First off, tell us a little bit about Night Owl Games and its history with Dungeon Overlord.

Night Owl Games was founded in 2008 with the goal of developing and publishing deep and strategic browser games that are easy to play, yet still appeal to hardcore gamers. Dungeon Overlord, at http://dungeonoverlord.com, is our first title and went into open beta on Facebook in January 2011. Since then, it has become a cult favorite for fans of the classic game Dungeon Keeper as well as a favorite for the previously frustrated Facebook gamer. Additionally, it’s attracted a new breed of hardcore social gamers.

What was it about the Facebook gaming scene that made it a good platform for Dungeon Overlord? Do you see the advent of social gaming on sites like Facebook as a step forward towards more acceptance of gaming mainstream or the opposite?

Social gaming on sites like Facebook is definitely a step towards more acceptance of gaming as mainstream. While Facebook games have done an unbelievably good job at serving games to people who have never really played them before, they fall short when it comes to people who want something a little more hardcore (for lack of a better word). Social gaming was on a path of that lacked strategy, and instead consisted of endless clicking as well as spamming your friends. Night Owl Games took the opportunity with Dungeon Overlord to make a deep strategy game to fill the niche that other social games left wide open. We decided to focus on making games for frustrated social gamers ready to “level-up their gaming”, as well as hardcore gamers who happen to be away from their console or gaming PC. It’s this move towards hardcore Facebook games that excites us about social gaming. Social games have already made grandmas into gamers, but until Dungeon Overlord, it had left many hardcore gamers out.

You guys bill Dungeon Overlord as a PvP game. What exactly does this mean in a space like Social Gaming?

Players in Dungeon Overlord are constantly vying for power. They can raid, pillage and conquer other players’ Dungeons. We find it ironic that social games don’t encourage you to meet new players. So, following a more traditional MMO vein, we allow alliances formed between in-game players, and attacks launched against in-game players; none of which have to be your “real-life” Facebook friends. In Dungeon Overlord, PvP truly means any player can attack (or help) any other player. What makes it hardcore PvP is that not only can you attack another player; you can actually take over their hard-earned expansion dungeons (although it is very difficult to do so).

Dungeon Overlord, like many other Facebook games, seems to require the player to invest a good junk of time in order to get to the meat and potatoes of the game. Build times can vary quite a bit between rooms and units, causing you to have to take a break and come back to the game. What does Dungeon Overlord offer you in between those long build times?

One of the best things about Dungeon Overlord is that you do not have to play it for long hours each day. It is still a social game in that regard. Instead, we let players queue up dozens and more tasks which may take hours to complete while they are away at work or playing on their console or gaming PC. A player can start an upgrade, add to their crafting queue, launch an attack or begin training a creature, and walk away from the game. Of course, there are boosts that can be purchased to expedite many of these tasks as well. On the other hand, if the player wants a more immersive experience, they can use the time while a task completes to begin others. In summary, the time between the long build times can be used very wisely building up resources, scouting new territory or in many cases, getting back to your day job.

What kind of gameplay offer to players who invest that time in the game? Do players have the ability to actually destroy other players’ lairs?

Players will gain Dungeons as they level. Their home/starter Dungeon is always safe from Pillages and Conquering. After that, any expansion Dungeon they take, including the coveted Heart of the Mountain dungeon, might be conquered or pillaged by other players. If a player does have a Dungeon conquered, the next Dungeon they take over will have permanent elements, like any everlasting boosts they purchased, transferred to it. However, conquering is not an easy task. Players get warning that an attack is coming their way, and it almost always takes more than one attack to conquer a Dungeon. The conquering mechanic is complicated, and players have every chance to defend, as well as launch counter attacks. The balance aspect is very important, but in Dungeon Overlord, the strong and well-prepared survive. That’s the nature of PvP.

There definitely is a market for titles like this, and room to grow in the genre. Where do you see Dungeon Overlord going in the future?

Dungeon Overlord will continue to grow, and we hope it will be a favorite game for many years. We plan to keep the game fresh and exciting with new features as well as content on an ongoing basis. We also plan to expand into new international markets with Dungeon Overlord while keeping the game as true to its core as possible. Beyond Dungeon Overlord, we are also working on a number of new titles and will continue to grow our hardcore social game library.

Thanks Chris for taking the time to answer our questions! For more information about Dungon Overlord and access to the open beta, please visit the official website.

Steve sits down again with David Webber, Executive Producer at SpriteBox Studios.

David is all too eager to give us a status update on company’s debut title, Sword of the Ultimate Destiny: Battle of the Three Kingdoms 9, and discuss what new projects they have in the pipeline.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at SpriteBox Studios.

David Webber: Sure. I’m David Webber, the Executive Producer here at SpriteBox. I’m basically in charge of overseeing the day-to-day development operations of the studio.

The MMO Gamer: Last year we talked about your studio’s debut title, Sword of the Ultimate Destiny: Battle of the Three Kingdoms 9. Could you bring us up to speed on how the game’s been doing?

David Webber: Well, unfortunately we had to shut down the North American servers shortly after launch due to a lack of player response.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sorry to hear that. Was your new “macrotransaction” model to blame?

David Webber: No, I don’t think that was it at all… hell, the Sword of the Ultimate Destiny sold out on all 50 servers the very first day.

The MMO Gamer: What was it, then?

David Webber: It was a combination of things, to be honest with you. I’d blame our marketing department first and foremost. I mean, you were the only interview I ever got booked for to promote the game, and no offense intended Steve, but you didn’t exactly bring in the Benjamins.

The MMO Gamer: None taken.

David Webber: The other big thing was our follow-through just wasn’t there. I looked at our analytics, and 80% of the people who downloaded the game either never even installed it, or if they did, never ended up actually making an account.

The MMO Gamer: Maybe they read our interview first.

David Webber: Very funny.

It was a learning experience, to be sure. We figured that if we built it, they would come. But it turned out that players are even more fickle than we originally thought.

So we rounded up some smartest guys in the room types. I mean these people were good. We’re talking about fifty dollar an hour consultants, here.

And we had a little bull session, and bounced around ideas for how we could reinvent the entire paradigm of MMO game delivery.

