Interviews:Pre-E3 Interview with Joe Ybarra at TTH
From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)
Interview at TenTonHammer
Jeff Woleslagle, TenTonHammer.com: Thank you very much for allowing us to visit with you, Mr. Ybarra. First of all, could you give us a sense of how Stargate Worlds is progressing through the development process?
Joe Ybarra, VP of Product Development, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment: Where we are in the pre-production right now is, we’re attacking the problem of what is this game and how are we going to build it in many different layers simultaneously. [A prototype] is one piece of the technical layer, but in addition to that aspect we also have the design elements of the game, the story elements, the art “look and feel” elements of the game, the quantity elements, and a bunch of other stuff like schedules, budgets, etc. In order to be out of pre-production, we have to have a clear-cut roadmap of what we’re building and how we’re going to build it. That’s the whole purpose of doing a quality pre-production is to make a lot of the decisions about: what is this game about, what are the player characters like, what are they going to be doing in the course of gameplay, what are the ways that we can expand the game after we go live, what are the key elements of the game that we absolutely have to nail?
In some areas, we have definitive answers. We believe we have figured out what the player races and archetypes structure will be, so from a strategic point of view, we can figure out what player characters are going to be. That’s an important point, in fact you start with that because if you don’t have player characters, you don’t have a game.
Another area that we’re still kind of bogged down in, and mostly because of manpower reasons, is that we’re still struggling to figure out: what is the story of this game? Unlike a lot of products (at least our observation in looking at other products in the marketplace), we feel that the storytelling aspect of our game needs to be really strong and compelling and powerful. And obviously this is very much in line with the TV series because that’s what the show is all about. But more to the point, we think the users are expecting that if we’re going to tell Stargate, we better tell interesting stories with interesting people in interesting locations. That really amplifies the need for us to do a good job in that area.
One of the things that’s really great about working here with this team is that we have so much experience here, not only in the MMO space, but also in writing and in game design, game systems, structures and things like that. So when we sit down and have a meeting, there are way more ideas than we can possibly implement, and what’s interesting is us having these dialogues where, because we’re experienced and have this knowledge, we know how to pare. We can start saying, ‘Well, this isn’t going to work because it conflicts with that, or it doesn’t really amplify this other thing.’ So we start to narrow and narrow and narrow.
End of pre-production is when we’ve narrowed the choices down to something we can look at and say ‘yes, we can build that, and if we believe that if we build it, everybody would like it.’ I’m picking on this particular subject matter because we have to do that for everything in the game. And that’s why it’s really hard to predict when you’ll be done with pre-production.
Right now, our goal is to try to be out of the first half of pre-production by the end of May. The reason that it’s “first half” is because we discovered, again because of lack of people (we didn’t hire the right people at the right time, or because we’ve made some decisions that we didn’t appreciate would effect some other things we’re working on), we know we’re going to be having a “second half” of pre-production. The way we’re going to slice it: the first half tells us ‘this is our game, and this is what it will begin to play like,’ and the second half is ‘here are some of the major game systems, are they really fleshed out so that if we build 7,000 hours of content around this, we know it’d work?’ And then have a refined look at what it will really cost to build this thing in terms of time, money, and effort.
So, the first half at the end of May to be about 80% there, and the remaining is 20% But it’s like anything in life, the last 20% is the hardest part. I’m pretty excited that we’re starting to do treatments to where you can actually start to see what the game is going to look like. I think that that’s really important to us because it gives us that visual grounding.
We’ve got enough of the tech base worked out with BigWorld that we can actually make comments about the size of shards, play environments, the number of areas that we can instantiate, the density of population with players and NPCs. We’ve actually made a lot of progress with the technical side. On the design side, we’re zeroing in on completion of the combat system. The combat system is the most complex system that we have to build. The reason is, it has to evolve. It’s not a static thing; as a player advances through his levels, we expect the way he plays is going to change several times in the course of his evolution. For us to be able to develop a combat system that sustains that over a game life of about 500 hours to completion is a fairly complex task.
