E3 Interview: SOE Austin’s John Blakely Talks DC Universe Online

To kick off our coverage of New-E3 (slightly delayed while I recovered from a particularly virulent strain of con-flu), today we bring you an interview with John Blakely, Vice President of Product Development for SOE Austin, and Studio Manager overseeing the team producing DC Universe Online.

Unfortunately there was no hands-on of the game available (they were saving that for this week’s Comic-Con in San Diego), so I had to stick largely to broad design philosophy questions, rather than getting into the finer details.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention the fact that the last time I read a comic book was back when George Bush Sr. was in the Oval Office. As a result, I tried as best I could to avoid questions that were outside my area of expertise. Please do not send me angry emails demanding to know why I didn’t ask any obscure comic-related minutia.

Press play to listen to the interview, or read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: To get us started, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at SOE.

John Blakely: I’m John Blakely, I’m the Vice President of Product Development at SOE Austin, where I’m also the Studio Manager.

I was a Senior Producer on EverQuest II, and I moved out to Austin a couple years ago to take over the studio, and also to start this project called DC Universe Online.

The MMO Gamer: The game has been, to say the least, shrouded in mystery and intrigue. As far as I know, this is the first time you’ve ever shown off anything—unless I’m mistaken.

So, also for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you fill us in on a little of the game’s back story and purpose?

John Blakely: Yes, it is the first time we’re talking about it, and yes it has been shrouded in mystery.

One of the things that we wanted to do was to make sure we took a careful amount of time to do a lot of deep pre-production on the product, and really understand what it is we were making, play what we were making, and then start talking about it, so that we could give the fans some answers and actually get them engaged.

This is DC Universe Online… it’s a daunting task, because there’s probably seventy years of continuity to pick from. We have in our license about 150 iconic characters, and those are heroes, villains, supporting cast, plus all the spaces and places that they play in and live in. That’s a lot of stuff to create and tie together into one unified game.

We kind of said “How can we do this?” And we realized that we needed to interpret it as if we’re walking through a door into the DC Universe. The universe already persists in people’s imaginations… in when they read those stories, watch the movies, the TV shows, they’re already imagining what things are like, and Batman lives in their hearts and minds.

So what we need to do is kind of bring in an interpreter to help us build that world.

We enlisted the help of one uber MMO gamer, Jim Lee, who also happens to be one of the world’s best comic book artists, and one of the senior editorial folks at DC, to kind of work with us as a bridge to speak gamer with us and then also be able to speak DC and allow us to work with the license to make sure the game delivered a compelling experience for players.

What DC Universe is, it’s the first time that you’ll be able to walk through that door, create your own custom superhero or supervillain, and work alongside or against some of the greatest heroes or villains of the DC Universe.

We’re going to be on the Playstation 3 as well as the PC, and the first thing we’re going to do with this product is to build a great superhero game.

This isn’t your mother or father’s MMO. Those things work for the fantasy setting, but felt to really deliver on that superhero power fantasy we had to deliver it in the game first in that moment-to-moment experience. This is an action game. Skill does count. There are no die rolls, you have to aim, and shoot, and hit. That’s really important to how we communicate that.

Month to month, those things we love about our MMOS, those are all going to be in there. The character progression, the hero’s or villain’s journey, the end-game which is so important in these products… we have a save the world, or rule the world kind of end-game.

Also, we’re going to be delivering on multiple platforms, so we’re going to have a great experience for everybody.

Pages: 1 2 3