The MMO Gamer: What’s wrong with the current system? The traditional box on the shelf model hasn’t been doing too badly now for over a decade.

David Webber: The question I’m asking is, what’s right about the current system?

With a traditional MMO you have to drive to the store, stand in line for ten minutes to buy some kind of box, if you can even find the right one. Then you take it home, open it up, and you’re dealing with discs, pieces of paper are flying everywhere, you’re typing in cryptic number sequences… it’s just a mess, a total mess. We knew there had to be a better way.

We thought digital delivery was the way to go at first, and in hindsight we were half right. But do you know what the biggest problem with digital delivery is?

The MMO Gamer: I give up.

David Webber: There’s just too much effort involved, too much responsibility. We found that, literally, for some people clicking a shortcut on their desktop is a Rubicon which will never be crossed.

The key to reaching that audience is tearing down all the barriers to entry, getting them into the experience as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

In short, we wanted people to be playing a game, before they even realized they were playing a game.

Continued on next page…

The MMO Gamer: Thank you for taking some time to talk with us. Many of our readers want to know more about your background. When did you discover you had a love for composition/music?

Jason Graves: I’ve always been interested in music. My parents have pictures of me wearing headphones and “playing” the piano when I was four years old. I took piano lessons in elementary school and then snare drum lessons in middle school. By high school, I was learning to play vibes and drum set along with more piano lessons.

I originally was studying to be an education major in college, but switched to music composition at the beginning of my sophomore year. I spent the rest of college studying music, eventually deciding to focus on film and television music at USC in Los Angeles.

The MMO Gamer: Do you believe music is essential to a video game experience?

Jason Graves: Absolutely! Music is what sets the emotional mood, whether you’re watching a movie or playing a video game. It’s even more critical in games because of their interactive nature. A properly implemented music score can totally sell a title. On the other hand, a poorly implemented score can make the entire experience seem repetitive and predictable. The music really does make or break the gameplay experience. At least that what us composers like to think!

The MMO Gamer: You won and were nominated for many awards for Dead Space, however you have many credits prior to that. Do you agree that this was your best work to that point?

Jason Graves: It was definitely my most original, which is what I think a lot of people responded to. It’s always difficult for me to predict how a specific game I’ve scored will be received once it’s released. The only thing I can do is focus on composing the best score possible.

I assumed the score for Dead Space would be largely marginalized by critics and fans, only because it was so incredibly dissonant and non-musical. Ironically, that’s exactly what made it unique and why it received to much attention.

The MMO Gamer: City of Heroes: Going Rogue has a soundtrack that includes a lot of baseline and drums, what does this music mean to you in relation to the game?

Jason Graves: As a composer, I’m always trying to find musical ways to convey the emotions and storyline of the game. I have to pay particular attention when I’m involved with an existing franchise. The previous music for City of Heroes had a little bit of everything, including dance, heavy metal, and industrial electronica, so it seemed natural to include some elements from these styles in the “next step” of the franchise.

If you combine these elements with orchestral music, you end up with what is referred to as a “hybrid score.” This general idea was the intentional direction from Paragon Studios. I was hired to bring a more cinematic, epic feel to the franchise.

The MMO Gamer: Welcome to Nova Praetoria is a classic game intro, including the choir and exciting backbeat and is a great beginning to the soundtrack. Shadow of a Doubt was all beats and thumps and very action oriented. However, Beyond the Horizon went an entirely different direction with its smooth cyberjazzy feel. Do you find this contrast to be essential for action games? Or games in general?

Jason Graves: Contrast is the most essential thing in the world, whether you’re talking about music, food or life in general. You’ve got to have vanilla to appreciate chocolate, and music is no different. I always try and plan out a unique instruments palette at the beginning of a new score.

The instruments and musical styles for Going Rogue reflect the general ideas and background of the game itself. Synths and electronic percussion that highlight the superhero aspect of the game, while the orchestra adds that cinematic touch and more epic feeling to the music.

The MMO Gamer: How much gaming experience do you have personally? What connects you to the gamers who listen to your compositions?

Jason Graves: I’ve been playing playing games since I was a kid. Now that I’ve got two kids of my own, we have a really great time playing together. They also really like to watch me play some of the more sophisticated first-person titles. Sometimes I think they get more excited watching me than they do actually playing themselves!

My ultimate goal is to create music that really sells the gaming experience to the player; something that totally immerses them in the game. I’m trying to compose the best score possible for the game. If I succeed, I consider that a win-win for myself and the players.

The MMO Gamer: Where do your ideas for the music come from? How much of a games’ history or backstory plays into each composition?

Jason Graves: There’s definitely a huge amount of influence from a game’s backstory and history. In the best case scenario, I can completely immerse myself in the world of the game. Developers send pictures, movies, scripts and rough storylines to give me the most information possible before I start composing.

For Going Rogue, there was an entire wiki catalog on the history of the different characters and locations. As a composer, you can never have too much information!

The MMO Gamer: Do you hope to move onto bigger media such as movies? Or do you think you have a home composing in the video game industry?

Jason Graves: Honestly, I’m incredibly happy where I am right now. I come from a film/television background and have already experienced the ups and downs of that industry. For me, there was a lot of “copy this score” or “try and sound exactly like this composer” going around, especially in the world of film music. I didn’t really have a chance to do anything original. Working in video games has given me the creative freedom I never had before.

As a result, games have been my career focus for the past eight years. But that doesn’t mean I’ve turned my back on composing outside the world of games. In fact, I’m currently working on two different film projects right. But these filmmakers want me to bring my own sense of drama and creative energy to their projects. They’re not asking me to directly copy someone else’s music.

I’ve got creative freedom to learn something new and try different things, which for me is the best part of my job!

The MMO Gamer: Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions!

The score for City of Heroes: Going Rogue is now available on iTunes.

Topics covered include the decision to make the game cross-platform, working with license-holder DC Comics, and departing from the standard MMO control scheme of “press 1 for fireball.”

Read on for the transcript.

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

Chris Cao: Sure. My name is Chris Cao, and I’m the game director on DC Universe Online. My job is basically like a movie director, I make sure all the parts visually, technologically, and gameplay wise come together, and give you a rocking superhero experience.