To give you a for-instance, we already know that we’re going to use component on our weapons. So here’s a P-90, as you evolve over time you will have sockets on your P-90 that you can buy power-ups that will make your gun more accurate or more powerful or whatever. And these power-ups can be crafted, or can be purchased, or can be acquired in drops. But you’ll also get guns that you find as drops that already have pre-configured upgrades. So now the question is for the style of play for the player: he has several ways of going about upgrading his equipment. What is his motivation for upgrading his equipment? As he goes up in levels, monsters get harder, but we’re also putting in new challenges, i.e. armor piercing rounds were really good at the beginning of play, but they don’t work really well when you get to the middle level of play. So we change things. This is really what I mean about the complexity of the combat system, because it has to embrace that level of detail. And we’re getting closer and closer to being able to do that.
How is your 35 person development team structured at this point in time? Ybarra: It’s pretty much evenly split. Right now, in terms of numbers of people, the largest department is art, followed by design, followed by engineering. Much of the reason why that is is ease of discovering talent. We were able to bring on the art staff very quickly because we were able to find lots of people that like Stargate and want to build an MMO. The design team came on a bit slower because we really wanted to make sure we got the right people. So we interviewed a bazillion people in order to get the ones that we want. That, by the way, is not stopping, we’re still doing that. And we’ve got some amazing folks that have come to work for us on the design side. Then we’ve got engineering, and engineering’s the worst. That’s because we want the best engineers we can find, and so does everybody else. The competition that we’ve enjoyed with those guys has been really fierce. We’ve been able to find some good guys, I just haven’t found them as quickly and in as great a quantity as we would like.
Is going cross-platform with Stargate Worlds out of the question?
Ybarra: No, not at all, in fact we would like to build this for the platforms that can take it on.
For the Xbox 360?
Ybarra: That’s the most obvious one to go after. Hopefully we’ll have others. Some of the decisions we’re making technologically will make it much more easily possible for us to do cross-platform. The more fundamental issue for building an MMO for the cross-platform is keyboard, connectivity, and storage, not necessarily in that order. Some of those things I can overcome, others I need help with.
Would you design different interfaces for two platforms playing on the same shard?
Ybarra: Most likely. The question is if you’re an Xbox 360 user, you have a controller. Whereas if you want them to play an MMO, I have to make them go out and buy a keyboard or I have to bundle a keyboard if I want them to chat.
So the question is whether or not we need to do something in more of like voice chat. And that’s a whole other ballgame, that’s an ornery one. It’s an interesting study as to whether or not voice over IP is a good thing. For players that are mature, it’s great, but unfortunately not all our customers are mature, either by age or by orientation.
Where will Stargate Worlds fall on the spectrum between open-ended and “directed” gameplay? Directing the flow of play is interesting because, like World of Warcraft, we want to take the orientation that the different races starting locations. So there’ll be directed play that says go here, then there, then here. And then eventually you’ll get to a space where we want to start homogenizing everyone. Then you’ll want to specialize. One of the things we like a lot is the idea of archetype based questing. So if I’m a scientist, that I want to stay on quests that are for scientists only. I’m going to get better as a scientist if I follow this quest trail. Quest trails like that will take you pretty much everywhere on the playfield. You could even end up back in the newbie zone for one of the other races to do a scientific research project.
One of the things I can definitely say is that everybody here that’s working on design agrees that directed play is the way to go. Directed play means that you always know what you’re going to do next as the player, that the flow of play is really obvious, and that we encourage you by dangling carrots to take you from place to place. It’s really more how do we choreograph the flow of play, as opposed to how you define play spaces.
Having said that, the other side of the coin is that, when we talked to the producers of the TV shows, they flat out told us we could do things in the MMO that they cannot do in the TV show, and they want us to do that. We can put the players in places that the special effects budgets can’t take TV viewers to. And we’re being very highly encouraged to do that by everybody. So we want to put some pretty exotic alien planets in there, some really interesting locations, put players in bizarre locations doing interesting and crazy things.
We’re talking about the universe here so, you know, the list of possibilities is longer than we have enough human resources to actually build. I’m really looking forward to nailing that aspect of the design down: what worlds are we building, how big are they, and how many of them. We already have a pretty good idea as to the number of worlds we’re going to have and sort of the scope of play each one needs to have, so now that we have a structure, what do we drop on top of the structure to make it really cool.
