A GDC interview: What you NEED to know(recent)

harvest151

Of the systems that you work on, which one is your favorite?



We're really proud of the crafting system. We can't wait to talk to you about it, and it is going to be really soon.

 

You mentioned Dark Age of Camelot in terms of how endgame was the big thing and the designers created systems so players could get there really fast. Then you said something very specific, "what if endgame isn't where you want to be?" What are some of the most important principles to you about switching people from the race to the finish line versus enjoying the actual run itself?



Damion Schubert: We really want to put in systems to encourage replay. The Legacy System, which we hope to get in, will hopefully be in that venue. I am not ready to talk about what exactly it is and how we do that, but we are really betting heavily on the level up game.



We are really betting heavily on the story aspects of the game, and we really want people to enjoy that journey, and to feel like that journey is interesting and exciting. We actually want to incentivize people to try the different classes so that they experience those other stories, and they play the game again. So that really put a lot of pressure on us to make sure that leveling up your second character and your third character is not grinding, and that it still feels like a fresh and interesting experience. We're less interested in doing a Dark Age of Camelot "hey bypass all the content" in order to get to max level to do the endgame content because of what we think is important about our game and is our unique selling point: we want you to try that content. Maybe there is a way in the future, but that isn't even a sparkle in our eye at this point.



How do you balance the rewards for the solo player and the group player without ripping apart your community?



The thing about solo players versus group players is that our team believes that one of the important hallmarks of the success of World of Warcraft is that group play is a lot of fun, but always perceived as optional. And so we want to have that sort of balance. One of the things we don't want -- because a lot of your solo play uses your class story as a driver -- we don't want your class story to feel blocked because you can't progress unless you manage to find a group. If you look at WoW, a lot of their group content that was really robust when the game shipped started to starve once the game got to a certain age. There wasn't anyone else between levels 20 to 30, so there weren't enough people to go do a group part of any map. They actually had to take out some of that group content and make it solo content simply so you could accomplish that quest.



Our class quests are so integral to the experience that we can't blockade that stuff behind requiring a group to complete your objective. We designed the group content we call Flashpoints to be self-closed stories consumed on their own, and designed to be optional for the most part. We designed them to be more rewarding because there is more friction in assembling a group and getting people together. Actually managing people is harder, and therefore the rewards for that should be greater. We have a good idea of what we want group content to be inside our space and what we want social games to be, and I think we are at a place where both sets of people will be happy.



You also spoke about offline grinds and rewards. There is always a connotation of "Hey! They aren't playing the game, so why do they get all this XP when they log in?" What do you think is the best way to balance offline versus online rewards?



We will definitely be leveraging the offline grind philosophy in a couple of places in our design. We will experiment but we are not quite prepared to talk about that today.

There is one interesting thing about character creation in The Old Republic that isn't in any other MMOs: after talking with the LucasArts Audio Team interview we did last year, we were told there is one female and one male voice for each individual class. In a character creator, you can potentially get a number of different facial features, structures, customization options, whatever they might be. Certain looks portray different sounds; people have a different voice, facial features, structure, depending on the size of the body. Did you run into any unique difficulties or troubles with looking at different models and the voices not feeling like the fit with the models or does it synchronized well?



Damion Schubert: You get that from time to time. But one of the things that we looked for when we looked for actors to fill those roles... we actually tried to chose actors that had good but not distinctive "Hey this guy feels like he is this ethnicity or this blah blah" for those roles because they need to feel universal. The player needs to feel himself/herself slide into those shoes. That is really important when we cast people to play the player character in a BioWare game.

We had little bit of an interest on that same vein of the animations. There were some issues in some other MMOs on combat animations and how sometimes one thing can be more over the other and make you feel a bit more overpowered like casting animations for a female character or species, etc. The challenge there in animations where you have a Sith Warrior and a Jedi Knight doing basically the same thing but they're doing it with different animations. Is there some sort of philosophy behind that as well when you are mirroring aspects or some challenges that you ran into?



We have a pretty strict philosophy of "don't be silly "and recognize that those things are balance concerns. We have an animation team and combat team that has their eyes open in that regard and factor all that stuff into how they balance the game. They would be better to ask details of it, but we are definitely aware other games had those problems. Hopefully we're sidestepping all of those since we built it with that in mind.



At the core, we wanted the Knight and the Warrior to feel different. When we described the Knight versus the Warrior, we said we really wanted the Knight to be more about agility and grace, and the Warrior feel more about strength and might. We wanted to capture that in the animations they display and in the abilities they use, so we really didn't really want them to be the same character with two different coats of paint. We knew there would be balance implications of that when we signed up for it, but we thought it would be worth it because that is part of the visual sell of the classes and making sure that they are very unique and different from each other.

How do those class traits reflect in animations that are non-combat related? We can't get into specifics about crafting but in most games when someone is crafting something, they are performing an action. Is it the same action for everyone or is there a unique system for each class?



Non-combat animations will share animations for those things, and they are tied to the body type. That is because we have a finite amount of animator time, disk space, and memory on your machine.

Do you think the class stories buffer player flow? If you pick up another MMO, there are multiple different areas that are levels areas, but it doesn't really matter which one you go to. For instance, you can go to WoW Level 20 zone X or WoW level 20 zone Y, and it is the same experience to get me to Level 30. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, there is that story, that dominate feeling that makes every class different. You know where these people are going to be since they are following the class story, and an Inquisitor at Level 15 is going to be at the same place another Level 15 is.



We will have a much better idea of where players should be at certain levels largely because we think that the class story is really good, and we think that most people are going to want to play that stuff and that leads to certain places at the same time. One of the things that we noticed though is that it is really bad to have different players' class stories go to different players. As a general rule, most people's class story tends to take them roughly the same planets, the same locations, and the same quest hubs at about the same time. You get to the same quest hub and then you go off to do your own thing -- but you are ready to adventure again. We really found it to be profoundly negative when the class story was splitting up groups. We really want to be sure that the class stories are improved by multiplayer and don't actually damage it.



You talked about path of least resistance today during the panel and it is obvious to us that story is the path of least resistance. Are we going to know that from the get go?



We try to give you more cookies for playing the story than just killing monsters. We looked at the balance of other games, and ours gives you a lot more for questing than for going off and killing a bunch of random things. We'll have to look again at how people actually play the game to see if that fulcrum is in the right spot. It could be that we are not yet giving enough. It could be that we are giving too much. But right now we're getting really good feedback from the tests we are doing.



One of the questions we ask of our focus groups and in our player surveys when we give them is "Does this pace feel correct? Does this feel like a grind to you?" I am actually incredibly gratified to find that most people give an answer of "this is about right" with "little too fast" and we get like a five-five which is actually good because players feel a little like they are cheating, and that is kind of where we want to be, and hopefully that feeling will extend throughout the experience of the entire level curve, that remains to be seen. We feel pretty good about where our grind is because people give us the best compliments which you can get about a grind is that it doesn't feel like a grind.



And finally, what class are you playing in Star Wars: The Old Republic?



I really like the story of the Imperial Agent, but I am playing the Sith Inquisitor.

 

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Cross faction communication / Cross faction questing / objectives

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#swtor Cross Faction communication: http://bit.ly/9PaUw9 // Cross faction Co-Op quests? http://bit.ly/aWHQXl

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harvest151

All courstesy of the DH.  Don't want to refernce a website other tha mmorpg and catch a warning =/

MMO.Maverick

Heh. I made a sortlike thread not even a day ago.

Anyway, thanks for the added attention towards the interview