I’ve been on the project since middle to late 2005.  So, it’s coming up on five years, but it’s all been worth it.  We have crazy technology that no one else has, that really lets you have physics-based superpowers and action combat right at your fingertips.

The MMO Gamer: So you were there all the way from the conceptual stage of things?

Chris Cao: I was.  Actually, I was there really early on when we first signed up Jim Lee.  Went around pitching it, figuring out what it is, and it’s amazing to see it now five years later.

The MMO Gamer: I’m curious, what kind of conversations went on when you were deciding to make it a cross-platform game?

Chris Cao: It was actually one of the things that attracted me to the project, was the fact that it was going to be on the PlayStation 3.

While there had been some pretty good MMOs on the various consoles, with the online connectivity coming on the PS3, it was a no-brainer that hey, MMOs need to be there.

A lot of console fans might not have known about them, and they still don’t really, so it’s great to be the first one on there and to give people that sort of attachment and understand what’s so cool about an MMO, but then also bring to life all of the action combat that you’d expect from a console action game.

So, a lot of people ask us, “Are you an MMO or are you an action game?”  And the answer I like to give is, “We’re DCUO.”

We just took inspiration from wherever we needed to, to make the best superhero-supervillain experience.  It wasn’t about following conventions,  it was about following that superhero fantasy.

The MMO Gamer: The reason I asked this is because, as you’ve pointed out, there haven’t been a whole lot of MMOs on the console.

Chris Cao: Yeah.

The MMO Gamer: The only one that really springs immediately to mind would be Final Fantasy XI.

Chris Cao: Well there was EverQuest Online Adventures too, but yeah, a couple here and there.

The MMO Gamer: Of course, that starts up that whole debate where the PC players might be wary of it because they think “Oh, you must have had to dumb down the controls and the UI for the console players,” and the console players might be turned off because they think “Oh, it’s also on the PC, it must be too complicated. I can’t figure out anything that’s not right trigger to shoot my machine gun.”

How do you come to a happy medium with that?

Chris Cao: Well, I think the answer is to just make a great superhero game.  And I go back to that because honestly, why do you want to play a DC game set in the DC Universe?

It’s because you want to be a superhero or a supervillain.  You want to have crazy over-the-top powers.  You want to be able to fly, leap, super speed.  You want to be able to do all of that.

And that’s really what it’s about.  Now, you can do it alongside your friends and alongside thousands or millions of other people.  That’s even better.  And so, that’s what I really look to.  For that PC MMO gamer, our two platforms are split.  PC gamers are with PC gamers.  PS3 guys are off on their own.

So, we can best customize the game to those audiences, but we’ve developed it cross-platform the whole time because we want it to be the same superhero experience, right?

At its core, we’re not making an MMO for MMO’s sake.  A good example of that is tradeskills.  Everybody asks, “Hey, do you have the old standbys?”  Well, we do so long as they support the superhero experience.

Batman doesn’t really go out and harvest flowers or mine ore.

The MMO Gamer: He does craft his Bat Grenades.

Chris Cao: Right, exactly.  Now he does go back, and he’ll figure some things out in his Batcave, so you can make some stuff.

But a lot of times… I mean, I was the lead designer of EverQuest 2.  I’m very familiar with MMOs.  And they are fantastic, and they do what they do well.

In fact, we took a lot of inspiration from some of the other comic book MMOs, and what they did well.

But really, do they get you to that punch-the-guy-in-the-face visceral image?  Do they get you to leap off of the building?  No.  So we had to go bigger with it, and that’s really what we’re after.

It’s not so much satisfying the conventions that are out there as inventing our own, so that you feel like a superhero.

The MMO Gamer: Back in 2005 when the project first started, superheroes and MMOs weren’t really that conducive to each other.  I think you had City of Heroes, and that was about it.

Chris Cao: Yeah, actually, it just came out the year before.

The MMO Gamer: Now, the field is slightly more crowded.  How do you stand out from the crowd when you’re dealing with City of Heroes, Champions, the Marvel MMO… I’m sure I’d probably missed about five or six others in there.

Chris Cao: Well, in light to your point, there’s even more fantasy MMOs.  It’s a huge genre now.  Everybody likes it.  Everybody wants to get into it.

So, it’s not just differentiating ourselves from superhero MMOs.  It’s what do you get that’s better in DC that you don’t even get in another MMO, or in another action game.

And what it really comes down to is two things:  You get action combat.  No bones about it.  On the PC or the PS3, you have visceral combat.  I know if you had the chance to play you’ll see what I mean.

This isn’t an MMO that sped up or dressed up.  This isn’t just animation.  This is connection with that superpower.

The second thing you get is a persistent world.  Now, to MMO players, they’re like great, I have that already.  But console players don’t.  They have the great action, but they don’t have a place that they can share with their friends, adventures they can go on forever, continuing updates every month, and a persistent world that you can just run across anybody and something serendipitous can happen.

So when I say take the best of both worlds, we’re dealing what no one else has done.  We’re taking all of the scale and scope and size that MMO brings, and that makes you feel real.

And then we’re adding in the instant action that you’d love to get and you do get out of all of your console games.  Those together give us really a unique kind of game.

It’s not a hybrid.  It’s just the ultimate superhero experience, because you’re really in the streets and you’ve got them.

You’re not playing Batman this time.  You are there with thousands of other players, working for and against him.  That’s never been done.

Continued on next page…

Topics covered include the allure of online games, juggling EverQuest with a professional baseball career, and why mounted combat on flying pigs will not be among the features included at release.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about what it is you do at 38 Studios.

Curt Schilling: My name is Curt Schilling, I’m the Chairman and Founder of 38 Studios. I do as little game design as possible, and I get to playtest what I think is going to be the next generation of online gaming experience.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sure you get this question a lot, but I have to ask, because it’s been the number one thing on my mind since I first heard about the studio, way back when it was still called Green Monster Games:

How does one go from playing Major League Baseball to starting an online game company?

Curt Schilling: I started gaming in 1980. The first game I ever played was Wizardry, which is still to this day one of my favorites of all time.

I got into the online space with Ultima Online. A teammate of mine when I was with the Phillies was playing it, hardcore.

I got into it, enjoyed it, liked it… But I’m not a hardcore PvP guy, so obviously I had some very challenging memories of those days.

The MMO Gamer: [laughing] So you played UO pre-Trammel, then?

Curt Schilling: Yes, pre-Trammel. Early.

The MMO Gamer: Those were the good old days.

Curt Schilling: That’s what I hear.

But then, somebody told me about EQ… I logged in to it, played it for a half an hour, 45 minutes, and quit.

Then I sat around the entire night, as you do with any good game, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it… “That was kind of cool! I’ve never played anything like that before!”

The next day I went back and I was hooked. That was all I played for the next four or five years.

Right around that time Sony found out that I played, and they invited me in for the VIP stuff.

I was already thinking about post-baseball, and what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to do something with a business, but not like a restaurant… not a thing that other people were doing.

More importantly to me, I wanted to do something that I was passionate about, and something that I was smart about.

I was definitely passionate about gaming, but I certainly wasn’t smart about it.

So, I turned my relationship with Sony into a kind of due diligence. I started to go in and talk to the people at the ground level, boots on the ground, people making the games.

I wanted to understand the industry, what works, what doesn’t. Why they liked their company, why they didn’t like their company.

I did that across the industry, to try and determine what the playing field was like, who the competitors were.

Obviously this was a time when it was just EQ, then it was Asheron’s Call, and DAoC… and then all of a sudden you had WoW, and it exploded into the mainstream.

The MMO Gamer: What was it that drew you to MMOs, in particular?

Curt Schilling: It’s been my choice of game for a lot of reasons.

The most important one for me was, doing what I do for a living, going out socially is not as easy for me as it is for other people.

But in an MMO, it’s painless. No one knows who I am. I can hang out, and have friends, and be whoever I want to be, without being Curt Schilling.

The great thing was, it got to the point where everybody that I played with—and still do play with—they knew exactly who I am, and none of them cared. Which is really cool for me.

Probably the biggest thing for me as a parent, and as a person who has heard all the arguments for and against gaming, and violence, and all of that crap… if it wasn’t for MMOs, I would not have the relationship that I have with my kids.

I’ve traveled my whole life. They were a way for me to log on when I was in San Diego, and my boys would log on in Boston, and we’d have our headsets on like we were in the same room playing together.

We’d group up, and within the MMO game space there are a lot of things you can teach people: You’re in a group, you have responsibility, you have a role, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things… You have to socially interact with people, and there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that.

So my kids, when they were beginning to learn to read and write, could type and communicate on a keyboard, which is going to be a medium which they’re going to use their entire lives, when they were five and six.

I looked at it as a powerful tool to enable education, and positive things with my kids. As opposed to all of the negative things that were going on with video games, violence, and all of that other stuff.

The MMO Gamer: Impressive that you managed to juggle EQ with a professional sports career.

I knew guys who couldn’t even handle working at the grocery store and playing EQ at the same time.

Curt Schilling: Well, my wife would argue that I didn’t juggle it well.

It’s funny because there were times—and people find this hard to believe—but you have times when you’re sitting at the keyboard playing, and you’re thinking about work, right?

People can’t believe that I would be at work thinking about playing games.

There would be times when I was sitting in the dugout, where I’d be looking at the clock thinking, “If the ninth inning is over by 11, I’ll be able to get back and raid by 12:30!”

But I’m a gamer, that’s how we think.

And then I’d meet people across the country that I’d played with, because I’d travel all the time, I’d give them tickets to games, say hello, put names to faces…

My celebrity really became a non-issue, which was a big, huge issue for me. In the game space, me playing baseball doesn’t buy me any credibility—and it shouldn’t.

Gamers don’t give a shit that I won three World Series. They care if we make a great game or not.

The more they understand my credibility as a gamer, and my beliefs as a visionary for the company, hopefully the more they’ll understand what we’re doing.

Continued on next page…

The trio delve into such topics as setting Rift apart from the competition in a crowded market, the use of focus testing to refine the game’s features (and title), and how much of a role community will play in the game’s development.

[As a personal aside, I realize this may seem like an odd mixture of job titles for one interview, but Cindy Bowens is an old friend of mine (and is married to an even older friend), and I couldn't resist bringing her along for the ride... even if I am a bit out of practice interviewing community managers.]

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you both please introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what you do at Trion Worlds.

Russ Brown: My name’s Russ Brown, I am a VP of Development. I basically run the development team for Rift at Trion Worlds.

Cindy Bowens: I’m Cindy Bowens, I’m the Senior Community Manager for Rift.

The MMO Gamer: Now, the first thing that really piqued my interest since the last time I saw the game: Why the name change, from Heroes of Telara to Rift: Planes of Telara?

Russ Brown: That’s a good question. We actually did some focus testing, we talked to some people, we got some gamers in… and the word “Heroes” just didn’t do very well.

People were sort of like, “Well, if everybody’s a hero, then I’m not a hero!”

And that was the main thing that people were talking about; they don’t want to be called a hero, they want to earn being a hero. So we took that name out.

Then we started looking at what sort of gameplay we have, what sort of things we’re doing, and the feature that really stood out was our rifts. So we said hey, let’s call our game Rift.

The MMO Gamer: City of Heroes, take note: This is free focus testing for you.

Russ Brown: [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: Aside from the name, what else has changed since our conversation last year?

Russ Brown: The main thing that’s changed is last year we had this idea that you could be any class any time. You could swap on the fly.

Once again we did some focus testing on that, and one of the things that came back was, “Hey wait, if I can do anything, then I’m not special. Why would a guild need me, if everybody can do my job?”

So we said okay. We still want customization, we still want people to change and dabble with things, so we basically broke the class system up into “callings.”

We have Warriors, Rogues, Mages, and Clerics, right? What that does is we still allow you to have this idea of souls, but the main difference is you start with a certain soul, you pick the soul for your starting class, and that’s what you were before you died.

Then as you adventure through the game you pick up more and more souls which you can swap out. Then you decide how you want to invest into a soul, how you want it to play.