We’ll send them back to places they’ve already seen too. But as a percentage of play activity, revisiting stuff they already know will be a smaller percentage than going to new places. Because that’s the whole spirit of what science fiction is all about, the exploration and discovery, and we definitely want to reinforce that.
How will non-combat content work? Can I get past that nasty Ori with a wink and a smile?
Ybarra: There’s a little bit of [diplomacy]. I think it’s more like play activities like crafting, construction, exploration, and scientific research. Those are the four major areas that we’ve looked at and really started designing systems around.
The interesting question that is asked when you say ‘non-combat’, the real issue that is raised is: in the absence of running around and shooting things, what do players do? To be able to do that, to have a system that is elegant enough so that players want to do a lot of it, we have to have a system that’s fairly robust, easy to learn, one that expands and grows in the same way combat does over time, and essentially is something that people will feel like, ‘boy, if I’m really good at this, I’m just as studly as the guy with the big gun.’
One of the things we discussed at length is that players are going to want to play the archetypes you see on the show. How do you make being Daniel Jackson fun in our game? What does he do, in order to play for 500 hours and come back at level cap and say ‘wow, that was great, I want to do that again!’ We invested a fair amount of design research on trying to do non-combat game activities, as part of things like deciphering ancient ruins, or putting together block puzzles inside of play areas.
One of the more interesting game design elements that our game has that is somewhat different than what other games have is that we have a real need to have people that are forward observers. That are not necessarily people that are combatants, but somebody that can spot for the heavy weapons guy with a mortar that has only three round of ammunition, and he’s sitting back 200 yards away (out of tactical combat range) waiting for the forward observer to say, ‘Okay, launch your shell to this location.’ To that extent, a Daniel Jackson character can do that kind of thing, where he’s in combat but he’s not actually going to fire a gun. His job is to sneak around, figure out where the best location is to drop a shell, get to that location, radio back to the actual combatant, and coordinate the fire as it comes in. That could be very interesting as a play type.
The stealthy thing: a lot of what you see in the show is Daniel Jackson talking his way out of something or sneaking his way out of something. We can embody that kind of play activity in many different ways in our game design.
That’s the area that we’re looking at because some of the other areas are really pretty straightforward. For example, in trying to be the Sam Carter astro-physicist / engineer type, it’s kind of interesting in that the way that they model the researchers in the TV series, they’re kind of combinations of pure scientist and engineer. It’s not sufficient for Sam Carter to be an expert at quantum physics, she actually can build things that use it. As a combat or gameplay mechanic, half of what I’m doing is learning new things, the other half is applying that new knowledge into the play activities that are going on. That’s a pretty compelling thing. Yea, I can make a +5 shield for this location. How do I go about building that thing, and what scenarios and quests are forcing me to go in that direction.
All of these systems have to have a certain amount of continuity from one another, so if I’ve been playing Archeologist and I get tired of that and want to pick up and be a scientist for some gameplay and start another character; that the things that I learned in being an archeologist carry forward in being an scientist. And both of those tight sets of game mechanics and game knowledge have to carry forward into the combat system. And I’d learn things in the combat system that come back in the other direction.
A simple way to think about how to handle that of course is that if you look at the user interfaces for products like World of Warcraft where you would basically have a plugin user interface. You’d want to put the things you use the most go into the areas of the hotbar in the right places. We see that that’s probably going to be one of the key components of gameplay: knowing when to have what activities available at what time, at what level of speed and accuracy. So a lot of work there.
Will PvP be as ornamental in SGW as in games like World of Warcraft, or will player vs. player combate be used for things like character advancement?
Ybarra: Not so much for character advancement as for elder gameplay. Depending on how we decide to implement the shards, we may have PvP shards in addition to PvE shards. The World of Warcraft model says that gee, they can have an order of magnitude more people with crummy PvP. So what does that mean? If you have to make a decision in making the game work better for PvE versus PvE, which way do you want to go? But again, the third level of our audience is the international people so we recognize that our PvP system has to be really good.
Would you allow third party addons?
Ybarra: I’d like to. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do it, but I’d like to have that kind of stuff. It’s a very challenging task, because there’s a qualitative level to go along with the quantitative and stability issues, not to mention taste. But it would be nice if we could find a way that the users could actually influence and get content into the product. When we first started designing this game, that was one of our goals. Whether or not that stays on the list- it’s hard to say, because we have all of this other stuff that we want to finish first.
