Interview: Hermann K. Peterscheck on Jumpgate Evolution’s Design Philosophy
The MMO Gamer: Alright, then tell us a little bit about Evolution’s hook. From the moment someone first creates their character and logs into the world, what they going to experience? What is going to reach out through the screen, grab hold of them, and say “Play this game”?
Hermann K. Peterscheck: As you say, the “hook” is very important. Internally we lovingly refer to it as the “first 15 minutes” although the time scale is somewhat irrelevant. The thought is that if your game has 300 hours of mediocre content, your game basically has 0 hours of content. Thus it is better to have 150 hours of great content.
Of course, this is simple to say and extremely difficult to do. My theory is that to grab people all you have to do is not do anything stupid that will cause them to not play your game. People that download or buy a game are ready to play; they want to be entertained, they are a positive audience.
So to maintain that attitude your game has to do some basic things. First and foremost, it has to actually run. This means no crashes, no bad frame-rates and no confusing UI to turn people away.
Once you have that (no small feat!) your game has to tell people who, what and why. It is important that in the first few minutes you know what you are doing and why you are doing it. This is the emotional investment that many of the best games nail: BioShock, Call of Duty 4, and Company of Heroes, just to name a few.
There are lots of ways of doing that, and I won’t give away too much, but we are working on that kind of stuff right now.
The third thing is to make sure that players don’t get stuck right away. As an example, we are focusing on giving you a simple mission right away and working hard to make sure that in blind testing people can accept it, understand it, and complete it within a few minutes. Then they get a nice reward that encourages them to play some more.
We are trying to do this without a formal tutorial, and instead making it a kind of “as it happens” scenario. This has proven to be difficult, but definitely worth while – tutorials can be boring, and in MMOs there can be a feeling of not “really” playing.
Once you have those three things all you really have to do is keep repeating them and adding new things from time to time – it’s really about not getting in the way of the fun the player already wants to have!
The MMO Gamer: Emotional investment, as you mentioned, is one of the most important aspects of getting the hook into a potential player.
But, in this case, how do you get a player invested in an inanimate object—when their character is represented by a ship?
Hermann K. Peterscheck: I believe that immersion is the act of the developer meeting the player’s expectations. Players WANT to be immersed… they start a game hoping that it is going to be great. All we have to do as developers is step out of the way.
I think the point is that you don’t have to be invested in the inanimate object, you have to be invested in the game world.
In the case of games with heavy character customization, such as WoW or City of Heroes, you are attached to the character which you control and represents you in the game world. In the case of a game like Freespace 2 (which is similar to Jumpgate Evolution) you are the pilot, and the ship is the vehicle through which you express your actions.
I played Freespace 2 again a few weeks ago and I maintain that it is incredibly immersive although I don’t necessarily have an emotional relationship with my ship. I’d also argue that there are a lot of character based games that don’t immerse me at all, even though I spend all this time customizing and modifying them.
Where it gets dangerous is when you forget what it is you are trying to immerse people in. I think if we tried to make people have an emotional relationship with their ship and ignored the rest of the game, that would be a huge mistake. We have the task of bringing the emotional value directly to the player and the ship is an extension of that.
The statement that character MMOs have been the successful ones is largely true, however I also think that it is a dangerous assumption to think that just because game X is the #1 game doesn’t mean that it’s the only possible way.
Remember that until the Lord of the Rings movies, Hollywood maintained that long running fantasy epics simply weren’t mainstream – now we have one after the other. I suspect that if Blizzard had made “World of Starcraft” we would be reading article after article about how SciFi is more mainstream in gaming than Fantasy.
At the end of the day if you make a great game that is fun to play and strikes people on an emotional level you will ultimately be successful. I also think it’s better to focus on a few things and do them well, than to split focus too much and execute lots of things poorly.
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