Interviews:Jake Simpson Chats with Shack News
From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)
Interview at ShackNews
As World of Warcraft continues to gain more and more subscribers--and, by extension, as Blizzard continually disproves estimates about the total potential size of the massively multiplayer audience--more and more companies have joined in the MMO fray, in hopes of getting a piece of that mammoth pie. Enter developer Cheyenne Mountain. The studio is staking its claim in the MMO world with a game based on long running sci-fi television series Stargate SG-1, soon to enter its tenth season on the air. Cheyenne Mountain itself, on the other hand, has only been around since 2002. Its staff has no dearth of experience, though, with talent from Blizzard, Raven, the Hollywood special effects industry, GT Interactive, and others; they've also got one of the founders of Electronic Arts.
Cheyenne's first effort, Stargate Worlds, is still a ways off, but I had the chance to get some early details from developer Jake Simpson to see how the game is shaping up.
Shack: There hasn't been much too information about Stargate Worlds so far. What's the game all about?
Jake Simpson: It’s about Stargate SG1, the universe they inhabit, the bad guys, the good guys, the political situations and mostly its about really cool StarGate effects, because hey, you’ve never seen one of those before, have you?
(Oh, you have? What?? Where??? Rats, back to the drawing board for that then!)
Seriously, it’s an MMO that contains lots and varied elements based in the Stargate Universe utilizing the rich and varied situations and characters therein. You don’t get to be a 10 season Sci-Fi series without creating a pretty compelling and interesting universes along the way.
Shack: Stargate Worlds is based on the Stargate-SG1 television series as opposed to the film, correct? What's the basic setting?
Jake Simpson: It is based on the TV Series, not the film, although one does follow on chronologically from the other. So the basic idea is that the US Military have discovered a large ring that has a combination key on it. When the combinations are set right, it sets up a wormhole between ‘our’ ring and another located on another planet. Different key combinations dial up different planets. The military (most specifically the Air Force) has set up a program of small teams that explore these different planets to bring back useful technology and meet the inhabitants.
In doing so, we found that humanity was used to seed lots of these other planets by a race called the Gou’ald, who are a bunch of parasite snakey things that take over people and make them their puppets. They pretended to be the ancient gods of our planet, and still think they are gods to this day. When a person gets taken over they get deep voices and glowy eyes and other things that would make Marylin Manson dance with glee if he could get his hands on this technology.
Anyway, these are bad people and they don’t like us and want to do bad things to us, like kill us all, make us slaves, eat all the Twinkies, the usual meglomanic stuff.
In the mean time, the Stargate exploration teams have also come across other races, like the Jaffa (pronounced Jaf-fa), who look like us but are bred as warriors for the Gou’ald and act as wet nurses to the parasites.
And so on. You get the idea. Lots of different locations, political situations, cool electrical guns and opportunities to do episodes where people loose their memories and spend the episode ‘remembering.’
Shack: The game seems heavily focused on squad-based PvE gameplay. How much focus is there on PvP?
Jake Simpson: There is a roughly equal amount of focus on PVP as there is on PVE – For some reason people tended to focus on the PVE aspect of the original announcement – however interally there has always been intent to have a large PVP element. At this stage, with the design more down, PVP is starting to come into focus more. The end game should be 50/50 in terms of what you’ll be doing.
One thing we are trying to do is make the distinction between parts of the game where PVE is the main focus, and other parts where PVP is a more natural mechanic. This may come at a quest level, or even a server level; at this stage we are still nailing down the particulars. Suffice to say PVP is just as important at PVE right now. You can’t have an MMO without the opportunity to blow your mates away, can you?
Shack: Bots are something that are not particularly common in MMOs, but we'll be seeing them in Stargate. What is Cheyenne doing to ensure that the MMO feel is not lost when players are making use of bots? Jake Simpson: Good question. Right now we are doing a lot of prototyping using Unreal Script to ensure that we get smart bots, but not so smart that you don’t actually need to play yourself. There’s a balance between dumb as a post bots that bump into walls and can’t operate an elevator without you, and bots that run out at the start of the mission and have it half completed by the time you get to the action, and that balance is what we are going for. There are many things we want to try and just see how it works – much as I’d love to document them here a) we aren’t sure what some of them are yet (bot decision making is very much an iterative science) and b) do I really want to tell everyone else doing an MMO what our secrets are? Aha! I think not!
Shack: Introduce us to the game's two factions, and how they differ in gameplay terms.
Jake Simpson: Who said anything about 2? Lets see, in the show you’ve got the Ori, the Gou’ald, the Jaffa, the Asgard, the Tau’ri (that’s us!), the Tok’ra (Has anyone else noticed a pre-ponderence of apostrophes’ in the Stargate naming conventions?? I gather the writers get royalties on apostrophe’s usage...) and so on. And that’s not counting what we may or may not create ourselves.
In terms of questing factions, you’ll probably be looking at two distinct factions point of view – although which factions go into which point of view you are looking at will get shuffled about based on the content and aim of the specific question undertaking.
And, of course, Amanda Tapping (Colonel Sam Carter) would get her own faction all by itself because, well, obviously she needs it. I, personally, have it all planned out.
What?
Shack: How deep is the game's character creation?