Another interview brought a playable race list to light. Can we take it to the bank?
Ybarra: It’s been slightly modified. I’d be more comfortable talking about it in about a month, by then the art department will have given me all the treatments… it’s one thing to say ‘We’re going to build these!’ and then it’s another thing to say, ‘Okay, how many animations do I need for an Asgard? What does he wear? How does it fit together? What does a level 1 Asgard uniform versus a level 100 Asgard uniform?’ I mean, there’s a ton of stuff you have to do. It’s easy to say ‘I want to be an Asgard,’ it’s a whole other thing to pull it off.
Are you comfortable with having irrevocable decisions in Stargate Worlds? That is, allowing players to make decisions they can't reverse later?
Ybarra: One of the things that will make our product successful is replayability. We’re making a real conscious effort to build that into our game.
What’s your feeling on solo vs. group content?
Ybarra: We know that we need to have a sufficient amount of gameplay that people who want to solo, can do so. But, on the other side of the coin, we’d rather encourage having people play in squads. That’s the way the show is, and that’s a very comfortable theme for the users that watch the show. [Crafting and construction] for sure will have a lot of group orientation. We’re taking a very strong orientation towards guilds in this game. We’ll have a guild leveling system, guild-specific crafting, guild banks, guild construction… we really want to encourage players to work together at the guild leve.
But, and we’ve talked a lot about this, the quantum of the game is the squad. And we want to really craft our content so that players that work together as units of four or five or whatever number… we’ll pick on four since that’s the number they use in the show. If I have three buddies that we play every week together, that as we are doing this, the content is actually rewarding us for getting better and better at working as a team. We really believe that, as we get to the higher-end content and players hit level cap and ‘what am I doing now?’, that the majority of the play experience for players at that level should be in squads. And that, we will have large-scale ‘Molten Core’ like content where there are 40-man raids and bigger, but we don’t expect the users to be doing a lot of that. What we’d rather them do is take the squad that they’ve been working with for the last 500 hours, and giving those guys really satisfying and interesting challenges that are repeatable and take them into new areas… just really challenge their teamwork. In crafting the game that way, we’ll be able to get something really quite different than what you see now, because we’ve taken that orientation from the beginning.
Could the ‘buddy system’ be exploited by players with multiple scrips?
Ybarra: Sure, but I don’t care. You want to sign up for 20 subscriptions, I’d be happy to sign you up!
What’s SGW’s core conflict? Humans versus goa’uld?
Ybarra: Actually it’s going to be a little more robust than that. If you follow the TV series- we’ll take Atlantis for this discussion- the bad guy du jour is the OORI, and there’s a certain degree of cooperation at a kind of hands-off level between the humans and the goa’uld. But if you look at the relationship between the humans and the goa’uld over the course of the ten seasons of the show- well, nine that have aired- there have been times they’ve been at each other’s throats, there have been times when they’ve had to be buddy-buddy for short periods of time, and then there’s this weird détente thing, where they’re constantly threatening the humans that ‘we’re going to come and beat your planet into submission!’ but they never actually do it.
But you’re right, one of the foundation conflicts is human vs. goa’uld. That was probably the first major document that we produced on the content side… was articulating what the faction system is all about at the grand strategic level. We ran this material by the producers of the TV series when we went up to Vancouver, and they told us that we really figured it all out. There’s really basically three competing factions in this storyline. There’s the free-will people (which are the humans, basically), the control people (the jaffa or goa’uld), and what we call the entropy group (people that kind of ride for… we’re either in it for ourselves and we don’t care, or we’re just here to make life miserable for everybody).
The way we’re architecting the game is to take advantage of this triad of potential different viewpoints and conflicts, and find different ways to interconnect them in interesting ways. For example, going back to the Goa’uld sometimes allies with you and sometimes doesn’t, we want the content to drive the user into interesting decisions like that. We have a really interesting one that we’ll throw in because we’re modeling Jaffa as a player race: the betrayal quest. The Jaffa start out as being subservient to Goa’uld, but at some point you get to make the decision: ‘I don’t wanna do that anymore, I want to be like Teal’C.”
