Transportation:

To help with limiting down time in game Mythic has made the transportation system in Imperator readily available. There are several different modes of transportation. In content areas, drop ships will facilitate travel inside the zone. The days of running along open fields of nothingness for 5-20 minutes to reach your destination are gone. Hubs will offer other types of transportation to reach more distant Hubs and planets.

Combat:

Imperator's combat system will require paying attention to the enemy during attacks, to watch for visual cues to how opponents react to differing attacks. How the enemy reacts will determine which follow-up style should be used. Hitting attack and sitting back waiting for combat to end is not an option in this game, nor is hitting a memorized key sequence.

Matt Firor gives a brief description to how the visual cues work “ For example a leg shot ability with a Gunner guy, if you shoot the mob and he starts limping then you know it worked and you can do your next style. If you shot him and he doesn't limp then you know it didn't work. ” Combat is not composed of turn based events. When you deliver damage to a mob, you will not stand there for a second or two waiting for the mob to react, you'll know instantly. Every profession will have some sort of ranged attack as well as some ability to handle close ranged melee combat.

Even More to Come:
There are many other aspects of Imperator which are still very much under development at the time of this writing. Some of the features still up in the air are:

• A political system . Mythic wants players to have the option to be able to take an active role in helping other players and participate in a player political system.
• Crafting. It is Mythic's intent that a crafter will be able to stamp a makers mark on any item they make so that it will be possible to see who made the item and at what level it was made.
• Economy. There will be a unit of currency; there will be a player economy. However, money will not be as overwhelmingly important as it is in other MMOGs.
• Death penalty. They do not want anything too harsh, but just enough punishment for death to add a bit of risk to missions.
• Player owned property . The game will probably not have vehicle ownership, but with the transportation system in game it really will not be needed. It definitely will not have player owned spaceships, since Imperator is not a wide-open space flight oriented game. There are plans for player apartments and guild owned complexes.

In Summary:
Mythic Entertainment has obviously put a lot of thought and work into their next adventure. Not only has the Roman Republic been taken down a new path, but so has the MMORPG genre. Imperator is a true next generation game: where character centric development and skill based leveling replace the whack-a-mole treadmill we have become all too familiar with. Look for more information about Imperator to be released at next weeks E3 convention, and for the months to come before its release in Summer 2006.

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Imperator Paintings of Hades Prime, Luna and Terra Nova: