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

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned that you’re building a superhero game first. This may be something of a convoluted question, but: Is your goal to make a superhero MMO, or an MMO that happens to have superheroes in it?

John Blakely: Our goal is to make a superhero MMO. What we want to do is build a great superhero game, and then provide the progression, the character depth, the expectation that you would have from an MMO running month-to-month.

It’s more along the lines of what some of the console games are doing, like Call of Duty 4, where they stick to their core competency which is making a great shooter, but they add ways to progress your character.

Those ways are not in a universe-based game, they’re outside of the game, per-se, because you’re really playing on maps to earn those things, but they’re still doing that. What we want to do is take that kind of model and say, “We really need to deliver a great superhero game.”

In the vein of Hulk Ultimate Destruction, or the Spider Man games, or the Batman and Superman games… any of those things where you feel like a superhero, which means freedom over your environment.

Crackdown is another great example of something that’s kind of like a superhero game, where you feel like a master of your environment, you feel like a God in that world.

We want to take that moment-to-moment visceral gameplay, and then we want to add in those elements that allow those characters in that world to grow over time.

The MMO Gamer: The reason I asked that question, there is obviously already a superhero MMO out there, City of Heroes / Villains. I wondered: Does Sony feel that the market can sustain two games of that similar genre?

You look at fantasy, and that represents around 85% of the market. Then you look at sci-fi, and that represents around 5% of the market.

It’s not a very big niche to go around, in other words.

John Blakely: We’re looking at it as, “Hey, we’re the DC Universe.”

There are a lot of great stories that can be told, there’s a lot of content that people enjoy. Superheroes are growing in the pop culture right now, and we feel that there’s a lot of room for that.

We feel that what we can offer with the DC Universe, with the art vision of Jim Lee, and the creative vision of Jim Lee on the project to help us align well with the DC Universe, and then delivering first and foremost a great fun, engaging moment-to-moment superhero game, with that kind of month-to-month gameplay, the gamers will love that, and we want to make sure that we deliver that experience to them.

The MMO Gamer: Is there a core tenet of design philosophy that you’re working under in this game? I know a lot of studios have this thing they stick up on the wall—like Brad McQuaid had quote-unquote “The Vision.”

Is there anything like that down in your neck of the woods?

John Blakely: We have one of those things, I guess everybody does. But ours is real simple: It’s just “Play.”

What that means is we’ve got to prove through play. You might have a vision, you might have a document, you might have an idea. That’s all great. But you’ve got to put the ingredients in the pot and taste the soup. That’s really when it matters.

We’re proving that as well, because we’re going to be showing up next week at Comic-Con with a playable demo. Not just behind closed doors, but a free access anyone can come up and play the game so we can show them what we’re talking about. We can demonstrate to them what kind of moment-to-moment gameplay they can expect in this product, and really start the dialogue with the players about the game.

At the end of the day we’re all players playing games, and we just get to be in that enviable position to be able to create those games as well, so we run by that tenet on everything.

We basically have shipped a quote-unquote “live product” to our internal team. We operate like a live team in our company. We publish every night to ourselves. We have playtests every day where we sit down and focus test amongst ourselves that product.

Essentially, what we’ve done is we’ve launched that product to our studio as a small audience we get to play and craft that game and help it grow along, and once it’s ready to go out to the public then that’s the point where we release that, but it won’t be “Hey, all these pieces just came together and we just started playing the game.”

We started playing the game over a year ago, and we continue to play it through, and will continue through the launch cycle to do that. It will be well-worn by the time it gets to the public.

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