Interviews:Ten Ton Hammer talks to Joe Ybarra at ODGC - Part 2
From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)
Interview at Ten Ton Hammer
Geographic Exploration
The most fascinating aspect about the geographic exploration in Stargate Worlds is the fact that much of the travel is non-linear, meaning that you can step through a Stargate on a world covered in ice or snow and emerge in a volcanic, lava-filled crater. In all truth, you really don’t know where you’re going to head next, unless you have memorized the coordinates to that particular world.
“One of the atmospheres that we’re trying to give to the player is the concept of always needing more gate addresses,” Joe said. “Because until they get a new address, they really don’t know where to go next. When those new coordinates fall into their hands, they’re like, ‘Oh wow! I have a new place to go!’ They jump through the gate and they’re in an entirely new world.”
Stargate Worlds, like other games, also has the built-in need for exploration as the characters look for the best resources available. Often, the areas that have the best alien ruins aren’t drawn out on a map, thus the players are encouraged to go explore the playing field and see what they can find.
Another exploration aspect is integrated into the storyline and the puzzles as well. Since the developers do have an instant teleportation system available to them, they can send players all over the galaxy to solve quests and puzzles. “With the gate, we can make players go through a whole range of different locations to finish a quest,” Joe said. “While the player is completing that quest, he could see a new world he’s really interested in and come back later for a closer look.”
One of my biggest concerns, coming into this part of the interview, was whether higher level players could share addresses with lower level players and perhaps give them an unfair advantage over there peers. It would also take away the thrill of learning new addresses through exploration and achievement. Joe said that the higher players couldn’t “give” the addresses to the new players, but there was still the problem of dialing in the gate to wherever the lower level player needed to go.
“We’re not exactly sure how to deal with this, as of yet,” Joe said. “I mean, a player could power level from 0-50 with a high level character, but they wouldn’t see anything. We want our players to experience the game world and find every little nook and cranny in the game while still keeping the pace of the game relatively high.”
Storyline Exploration
Exploring a world’s geography may be fun, but following the storyline of Stargate Worlds may prove to be an even more interesting experience. The development team at CME is quite aware that having a solid story in their MMO is important, because Stargate SG-1 fans are used to having exquisitely written plots from the writers of the series.
Instead of making individual story arcs for each character combination – like World of Warcraft attempted – Joe was interested in blending the stories together and making for a separate yet combined experience that immerses players in the Stargate lore.
“One thing I thought World of Warcraft could have done better were things like archetype specific quests,” he said. “For those of you who have played a Warlock (like me), you didn’t really have a lot of class-specific quests. But the Druid, he had all these specific quests to unlock abilities and so forth.”
“The best example that we can share with you is what we’re doing with the Asgard,” he continued. “Fans of the show will know this, but one of the Asgard’s main motivators, as an entire race, is how to make more Asgard. They have a real problem because they don’t reproduce sexually, they have to clone themselves! So their whole genetic pool is degrading over time.”
“With this in mind, we modeled that whole concept into what the Asgard, as player characters, are trying to accomplish,” Joe stated. “The players will be totally involved in trying to find more Asgardian genetic strains, trying to find new cloning technlogies, and that sort of thing.”
And the other races will have similar storylines to the Asgard; the Stargate lore allows for the CME developers to explore these timelines. For example, the Free Jaffa are all about helping the rebellion move forward, while the Goa’uld are really trying to get their powerbase back. There’s lots of story to choose from in the Stargate universe.
“We really want players to go through this story more than once, and explore the world from every different persepective,” Joe said. “There’s so much that developers create that isn’t explored in MMOs, and we want to lessen that and allow players to see our entire creation.”
Along with the individual storylines, Joe really hopes that through the development process his team creates a reason for players to look deeply at their character types and really explore what makes them Jaffa or Goa’uld or a Human Soldier. “The reasons for us to do this are two fold,” Joe reasoned. “One, we want the fans who pick up this game to be able to see this kind of content.”
“Second, for the users who do not know Stargate; we want them to be able to see the reasoning behind their gameplay choices. Since Stargate is not a traditional MMO, there may be some confusion as to why each race/archetype can achieve certain things, and we want to make that reasoning clear to the new players. We want players to see what it means to be a Jaffa, Asgard, etc.”
As a side note, players may only get to play as a member of a species – such as a Jaffa or a Goa’uld – but Joe did mention that a “Talent” system is being implemented in the game to bring differentiation to the different character archetypes. While Joe did not go into detail about the “Talent” system, it did sound like this would bring some uniqueness to individual Asgards or Jaffa.
Pacing
Even with this focus on exploration and puzzle-solving, Joe and the CME team really want to keep the pacing of the game relatively high. While the modern combat system lends for a relatively high-energy style of gameplay, that quick pacing is necessary in the rest of the game for the players to remain engaged and not want to simply shoot bad guys all day.
“That’s why the users are constantly moving through things and finding answers to problems, because we have to keep the pace of the game constantly at that high-level,” Joe said. “There are really two strategic reasons why this is important to us. First, if I’m going to build all this content, I want the customers to see it.”
“The other thing is – staying with the economics of building this thing – my live team doesn’t need to be focused on just expanding one section of the gameplay,” Joe continued. “Players are going to be playing at various levels, so the live team can drop content in at whatever level they feel needs the most work.”
With a background as rich and diverse as the Stargate series, it’s no wonder that the game developers would want to have players experience all that the game has to offer. They’ve put in time and energy into seeing the game succeed, and the fans will want to see the world just as much as the developers want them to see it.
Tying Back Into The Series
Speaking of the fans, while he was talking Joe brought up a very intriguing point about the future of the game. Although much of their game is based on actual selections from the TV series, some of what Joe and the CME team are working on is original content within the Stargate universe. Since the game is backward looking, the producers of the TV series are actually interested in having the CME team put particular items from the upcoming series and Stargate Atlantis into the Stargate Worlds game.
On an even more exciting note, there may be some original Stargate Worlds content being integrated into the new series. “They’ve actually requested some content from our game to be used in their shows,” Joe said. “In exchange for that, they want to put something really solid and recognizable from our game into the pilot of the new show.”
And post-launch, this tieback into the show is going to be even more reinforced. “Players will be able to see certain items, races, or locations and know they came straight out of the game,” Joe said. “We want to reinforce to the players that we’re releasing two products at once: A game and a new show.”
“Even farther out of launch, we’d really like to translate content between the game and the show in real-time,” Joe added. “When something new is opened up in the series, we’ll put it into the game and vice versa.”
Updates On The Game
According to Joe, there may be some new content going out soon on one of the storyline progressions in the game. This particular storyline focuses on the eventual destruction of Tolana and how this looks from the development standpoint. Developing Tolana was important because it helped refine the development of the worlds through each Stargate coordinate and it really emphasized the storylines from the show.
“Tolana is actually visited in three different stages during play,” Joe said. “You start off in Tolana and it looks great. Everything is very advanced and new; nothing is wrong with the world. You come back to Tolana later and it’s being assaulted by the Goa’uld. There’s all this stuff going on, explosions and fire-fighting are rampant. Lots of action.”
“Finally, the third time you visit Tolana, it is destroyed. There’s nothing left but rubble,” Joe finished. Hopefully we’ll be getting some screenshots from this progression soon, because it sounds amazing!