Jake Simpson: Well, fairly deep. We’ll be doing the usual Create A Character stuff that MMO players have come to expect these days, but adding a few twists to it such that it will be unique. I wish I could go into details but right now that’s a fairly classified area. Obviously we want a fair degree of customization available in the game – uniqueness being a big commodity in the MMO space.
Shack: What sorts of quests can we expect?
Jake Simpson: We are aiming at a very story based mission profile. Bearing in mind we are based on a highly story based license; it would make sense that our missions looked like episodes of Stargate. Missions are planned to have more than one way to complete them, and some missions will have alternate goals depending on who your faction is that you play as – it would make sense that if your mission is an group attempting to take out a Gou’ald mother ship then if you play as a Gou’ald your end game would be 180 the opposite of the other guys.
Shack: What is the game's economy like?
Jake Simpson: We’ve been thinking about this and discussing it recently; there are many ways we could go with this but inserting it into the StarGate universe without it seeming too tacked on is a tricky one. More on this when we have more concrete plans.
Shack: There will be multiple worlds to explore. How will this be structured, and how will travel work? What sorts of environments will we see?
Jake Simpson:Have you actually watched Stargate at all? They have this really big ring thing that acts like a gate between worlds. Oh you have? Oh right, you mean vehicles? Ahh, right. Currently, while we have large outside areas planned we aren’t planning any driveable vehicles at this time. We may well have some taggable vehicles (ie non player controlled vehicles, like a subway train) that the player can use; we are still evaluating where to put our technology efforts at this time though.
Shack: How will the world of the game evolve or change over time, if at all? Is there any sort of overarching story?
Jake Simpson: This will be an ongoing game – much like the competition is constantly evolving and growing. This is what players demand these days, and we are doing our best to listen to our players (or players to be – you can have your own say at the forums). We can’t afford to sit on any laurels (not that we have any yet) because the competition is so tight, and rightly so.
In some cases we may well have an overarching story, and in other cases some missions may be more throw away – there’s no specific answer to this right now because we are still forming up what some of the missions will be.
There will be episodic content being released – the whole point of what we are doing is to emulate the TV show in delivery method – internally we are even referring to that content as being “episodes” like the TV show.
One interesting aspect here is that the TV show people (who have been nothing but helpful and enthusiastic it should be pointed out, as have the US Air Force, who have a stake in Stargate SG1) have mentioned the strong possibility that missions and situations set up in the game might well find them selves canon in the TV show too. The possibility of game events being referenced in the show is definitely there. So, no pressure there then.
Shack: What sort of graphical standard is being targeted; is the game intended more for higher-end or more mainstream machines?
Jake Simpson: Well, we are using a state of the art codebase for the client, and intending to use DirectX 10 functionality, so we are looking at being an extremely pretty game. We are aiming at today’s high end, so by the time we come to market that should be main stream then.
Shack: Do you have any reflections on competing in the current MMO market, which is currently dominated by a few big players, most notably Blizzard?
Jake Simpson: I think the phrase "go big or go home" is applicable here. We aren’t planning on a niche game here; we are planning on going all out for something that players want to play.
It’s a very hard to break into game genre, and right now fantasy games are definitely the top of the pile – whether that’s because of implementation or approachability of the subject matter is something that’s been hotly contested around here. We want to make something that has a rich universe, and has familiar MMO aspects to it, along with enough new elements to keep you interested, but that has a gentle learning curve for the newbies so you don’t start your MMO experience being wiped out by a level 60 sorcerer all day because he doesn’t have anything else to do.
It’s certainly a busy genre to be working in, but one of the things about having such successful competition around is that you get plenty of examples of how to do things ‘right’, which is nice.
Shack: Will you be following a standard MMO payment and subscription plan?
Jake Simpson: Probably. We are still working on those aspects of The Plan. Right now we are just concentrating on making a game that people want to play rather than worrying about whether people will want to give us money to play it. "Small moves, Ellie!"
Shack: Does Cheyenne Mountain have any other projects in the works at the moment?
Jake Simpson: Right now we are concentrating on the development of Stargate Worlds (in between sunning ourselves at our exclusive pool side offices, obviously). There might well be some dipping of toes into console development some point in the near future (especially since we are getting proficient with Unreal technology which has next gen versions), but right now we are focusing on building a world class MMO. And boy, that’s got a lot of work behind it. It’s all a pretty known science, but man, there’s a lot to do!
Shack: How far along is Stargate Worlds' development, and when can we expect to see it ship?
Jake Simpson: Ummm. Well, we are doing a lot of prototyping, we’ve made quite a lot of concrete technical decisions about how we are going to deliver the experience, and what tech we are basing ourselves on. We’ve been nailing down our design idea’s – races, environments, disciplines, skills etc to the point where we’ve got a pretty concrete destination in mind. We are also staffing up to have the people we need for full production. We’ve got some hurdles to overcome in sheer quantity of work, of that there’s no doubt, but right now we have a plan for leaping those hurdles – we just need some time to actually go do it.
In terms of shipping I wouldn’t like to say – it’s far enough out that I’m sure there would be a degree of fluctuation in date and I hate to promise something and it not be right.
It won’t be 2006 though. That I can promise you.
Oh and we are always looking for good people to help us build this. So if you fancy sunny Phoenix and have game development experience, we want to hear from you.
Shack: Thanks for your time.