For example, when I’m playing my Rogue, I start out as a Riftblade, I believe it’s called. Classic PvP rogue. Then when I want to get some range, I’ll put a Ranger in, I won’t go very deep into it with pets, but I’ll go deep enough that I can start building up my points with melee.

So my playstyle is, “Pew pew pew,” shooting the guy from ranged, and then by the time he reaches me, he’s almost dead and I can do a finisher.

The MMO Gamer: Interesting. Two questions, and two answers that you changed something big based on focus group feedback.

Russ Brown: Yes.

The MMO Gamer: Does that happen a lot?

Russ Brown: Well, it can’t constantly happen, but in the beginning you have to test and listen to what people are saying.

One of the things that always frustrated me at other companies I worked at was we did focus testing at alpha or beta. If I’m focus testing alpha or beta, I can’t do anything. I don’t have time to react.

If I’m in beta, and I say “What do you guys think?” and they say, “Well, if you did this it’d be a lot better…” It’s like, “Great, but I can’t do that! It’s beta, we need to ship the game!”

So we had focus testing earlier to make sure that we were on the right track. And then when we work with the community, when we have our closed and open beta tests, we can sit down and iterate things with them.

The other thing we did is, we added sides. Before we didn’t have sides, we didn’t have two factions that you started with. And the reason we did that is people were saying, “You’ve got no sense of being. You’ve got no sense of he’s my friend, he’s my enemy. I like this guy, I don’t like that guy.”

It immediately gives you guys you group with. It sounds simple, but when we were just saying don’t worry about sides, it was kind of confusing people.

The MMO Gamer: Cindy, I’m sure the first question a lot of people are going to have for you is, with a game this far from release, how much of a community is actually out there for you to manage?

Cindy Bowens: Right now we’ve got a couple hundred people on our forums regularly. It’s growing exponentially, and I can’t wait to see how many we have when I go back next week.

But the thing about this community that’s just awesome, is it’s all old MMO gamers.

I put up a thread my first day there, and said “What MMOs have you played?” They’re all old EQ, old DAoC… some World of Warcraft, but it’s mostly the people who have been around for the last decade, who have played these games, know what they want, know what they like, and know what they demand from a game and from the company making it.

One of the first things I’ve tried to do is introduce them to the team, let them know what the team wants to hear from them, and that their feedback is valid, and that’s been going great.

We have a lot of well-known MMO players in the community, my first day there when I logged on there were a number of people who popped on and said, “Hey, remember me from Vanguard? Remember me from EverQuest?”

I couldn’t be happier, because that’s going to be the roots of our community.

Continued on next page…

In an extensive interview, the two discuss WAR’s history from launch up to the present day, the changes which have taken place over that time, as well as what’s yet to come.

If you played Warhammer Online at launch and have been wondering if your issues have been addressed and now is the time to come back, this interview was done with you in mind.

If you would prefer to listen rather than read, this interview can be heard in its entirety during Episode 27 of our Working as Intended podcast.

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

Carrie Gouskos: I’m Carrie Gouskos, the Producer on Warhammer Online. What that means effectively is that I’m responsible in some way for everything that happens with respect to what goes into the game, what the big picture plans are, and how we work with the community.

There’s obviously a large team of people who deal with the specifics, but for me it’s about the big picture, and steering it into the direction I think it needs to go, and working with the community and the team to hopefully get everyone’s goals aligned together.

The MMO Gamer: Now, you and I have only met once before, way back at Games Day LA in 2007.

WAR had just entered beta then, and I recall that basically everything was coming up roses: The game was looking great, it had a very rabid fanbase… I can attest to just how rabid, when I said something slightly negative about it in an article later on.

The game had a huge buildup, a huge following, then it launched, and…

What happened?

Carrie Gouskos: There are a couple ways to answer that.

Pre-launch, I think we did a very good job about getting people excited about the game. We had a huge license, and we had a lot of unique personalities on the development team that were really infectiously excited about the game.

We thought we were doing a lot of really neat stuff, and wanted to share that with everyone. I don’t think internally—actually, I know internally, nobody here was going “Oh, we’re going to beat WoW!” or any of that.  There was none of that kind of gauging.

But it was like, “We’re going to have a successful MMO. We’re going to be awesome, and have so many players!” all of that stuff. We had a lot of expectations, and we launched to that kind of hype.

I think the problem was, to some degree, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed.

I actually think that we have a large game, with a lot of people playing who are excited about it. But you can see how many servers we opened with, all of that, and people try to do the numbers game, guessing how many players we have now…

The fact of the matter is that we came out huge, and there were problems. So I think that was a little bit of a buzz kill for the development team, and to some degree our players, as well.

We’ve been spending all this time since trying to refine the game, and get it to a state that we think, “This is what people are looking for, this is what they want.”

If you asked me personally how I feel about it, I loved the features in our game at launch, but I do think obviously there are things that I look at and say, “God, I wish I had fixed that! Or I wish I’d done that!” You can do that all day long.

So the goal since then has been to do all those things that we wanted to do, and to grow with our players, and instead of trying to make the game we think players are going to like, make the game that players are going to enjoy, because they’re the ones sitting here telling us, and we’re listening to them.

We’ve been maybe more quiet in the past six months, because we’ve been  hunkering down and going, “Okay, what is it that’s going to satisfy the players’ needs, make them come back, and make them happy?”

I think we’ve accomplished that. I don’t want to say that in the tone of like “rah-rah,” I do feel like we’re down to business at this point, and we’ve done a lot of things to the game that has pacified some of the dissatisfaction at launch, and I’m very happy with the players, and their interactions with us.

The MMO Gamer: Those improvements were actually the reason I wanted to talk to you, today.

I played WAR at launch… hell, I played a long time before launch, I was in beta from January of 2008. I got into the pre-order head start, talked all my friends into buying the game… We had a guild going, big alliance, a hundred guys on every night.

And then all of a sudden it just kind of… stopped. Coincidentally, right around the time that Wrath of the Lich King came out.

Carrie Gouskos: Uh huh. [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: That was basically the reason that I quit. I don’t play MMOs to solo, and I don’t like making new friends. So once all my friends quit, I was gone.

