Possibility Space Founder Gage Galinger on Outsourcing, Procedural Content, and Adventure in Warrior Epic

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The MMO Gamer: Up to today micro-transactions in online games have appealed primarily to a younger audience; the 13 to 15 year olds with Maple Story and things of that nature.

iTunes, of course, is probably the most readily available mainstream example of a micro-transaction system. How many people do you know that don’t use iTunes? But, there still seems to be this stigma attached to it within MMOs. To many people it’s still associated with IGE, buying gold, and all of that.

How do you overcome that perception?

Gage Galinger: I think it has really largely to do with the content. I don’t think that the games that came before us have been marketed under what I would call the Internet model.

If you look on the Internet, what we’re talking about is actually the norm. Everything is very accessible, right? When you go to YouTube or CNN.com, regardless of what PC you’re using, you can access it. And it’s free. You don’t have to sign up. You can just start using it.

Then, if you want, there’s a value-add proposition on the backside. Now video games, and all my games are a complete anomaly to that. And there’s no real reason for that. That’s just from legacy. But I feel pretty strongly that if you apply the principles that make the Internet work to mainstream gaming, it’s going to work as well.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, that’s enough about the business angle of the title. Let’s talk a little about the game itself. During the demo you described it as Diablo meets The Sims. Can you elaborate on that?

Gage Galinger: One of the important aspects of our game is that we wanted to solve the session length problem.

Most online games that provide a very immersive experience today require very long sessions – two to three hours to get done what you need to get done. So, the first choice was to go to a short session model. And in going to a short session model it becomes clear that you also want to do a multiple warrior model.

Doing a multiple warrior model, we wanted to have a house to put these in. So rather than just have one guy or one character that you sort of abstractly glue your property to, we decided to give every player a castle.

In this castle you can buy lots of stuff, keep all your loot, and recruit lots of warriors. It’s like training up your own little dollhouse of soldiers and customizing your castle how you want it to be. That’s how The Sims comes in: the castle is both functional and cosmetic.

The Diablo aspect comes in from the actual gameplay. It is a dungeon crawl, it is a largely cooperative, five-person PvE mission based short session experience. We also have PvP modes, but they’re also again short session. And basically it’s a nice update to the dungeon crawling Action-RPG genre.

The MMO Gamer: Where did the idea to create Warrior Epic come from?

Was it originally devised as a way to try and take advantage of the free micro-transaction model? Or was the thinking more along the lines of, “You know, this would make a great game. Maybe we can add micro-transactions to it.”

Gage Galinger: This initial idea started probably five years ago. Even back then, I already thought the market was over-saturated with the EverQuest style of gaming, and yet they continue to come out.

So it was sort of a mixture. One was the business model. I felt very strongly the business model would work. I waited on the sidelines for a year or two before I did anything about it, but when I saw that the major Western publishers weren’t doing anything, I said, “Well, you know what? I’m going to do something about it. I can’t wait anymore.”

Then when it came to the game style, you know, I’m a huge fan of Diablo, I love the Action-RPG genre, and I’m just surprised that nobody took this new online business model and applied it to this very successful, very popular genre, because I thought it was an easy choice.

I said, “I want to be the guy that brings a nice Action-RPG to this genre, to this business.”

The MMO Gamer: You also talked about the mission system during the demo. The game revolves around meeting up with your friends and going out on these missions, which you mentioned were procedurally generated.

That always raises a red flag for me, the gamer. I remember very well in City of Heroes or Phantasy Star Universe, which also had procedurally generated missions, where you would go through one and there’s a tunnel and then a room with five mobs, then another tunnel and a room with six mobs…

Then you go through it the second time and the tunnel with six mobs in front, the one with five mobs in the back, but it would become a very recognizable pattern after a while. How do you overcome that? Is it just moving through content fast enough that it doesn’t become noticeable?

Gage Galinger: Well, that’s a really good question and that’s actually one of our main technical challenges.

What we did to address the problem was we could take advantage of one thing – being out in China and that is, you know, a very efficient labor base.

So we can actually do things differently than a Western based studio can do. One of the things we do great is we can crank out assets very, very quickly, especially because our pipeline has been designed to be very simple.

So using that we basically – we built our dungeons in multiple layers, so every dungeon is made of rooms and hallways, every room is made of pieces, every room has many, many different pieces, so the first pass of the dungeon is to take a look at the party composition and decide, based on how many people are here, how big should these rooms be? How many rooms should be there? And randomize that.

Then we layer in another randomization of monsters, and then we layer in another randomization of the objects that we give.

We have our designers write different quests, so it’s not just randomly place this monster here – there’s actually a selection of encounters that can happen in every room.

So you’re right – it is a challenge and it’s definitely not something that, we cannot say that we’ve completely solved, but it is something that I think we’ve put quite a lot of work into and, you know, we’ve seen pretty good results with it so far.

[Unfortunately at this point in the interview we were advised that Gage's next appointment had arrived and we had to wrap things up.]

The MMO Gamer: I like to wrap my interviews up on a more philosophical note as opposed to, “What are your features, when is it coming out, and how many exclusives are you going to give me?”

So, my old favorite: Why do you make games? Why did you get into the industry? Why do you wake up every morning, go to work, and do what it is you do?

Gage Galinger: The short answer is because I can. I’ve played games my entire life and when I went into college I was in computer engineering and I did an internship at an oil and gas company, and realized, “Holy crap! I cannot face this future for the next 40 years.”

I suddenly became aware that there was such a thing as the game industry – the people that made these things that I played, and, you know, I put all my effort, my passion, into making game demos and I was very lucky, I got a job with Blizzard right out of college.

Been in love with the industry ever since.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate it and we hope we can do it again some time.

Gage Galinger: Indeed. Thank you.

Stay tuned to The MMO Gamer for additional information about Warrior Epic in the days to come. In the meanwhile, you can visit the game’s official site at: http://www.warriorepic.com