We want to give the user lots of choices like that. Really good game design is about presenting the players with lots of choices, and they have to be good choices. We’re really focused in on doing that.
The storyline is going to be really interesting and robust. We’ve been working on this for months; we really want to make sure that when players sit down for the first time that they start playing this game, that they know why they are doing things. I have a purpose, so when I fire up my first character, let’s say it’s a Sam Carter character… I’m an astrophysicist, and I’m a human. As soon as I start reading the character description, as soon as I’m in the scenario or first quest, I understand where I’m going for the first 100 levels of play. That’s how strongly we feel about that. And then along the way of that thread, we will take you in twists and turns, and you’ll get choices of going this way and that way. That’s why we think it’s really important that our storyline and our content is way, way superior to what you normally see in these products. One of the things that’s really painful about building an MMO is that we have to sustain at least 500 hours of gameplay. That is a huge amount of content to do, and to try to tell a story, and to have a rich play experience and do all that, is an intensely huge amount of work. But we’re going to pull this off.
How will the game interface with the Stargate TV serials?
Ybarra: We’re still trying to figure out what the best working relationship is. Both the TV series folks, ourselves, and MGM all have the same motivation to tie in the video game with the TV show. To the extent that, now that we have a feel for the production cycles and we understand what our goals are, there’s no reason we can integrate live game content into airing shows when they come out. They finish these shows months before they actually air, and I need to be finished with my content months before I actually deploy. So there should be a way for us to connect those dots together.
That’s one of the major differentiating features of our product, we think.
Will you need a large team to match production cycles with the television shows?
Ybarra: No, there are two things that influence that. The first one is: how good is my production path? How good are my tools? How good is the code base? How fast can I turn something in to the game; get it tested, and then deploy? The second is planning: knowing what it is I’m going to do. If I wait till the last minute to decide what to do, then I’m not going to have any opportunities to get this done.
One of the philosophies we’re trying to work towards here, as a practice, is a 6 week dev cycle: 4 weeks in development, 2 weeks in QA, and then deploy. If we use that cycle throughout production, so that by the time we get to live team, it’s built into the cycle of the team. If we work with that, then the real problem solving is making decisions about what you’re going to build in those four weeks, and being really wise about taking on as much as you can get done. If we do those two things, we should be ok.
Will you target casual or hardcore players with Stargate Worlds?
Ybarra: Casual gamers. Actually, casual isn’t a good descriptor. Our primary target audience is players that are new to MMOs, and when I say that, I mean players that are playing games right now, but have not tried MMOs for whatever reason. Our secondary audience is the existing audience. Two years from now, the players that are naieve are going to be hardcore. That being said, we know we have to build in some pretty intense content.
How do you attract non-MMO’ers?
Ybarra: It’s more than just user-friendly, but yes, that’s one component of it. Easy to learn, hard to master is another. Depth, you know, layered depth, I want to teach it to you as you go, keep you in the game longer. There’s a lot of different techniques you have to do to get to that audience, make sure you invest a lot of time doing your UIs for example, they have to be transparent.
The third level of audience we’re going after is international customers, which is going to prove to be a fairly interesting challenge, but what it does force us to do is embrace PvP right from the beginning of the design, so that we are building a PvP-PvE environment simultaneously. Because we know that some of these things are mutually exclusive, that we have to design game systems up front and say ‘Great, ok, it doesn’t work that way in PvP, are we ok with that? Sure. Ok, then let’s go on.’
How much of a groundswell is there for Stargate Worlds in the international scene?
Sara Barker, CME's Director of Marketing: It’s actually huge in Europe, especially in England, Germany, and France. Right now on our forums, there are way more users from Europe than there are from North America.
Joe Ybarra: We’re finding, now that we’re talking to some of the publishing partners [in the Far East], that there is Stargate, but more importantly the fact that there are no science fiction games. We know that we are filling a massively big hole.
Is SGW culturally of interest in the Far East?
Ybarra: Based on the interest we’re getting from the publishers I would have to say yea. If they’re saying ‘We want your product because there’s nothing like it and we could sell a billion of them’, I’ll build it! The problem is that the folks in the Far East consume this stuff at an even higher rate of speed than our folks do. It’s pretty frightening how fast those guys can burn through this material, so we have a little bit of a challenge in addressing their needs.