And, I’ve pretty much been trying ever since to talk them into giving the game a second shot.

I decided to just jump in and swim last month, and see if I could needle them down by constant reminders that, “Hey, I’m playing WAR again, you want to come back and try it?”

But their responses always tend to be, “No. We played it. We didn’t like it. That’s it.”

And that’s of course the prevailing notion of just about every MMO on the market: People get an idea in their head at launch, and no matter what happens to a game six months, a year afterward, the day they bought the box is the image they have in their mind forever.

Anarchy Online, for instance, was never able to live down that launch…

Carrie Gouskos: Actually, Anarchy Online was one that I went back to like three times. Every time I went back, I just wanted to love that game so much, I tried so hard.

But I understand completely what you’re saying. It’s funny, isn’t it? The only turnaround I can think of is you need to have a complete makeover. And even then, it’s hard to change your intuition.

Which is interesting, because I do think a lot of games are actually broken at launch, but I don’t think that Warhammer was.  There were problems, certainly. But compared to some of the experiences I’ve had in other MMOs…

I’m not saying that’s forgivable, at all. As an industry we need to move away from that, “We’ll fix it later” mentality, which I’ve never had. But they’re so massive, and there’s so much going on, it’s almost hard to contain it all.

And I guess you were setting us up for a question, which you can ask now if you’d like. [laughing]

The MMO Gamer: The question was essentially, even though the game has improved a great deal since launch, how can you get people to change their preconceptions of it?

How do you get past, “The game is Anarchy Online, I ain’t playing it no more.”

Carrie Gouskos: The true answer of how to get people playing the game is to fix the game. To put things in the game that they would like.

But the question you’re asking is about perception. I’m taking a little bit different approach than some of my predecessors, and maybe to my own detriment, but I’m going to stick by it and see how well it works.

Which is: To be as humble, and candid, and honest as I can be—obviously understanding that there are certain things that I can’t talk about, which are off the table.

But to really go to the community and say, “I’m going to sit here, and start by making you some promises, and I’m going to fulfill them all. And I don’t expect you to believe me until they’re complete.”

Hopefully, through this labored back-and-forth with people who are negative, and angry, and just constantly kind of going, “Let’s go! What can we do? How are we going to change this?”

My hope is, that instead of people’s enjoyment with Warhammer spreading through “excitement,” or that kind of false energy, that it comes through a true, honest passion, and happiness.

We certainly have people in the community that advocate the game, like our bloggers, these people are just fantastic, and they really feel very passionately about the game.

Don’t get me wrong, they hold us really to account with, “Why didn’t you fix this? And why didn’t you do that? But, their commitment is clear, and I believe they’re committed because they trust us, and they see us moving in the right direction, for whatever it is that they’re interested in.

The answer is, I’ll take ‘em back one at a time. I don’t need several hundred thousand people to come pouring back into Warhammer. I’ll take them one at a time, and as soon as they’re ready to come back.

The MMO Gamer: So then no opening the floodgates? No “Come on back, everybody gets a free month!”?

Carrie Gouskos: [laughing] Don’t get me wrong, if everybody wants to come play Warhammer again, I’m not going to complain.

But I want people to come back, and I want them to stay. I want them to meet people that they like to play with, I want them to be excited about it, and I want them to really enjoy it, and stay with us forever.

That’s what I want, honest as that.

The MMO Gamer: So, we’ve established why I quit, but now I’d like to discuss some of the other issues people had with the game, and how you’ve gone about answering them.

A lot of the complaints that I heard at launch were regarding the technical side of the game.

A number of these issues have been addressed, for instance the game runs much better now on the same hardware than it once did.

But, some of them haven’t; for instance, the crash to desktop issue.

You’ve said in a Producer Letter that bug fixes are now a priority for you, could you update us on the progress that’s been made on the technical side of the game?

Carrie Gouskos: Sure. This is actually one of those things where our exploration in the Asian markets have a lot of benefit to all the other markets as well, because of the numbers of players that are expected within a single area there, a taxation that we don’t really see in the playstyle in North America and Europe.

We pretty much have people dedicated to working on the crash issues. The crash to desktop stuff actually has improved significantly since launch, maybe it’s on a case-by-case basis depending on one certain set-up or another, we might not have addressed your crash to desktop.

But if you look at the overall numbers, we actually have improved on those, and server crashes have been all but eradicated.

The answer is that we have a permanent staff working on optimization, and dealing with performance as best as possible.

We saw a lot of those fixes coming in the Fall of last year, the 1.3.2 version was when we had the majority of it. Those were both client and server changes, specifically things like making texture memory better.

The Mac version helped with that, we had to make some changes with the Mac version of the game that improved the performance of textures significantly.

It’s just one of those things that you have to keep working on. I’m quite, I won’t say satisfied, but I’m happy with the progress that we’ve made.

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned something in that answer: The fact that you generally expect more players to be in the same area on the Asian servers, as opposed to the US and European servers.

That was actually going to be my next question… Another big holdover problem from launch, is that for a PvP game, a lot of people don’t seem to be that interested in actually killing each other.

I’m in tier 4 now, since I started playing again. I formerly played a Sorcerer, now I’m a Bright Wizard, because I have a one-track mind.

And, a great deal of tier 4 seems to be sitting on my horse, waiting for a timer to expire at a battlefield objective, while people in region chat are saying, “Where’s Destro?” “They’re two zones behind us. Want to go kill them?” “Nahh.”

In 1.3.5 you’re changing city siege to be 100% PvP-centric, removing most of the PvE components. I was wondering if there were any plans to go back and take a look at the Open RvR segment, to do more of the same there.

Carrie Gouskos: Absolutely. The complaint about the fact that the cities were PvE end-game I think was in recent months one of the most significant we’d been receiving, which is why we chose that one to tackle.

We also, in the last version, addressed some of the scenario stuff as well. We’ve kind of been making our way through various things.

Open RvR is definitely the next hot-button issue, and this is an example of where candid gets me into trouble…

I made the comment to one of our bloggers once recently, when we had them out here for a roundtable, I made a comment that, “You know, I’m not sure what to do.”

