission is accepted, a glowing beacon on the map will indicate where the player must go to proceed with their mission.
Imperator has approximately a 50/50 mix of instanced zones (generated on the fly for just the player or group) and static zones which may have many players in them. Some missions will take place in un-crowded instanced areas which is another nice feature for the player whose time is limited. With that said, Imperator does encourage players to team up to achieve their goals: it is not designed to be a solo game. Mythic has included tools in game that will aid players in finding groups, which will definitely be needed for some difficult encounters.