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Trick Dempsey - Defiance Creative Lead - AMA
TrickDempseyTrion
Member Posts: 11
Hey folks! I’m Trick Dempsey, the creative lead for Defiance. Our Arkbreaker DLC is coming out in just a few days on December 10th, and I’m here to answer your questions about Arkbreaker, Defiance, and the wild world that is video game development.
A bit about me: You may have heard of some of the previous games I worked on while I was at Rockstar San Diego: Red Dead Redemption, Undead Nightmare, and Max Payne 3. Prior to that I worked on titles for Ignition Entertainment and Gearbox Software. I had a weird path getting to the games industry. I’ve been a stuntman, a set designer, a production assistant, and even a costumer. There’s a lot of film and theatre in my background. So, if you linger in obscurity with a liberal arts degree, I can feel your pain. Oh! For people who keep track of folk from the gaming schools: I am graduate of the Guildhall at SMU, which is a fine and difficult program to survive.
Defiance has been an interesting project to work on the past few years, and it is one of my favorites.
For some context, check out the blog posts and announcements surrounding Arkbreaker –
Arkbreaker Features: http://community.defiance.com/
Summoning Arkfalls: http://community.defiance.com/
Evolution of Coop: http://community.defiance.com/
So post your questions and I will answer them here over the next few hours.
Comments
Thank you for the AMA. I want to say that defiance has the potential to be a great game. I would like to explain why I stopped playing and maybe you can answer if any of those reasons are going to be addressed.
1. I played on ps3. As an mmo, it lacked socialization on every aspect. From chat interface, to having a social hub etc.. I know there are limitation on console but does this dlc or any planned ones attempt to bring some life into the massive online aspect of the defiance mmorpg.
2. I am an avid pvper and , defiance seems like it has huge potential for pvp but the flip side there is hardly any direction in pvp.
3. Lastly and ultimately the reason why i stopped was character progression. It appears that trion wanted to have the borderlands loot feel to the game, but didn't realize that borderlands is not an mmo. There doesn't feel like any type of foothold your character has on the world. It ultimately felt to me, that i was logging in to look for a gun, to shoot the same red crystal.
Granted i quit before the casthian charge pack, but after spending 50 on a game that went down to 10 bucks the following week, im a little gunshy to spend on a game that i was relatively uninterested in shortly after buying.
again, thank you for taking the time to do this AMA
Yes, 1 and 3 of the above I would like to know. With regard to 1, I am a PC player and still the social experience is lacking.
Some of our retention plans come from some obvious systemic updates. Our clan progression track in Arkbreaker adds a lot of chase for people to be involved in a community-focused progression track.
We're also adding in daily and weekly login bonuses as well as improvements in the contract system to make that chase more clear. We've got a few more tricks up our sleeves in that regards as well.
Also, we're accelerating our release schedule for updates to get more exciting content out to our ark hunters more quickly. It's hard to quantify, but a live game is a conversation with our players and creating a universe which they want to visit again and again.
Just for fun, I'll address these in reverse order.
We're doing a lot to address progression in the game. The joke has been to simply unleash the battlecry: "MAKE THE NUMBERS GO UP!" It's the most basic drive of any MMO, and the numbers don't really go up in the current Defiance progression. So we're putting in a lot of systems to create a better loot chase, but also a better power chase. I can talk more at length about progression, it's the biggest project we have going right now, but the big news is that we are definitely addressing it.
PvP is an interesting beast in Defiance. I'm a big fan of Shadow War and of the Freight Yard map, and I love the strategic possibilities that the spikes and stims add to those battles. The Echelon contracts were meant to drive a lot of the PvP activity, but they just were not well communicated enough or rewarded well enough. Something we plan on doing is addressing both those issues.
We've got a lot of social updates coming. Some of that is clan work, but more importantly is making chat more reliable and more clear. They're coming slowly, to be sure, but communication is such an important part of an MMO that we're not going to let that aspect lay fallow.
So, we are looking at doing that. Right now, players load a higher resolution texture and model when they enter into a cinematic. Those assets exist, but they are not loaded during gameplay. We're looking to add some knobs to let PC players access those and use them in the normal gameplay. It was never put into the game. The hope was to let the players in the seat be able to shoot their own guns, but a few technical issues kept that from becoming a reality. Some of those issues will be cleared by development in other parts of the game, and, moving forward, I hope to allow the riders to shoot from the raptor at the very least. Sadly, I can't say when we'd be able to get to that.Thank you for the replies. I still follow the game, and I may check back in after this DLC.
Good luck and remember, despite the negativity... most of us complain because we want DEFIANCE to be great.
We are going to expand the EGO grid. I touched on this a bit before, but I can hit a bit more detail now.
My main goal with creating new EGO grid expansions is to make perks which can compete with the big heavy hitters in the perks: preparedness and thick skinned, for example. Expanding the grid just to expand it is tempting, but it's also lazy. The new perks need to be exciting enough that you could make loadouts without a single perk in common. We've got some nice things in store for our good friend EGO.
Spells!?! "Nanites", thank you. So the funny thing is that a lot of our enemies and bosses have abilities not far from magic. I definitely want to provide players flashier and more exciting powers. Right now, it's a push for story content and progression, but once those are secure, expanding the power base, either from new EGO powers or from crazy spikes and stims, is definitely on the TODO list.
That's a lot to respond to, so I'll try to hit them all.