What I meant was, sometimes it’s very difficult to just make people fight each other. Fortunately, we’ve got designers and a bunch of guys on the team who promptly hit me upside the head after that, and said “We know what to do!”

So we’re kind of tackling ORvR right now. I think that there are things we can do, I don’t think that we can ever get away from the fact that sometimes people are going to choose not to fight each other.

But I can tell you that the changes to the cities at least bring that aspect front and center, you are going to be fighting each other in the end-game, and that’s going to be a pretty exciting fight.

On the way up there, we definitely need to tackle some of that stuff, especially the timers. I’m tired of hearing people say “Waithammer.”

The MMO Gamer: Staying on the subject, in the lead-up to the release of the game, the ORvR campaign was pitched as being the epic battle of good against evil, and that actually getting into a city was “A Big Deal.”

Last night on Badlands, I think they were in Altdorf twice, and we were in Inevitable City twice, within the space of about eight hours.

I appreciate the fact that you took fortresses out to try and get city siege happening more often, but when you get the message “Inevitable City lies undefended! To arms!” and your reactions is, “Meh.”

Doesn’t that kind of take the fun out of it?

Carrie Gouskos: It used to be very difficult to launch a city. In fact, I don’t think we had a king killed for the first three months.

It used to be a lot harder than it is now, and that’s certainly something that we’ve done because we wanted to give more people the opportunity to see the end-game.

As part of the ORvR changes we’re looking at, “What is the campaign? How epic is it? How often do we want cities to be launching?”

That’s the question that I didn’t have the answer to. The unfortunate thing is that the things that make it take longer are those timers. If there weren’t those timers at all cities would be flipping every hour.

You want to reward people for effort. You don’t want to say “Get together with fifty people and maybe you’ll push one zone.” You want to say “Get together with fifty people and you can push all the way to the city!”

Certainly there’s some things that we need to address with that, and there are certainly ideas and various things that people have in mind.

The problem is always, with a live game, is anything you do, especially to make it harder after it’s been easier, is entirely reacted to negatively.

People just go, “Ugh! This is the worst thing ever!”

So you have to be creative about it. You have to do something that is enjoyable during that time. I don’t know if that means putting the forts back in or in a different way, but something.

We’re looking into exploring our options, there.

The MMO Gamer: And just to round the topic out, are there any plans for the foreseeable future to add in the missing capitals?

Carrie Gouskos: [laughing] Till the end of time, that question.

We are always looking at things like that. I don’t want to say too much about it, because I don’t really have anything tangible to say. But it’s certainly not off the table.

The MMO Gamer: So do you feel that cutting the other four and focusing solely on Altdorf and Inevitable City was the correct decision in the long run, having a year and a half to look back on it?

Carrie Gouskos: Oh yeah. We would be launching this fall. There was so much effort that went into the cities, to get them… it wouldn’t have been right to have them all.

The complexity starts to get in trouble. If I had to look back at lessons I’ve learned from the development of Warhammer, it’s the complexity thing. You get really caught up in “We can add this feature! We can do this stuff! It’ll be really cool!”

What happens is you end up cramming a bunch of stuff in, and yeah there’s a lot of cool stuff, but maybe not as polished as you wanted it to be. So, I would stay away from that as much as possible.

I actually think our game has got a lot of features, a lot going on, and maybe it doesn’t need all of those features, or maybe we could have added them in slower.

The MMO Gamer: Speaking of adding things into the game… Aside from the cities, any big upcoming content changes?

Carrie Gouskos: Yes! Every version.

The MMO Gamer: I meant “big” in air quotes, along the same lines as, for instance, Land of the Dead.

Carrie Gouskos: We aren’t prepared to announce anything right now about that.

The MMO Gamer: Another one of the big issues at launch was basically, I hit the PvE level of 40, and my brain hit a mental wall.

I looked at all those big, purple numbers that I was going to have to grind out, and I was thinking to myself: “Should I quit while I’m ahead, or keep on going?”

What have you gone back and added in to make those big, purple numbers you have to go through from the PvE cap of 40 all the way up to the RvR cap of 80 more “carrot-y,” as opposed to just killing people for the sheer sake of killing people?

Carrie Gouskos: We’re always evaluating what’s available at each of the levels to make sure that it’s as carrot-y as possible. If you think of a game like ours, where RvR really is the crown jewel, it makes sense to have the higher level cap be the RvR cap.

To some degree, what’s carrot-y about the upper levels is the sense of pride that a lot of people have, “Oh man, I’m renown rank 80!”

People are really prideful about that. And a lot of things are gated off of the renown ranks, different sets of armor, abilities, all of that stuff.

I guess I wouldn’t say that making those top 40 levels seem more tangible is something that I see as a problem. I see that as a challenge, and a lot of MMO players like to overcome challenges, and so that’s presented for them.

Clearly you didn’t have enough of the other kind of things, the stickiness, to make you want to overcome that challenge, but hopefully in your return, you will.

The MMO Gamer: For me, I’m kind of hard-wired for the traditional MMO mindset: You follow a set course of progression to a cap, and then you wait for the expansion. That’s the way it usually goes.

So, for my progression I hit 40, and then… “No one is giving me quests! No one is telling me what to do! I must be instructed! I must be led by the nose! Where do I kill people? How? Why? Where do I get these armor sets? What’s a ‘ward’?”

That last bit I actually have to commend you on, because that was another one of the big problems we had at launch: Everyone knew you needed wards to complete the high-end content, but nobody knew how you actually got them.

Putting that right in the Tome of Knowledge, with explicit instructions that were easy to understand, I thought that was a great additional carrot.

Carrie Gouskos: The information thing is a really interesting challenge. I enjoy it, but it’s sometimes really frustrating.

You do it too much one way, and there’s text all over the screen and people going, “Ah! Get this stuff out of here!”

On the other hand, the moment they need to know, it should be “How do I know what a ward is? Oh!”

How do I know when you need to know that? And the Tome has been great fun, but it’s been a great tool as well, to provide that information. Like with Live Events as well, to have them all available in the Tome, that’s been wonderful.

But I guess it’s sort of a slightly different principle, like I said about what to do next, and where to go next… The answer is you go kill people.

