SGWNews:05/10/06 Pre-E3 Interview with Joe Ybarra at TTH

From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)

Article at StargateWorlds.com

by Khatie

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.

TTH: 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 wewant. 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.

TTH: 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.

TTH: 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.

TTH: 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.