We've talked a bit about the social issues already, but you bring up an interesting point about PvP that our current progression actually handles rather well and is something we are working to preserve with upcoming updates. The barrier to entry in PvP is actually quite low. There are some folks on this forum and others who have already figured out the baseline PvP build where you can be instantly effective. It takes surprisingly few perks and only a good Ironclad shield to really make you able to stand up in a fight. The power curve is really very small presently, and even at max EGO rating a sawed-off shotgun at point blank will drop you like a bad habit. So, lowbies can't dominate a match, but they certainly are not powerless.
As for watching the episodes. They should be available on Hulu online. We'll also be reactivating the episodic content in game in the near future so that you can catch up on that as well.
There are a lot of new features, so I may forget some from this list. But... here goes.
Paid:
- Co-op versions of the storyline maps.
- Fully coop main storyline (No more shuffling you out of your group.)
- Spike, stims, and consumable grenades.
- Clan progression
- Entering arkbreaks called down by other players.
I love the voice cast we pulled together for the game, and they are all incredible actors. Unfortunately, for Byzantine contractual reasons, I cannot discuss their identities. It's maddening in the extreme, let me tell you.But why wasn't it Tiio? I mean, I know for a fact it wasn't her (she told me) and she's done voice work before (Assassin's Creed 3) and even she doesn't have an answer for why Game-Rynn is voiced by some unknown entity who sounds very Russian.
Hello Trick,
Just want to start with saying thanks for doing this. On to the questions!
1. Will this next patch bring an end to everyone looking the same while the game loads? I've seen in a screenshot from the test server this is a new setting called "prox memory" or something like that. Will that make it so we don't have this problem again?
2. In game chat - Seriously when is it going to get fixed? I can't believe how bad it is, just do a copy/paste of rifts and that would be more than enough.
3. Defiance has unbelievable potential for open world PvP, but I don't believe it is being taken advantage of. Firstly, why do we have to wear those stupid PvP suits when we have earned/payed for much cooler looking ones in the "PvE game"? Secondly, Defiance has such a cool open world and awesome way of traversing it, why isn't there a proper open world PvP option? I know there is shadow war, but I'm talking real open world PvP.
Gotta agree with point 3 here. The PvP outfits are so bland!
Hello,
Thanks for taking time out to do this.
I have a quick question. As a massive fan of the game and show I would love to be able to play the game on my new console.
Any plans for a 'next gen' version?
I own the game on both Xbox and PC but almost all of my playtime is on Xbox, which leads me to my next question...
Maybe even cross-platform characters? (Xbox to Pc back to Xbox)
Would love to be able to play on a PC server whilst I'm away from my Xbox.
Thank you for your time,
Speedmetal890
Sorry for the poor formatting, I'm on my phone
So I'm one of the people who purchased the game on day one, and even bought the season pass DLC thing. Although the game was *somewhat* fun for the first 10 or so hours, I kind of lost interest after realizing that it's literally the same stuff over and over, with no real variation. So here are a few questions I have for you, from the perspective of a player who bought into the game early and got burned on just about every level...
I have more questions, but I"ll leave you to those now. Thanks, in advance.
You make me like charity
The proxy memory setting won't entirely alleviate the "generic appearance guy" running around at arkfalls. It will help, but it will primarily let you see more people. Expanded functionality for that is in the works.
The when of the in-game chat is an ongoing issue. I'd love it if it were just and issue of copying and pasting from Rift, but nothing is ever that simple. Sadly. We have entirely different libraries and communications protocols. And UI. We're on it, it's just not ready for Arkbreaker.
The PvP outfits actually assure you can see the weapons your enemies are using. It lowers the memory overhead for all the player models so we can concentrate on accurately displaying their status. It's a memory tradeoff to improve performance.
We're currently focusing on our release platforms, so I can't comment on the new generation of consoles. Even though the Twitch integration features on them make me intensely happy.
We've all wanted cross-platform play and that's even how we play inside the office. (The internal servers are totally blind of platform.) Sadly, for a long list of reasons that are outside my control, we can't support cross-platform play or character transfers.
We are doing a lot for the UI design on the PC. There were some aspects of it which were... unfortunate. We're taking surgical steps to improve it over time. Inventory management was the major push this round.
PvP still has a "build of the day" feel to it, but the Arkbreaker updates to consumables does a bit to change it. We've also altered the way damage resistance works to encourage more builds. Shotguns still dominate a lot, but we're also seeing some more eccentric builds rising to prominence which bodes well for the balance updates we've done so far. We've got some more tricks up our sleeves which will really change the game though.
We've done a lot to the health scaling in arkfall enemies since launch, and that frustration has greatly reduced. They're still tough, but considerably less nutty.
Man, that long hair was hard to maintain.
A land expansion is inevitable in any MMO. I can't say when one will come. (That's not a good AMA answer, sorry.)
The Warmaster is probably the biggest Volge. Now, that does not mean it is the biggest weapon in the Volge arsenal. We saw their crazy walker-tank things in the pilot of the show. They are a sentient species, and they are definitely tool users. The Volge which come out of the Storm Divide have had much more time to prepare.
The Redwood City office is a pretty interesting place. It's a much flatter office if that makes sense. Not Valve flat, but pretty flat. Hell, Scot Hartsman, the CEO, sits in the dev cubicles just ten feet away from my own seat. It is a smaller team, but also more fluid. We have a dedicated team, but we also trade talent with Rift, Trove, and Archeage which really helps from developing tunnel vision in terms of Defiance design.