Interview: Hermann K. Peterscheck on Jumpgate Evolution’s Design Philosophy
The MMO Gamer: On the subject of SciFi… The last time we spoke, the subject of EVE came up. Unless Iceland is struck down by God and wiped off the face of the Earth within the next year, CCP are obviously going to be your competition in the “space MMO” segment of the genre.
Does that alter your design philosophies at all? Do you look at EVE and say, “Anything they can do we can do better”?
Hermann K. Peterscheck: Yes and no. First of all, all MMOs compete with each other in the sense that players are going to choose where to spend their time and money. Inside of that are many niches, although fantasy is the major one (thanks to World of Warcraft).
Jumpgate Evolution was always planned to be a more action based MMO in the sense that you will fly your ship around and go on space adventures. It’s more like Privateer Online or X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter – that kind of game. This is different than EVE.
Obviously the game will have missions, trade, mining, and all sorts of other meta game type features – but this is actually no different than Everquest 2 or WoW.
We would be stupid not to look at what has made EVE successful and see if we can improve on those things. That is what drives the whole industry, and really the human race, forward – iteration and incremental improvement on successful models.
However, I am a strong believer that people tend to play great games and if you make a great game, they will come. So our major focus is on making sure the game itself is a quality product worth asking people to spend their time and money on.
The MMO Gamer: In order to make that great game, in a pre-beta environment with limited outside input, what do you use to gauge what it is that the majority of players (rather than the board warriors) are looking for?
Hermann K. Peterscheck: I think this is hard to do no matter what. Knowing your audience is a tricky thing and, as you say, people who are vocal and post a lot do not necessarily represent the average person that will play your game.
It turns out there are a few ways to evaluate if the game is good. The easiest way is to look at other successful games in the same genre and see if you match them in the areas you are focusing on. For example in the case of Jumpgate Evolution we can look at games like EVE, Freespace 2, Privateer, Freelancer and so on.
These are all examples of well executed space games and it’s not hard to create a list of things they do well that contribute to that success. That is to say, many of those games have similar strong points which are what the majority of players are looking for.
Another way to do it is to ask them. But you need to ask the right questions and in the right way. The nice thing about NetDevil is the company is big enough now that we have a large and varied pool of gamers to choose from. If we are working on something we grab someone and do a test and see what they like or don’t like, find confusing and so on.
I was shocked to find that there is enormous consensus on what people enjoy and don’t enjoy.
When you think about it, this makes sense. As an example, I don’t consider myself a hardcore RTS player but you can bet your life I will be playing Starcraft 2 when it comes out. I’m also not a huge FPS fan, in fact it’s probably my least favorite genre; but let’s face it BioShock was amazing.
The thing that strikes me is that great games are the ones that transcend their genre and reach into the masses. It is not by accident that many of the highest ranked and most critically acclaimed games are also the best sellers. It turns out people don’t like to play bad games and reward quality with their patronage.
Although it’s very hard to quantify we tend to know a great game when we play one. When I fired up Starcraft for the first time did I think to myself “Well, I don’t play RTSes so even though this is great I better stop player.” Of course not. It was fun, I played it.
I also think that developers are better at self-evaluation than we like to admit. I suspect that many of us that have worked on products have a suspicion when something is not good enough. When we know the game is good enough we want to tell everyone, get all our friends and family to play it; we can’t wait to show the world.
I think that if the people on my team are going home after work and playing Jumpgate Evolution for fun that it’s a reasonably good assumption that many other people will as well. So a combination of that and blind user testing is a good way to know when you are there.
Knowing how to get there is a whole different problem, of course.
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