Our fourth level of target audience is Stargate fans. But in order to be a successful game, my first priority is to make something that’s really a lot of fun. It just happens to be about Stargate. If it’s not a good game, we might as well not show up.
Is it worth comparing Stargate Worlds to another similarly licensed game, Star Wars Galaxies? Have you learned anything from SOE's perceived mistakes?
Ybarra: I really have to say I've learned more from World of Warcraft. When you compare competitive products, what you’re looking at is, what are the consumers taking as the play experience that got them to play? That’s the part that I care about when I’m playing these games. The other part of it: how do I actually build this? I could have the best game design and the best intentions, if I have no clue as to how to build it, it’s not going to happen.
What, in your opinion, is special about World of Warcraft?
Ybarra: I think accessibility is one of the biggest reasons it’s that way. And I think also the ‘simple to learn, hard to master’ aspect of the game design is really compelling. I think that also, by and large… after many months of playing, I finally got a level 60 character this week, I can now speak to aspects of the game that obviously I wouldn’t be able to talk to if I hadn’t done that. As you move through the content, they do a really good job of keeping your expectation level high; it always feels like there’s something new I’m going to learn about or there’s some new spell I’m going to get, or some new adversary.
The feedback loops are extremely good in that game, and they do a reasonably good job of pacing. There’s a stretch of gameplay in there where they lost sight of the good technique that they used before and after this stretch, and this stretch I’m describing is from level 35ish to level 48ish. And what happens in that space is some of the goal orientation, the quests are harder to find, they’re spread out, they’re less interesting for whatever reason. This grind period is where you, since you don’t know what you’re going to do, you spend your time beating up on pigs and other random things. And there’s enough reward system though because I’m still leveling, and I’m still getting new spells, and ‘as soon as I get to level 40, I can go to that other area there.’ So it keeps you going, but there’s that gap of pacing in there.
But once you get to level 49-50, it all of the sudden goes right back to where it was before. There’s more stuff to do than I could possibly imagine. In fact, I went from level 50 to level 60 in about three weeks. I just ripped right through the game at that point, and it was exciting and really compelling and that’s the way the game is right from the beginning: so you go from level 1 to 20 feeling exactly like that. ‘I can’t wait till I get home, because I can’t wait to get this spell…’ Then you hit the doldrums, then you get it back again. I’m picking on this aspect of World of Warcraft because there’s precious little you can pick on in that game.
Do developers put these “doldrums” in the game intentionally?
Ybarra: That’s one of the interesting theories about MMO design: ‘The way I’m going to keep my customers, I’m going to make it take forever to get to the level cap.’ So it takes 2,000 hours to make the level cap in EverQuest, and there’s no way I’m playing for 2,000 hours, I don’t care how good it is.
Does Stargate Worlds have a target age range?
Ybarra: I’d like to go to the same age group as the World of Warcraft type people. But basically it’s the folks that watch the TV show that are going to be the target audience. They map very nicely into computer users and game players.
Any closing impressions on the progress of Stargate Worlds?
Ybarra: As you can probably tell, we’re pretty passionate about this project. We’re all excited because many of us have built products before and we want to use this as a vehicle to take all the skills that we learned and apply them and at the same time explore new possibilities. You always stand on the shoulders of the people that came before you, and the good news is we have some of those people here.
These games, when they’re at their best, are about families. My buddies and I, we’re a family playing this game. The guild is a big family. Our orientation is to bring that to the forefront, and rewarding the player for thinking on that basis. I think that’s a really exciting aspect of what we’re trying to do. What’s fun about it is, this is more a philosophy and design problem than it is anything else. The code that I need to actually support this is trivial. The trick is figuring out how to do it.
As a creative process (and this applies to products other than just MMOs),when we’re done building, the end result of the product is our personalities, the personalities of the people that created the product. Our beliefs, our thinking, and our attitudes are really referenced in what we do. I’m making that statement based upon the fact that I’ve been building games for 25 years, and I’ve built a lot of different kinds of games, I’ve worked with lots of people that have built different kinds of games, that seems to be a pretty unifying trait. You can tell a Will Wright game from a Sid Meier game. I mean, there’s a personality in there, and you can see it.