How do you do it? There were certain things that were lacking, like global chat channels at launch, which made coordination difficult. A lot of things we’ve been working on has been improving communication, and ways for players to find each other and interact with each other.

We made some pretty big improvements to chat, including adding the global chat channels, the War Report which tells you where the fights are, which is kind of successful, and kind of not.

The rally call… we’ve been playing around with all that stuff. We did a lot of changes to the guild system, to make guilds more interesting, you could do a lot more stuff with guilds and recruit people easier, that kind of thing.

I think that’s the key, we need to give you guys the tools to be able to interact with each other well. That then provides the, “What do you do now?”

The MMO Gamer: To me personally, WAR has always been the most fun when you’re out killing people on the open field of battle.

But, as I said in an earlier question, it seems that more people are interested in avoidance these days than fighting pitched battles, because somebody always gripes, “Oh, they’ve got five more guys than we do, we don’t have a chance!”

I remember back in beta, some of the most fun I ever had in WAR was during the zone tests, because it was a command economy.

Mythic just wrote in the patch notes, “We want you to go to Praag, and kill every man, woman, and child you see.” And so the entire server did. All day long.

Have you ever considered bringing that over into the live game? Just locking down everything except one area and saying, “This is your objective for today. Kill everybody. You’re not getting any renown unless you do.”?

Carrie Gouskos: To varying degrees that is something we’re exploring.

One of the things that we’ve been working on, and this is something that I think has been successfully working for the past few months is the Weekend Warfronts, which is kind of a different goal each weekend, basically a Live Event each weekend.

Right now they’re scenarios. We’ve had some talk with people about doing Open RvR with it, so that this weekend we can say, “Okay, go kill people in this zone, you’ll get this bonus, or do this…”

I don’t know if we’ll ever lock down all the other zones, but I think we can find clever ways to incentivize playing in certain areas.

But then of course that kind of counterpoints one of the reasons why we took the fortresses out: We did not want an entire server’s worth of people converging on one place.

We want people to have a good time, and we want to have a lot of people together, but we don’t want to have everyone together, because we don’t want performance impact.

Again, we’re looking at improving always, and we’ve actually vastly improved the number of people who can be in one place since launch, so I don’t even know if that’s an issue any more. But it’s something to be mindful of.

The MMO Gamer: I try to offer everyone I interview the chance to answer this question, because I find that there’s a lot of pent-up rage among developers in the gaming industry, like, “You bastards in the media never ask me that! And now that you’ve given me the chance, I’m going to talk about it for fifty minutes!”

So, is there anything that you personally would like to talk about? The sort of thing that people such as myself, for instance, don’t generally ask you?

Carrie Gouskos: [laughing] I actually don’t feel the way that most people feel. I think we get the whole range. I don’t think the questions fall on either one side or another, it’s like the “Why don’t people like Blah? Why did you do Blah? What would you do differently? Tell us about how terrible it was.”

I feel like we did a pretty good job of answering that question, because like I said, I think there’s a humility, and we’ve certainly learned from lessons.

On the other hand, especially given the line of questioning so far, I don’t want to say that I feel like the game is not… I really enjoy the game. I really like it. I like to kill people in the face.

I’ve met a lot of people who play the game that like the game. They don’t know who I am, so they’re not just telling me that because I work at Mythic and they think I’m going to give them free stuff.

This is just a matter of taste, and what you’re interested in.

That being said, what do I wish that people would ask?

For our players, and for people that maybe were players and stopped for one reason or another, it is nothing but helpful to constructively explain what it is that you do and do not like about a game. Especially an MMO, because they’re always changing.

And as much as I tried to avoid some aspects of the community, especially those that think that we never do right and will always be negative—for my own health I have to avoid it—we have people who gather that information, and get it together, and we use that to address the game.

So my answer to a question that wasn’t asked was, I would love for players to find ways to give their feedback about what they do or do not like about the game. Even if it’s really harsh feedback, because ranting on some site isn’t necessarily the best way to do it.

The MMO Gamer: Incidentally, I enjoy killing people in the face, too. Which is why I play a Bright Wizard.

That’s why I kept bringing up Open RvR, there aren’t enough people to kill in the face, because everyone just wants to farm renown.

Carrie Gouskos: [laughing] I agree.

I won’t mention what server I play on, but I do think that it’s sort of on a server-by-server basis. I think Badlands is a fairly balanced server, but on some servers you do see a lot more different aspects of fighting.

But we’re always looking to find more ways to embrace what the game is. You can get lost in going, “Is WAR a PvE game, or an RvR game?”

Obviously we want to support all different types of playstyles, and different types of people. But at the end of the day, we’re a game for people who like killing people. In the face.

To deny that would be naïve. That’s going to be our focus for as long as it can be.

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

So, why do you make games? Why do you wake up every morning, go to work at Mythic, and do what it is you do?

Carrie Gouskos: Wow. That’s a question, alright. [laughing]

I guess, for me it’s really selfish. I’m really, really passionate about video games, in general, all of them, every kind of them.

I love to interact with video games. I love seeing what they have to offer. And the ability to do something, and impact someone in the same way, I think is really exciting, interesting, and wonderful.

There is nothing quite like meeting someone who plays a game that you’re working on, when they’re excited about it, and hearing them go like, “Wow!”

So, it’s almost entirely selfish. I love it, I really do. And I think that’s true for most development teams, as well. There’s so much power at our fingertips to do stuff that people really enjoy.

Of course equally, those days when things don’t go right, or people are not happy with the game, those can be soul-crushing. But on a day-to-day basis, I think we do pretty well. It makes me happy to get up and come to Mythic.

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

Carrie Gouskos: Thank you.

Stay tuned to The MMO Gamer for more Warhammer Online coverage in the days and weeks ahead.

If this interview has piqued your interest, the game is currently offering an unlimited free trial (capped at level 10), and returning players may reactivate their accounts free for 10 days. Both are available at the official website: http://www.warhammeronline.com

Topics include the decision to bring Gods & Heroes back from the dead, differentiating yourself from a crowded online gaming market, and why the game may turn out to be more like Battlefield 2 than WoW…

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: To start us off, can you tell our readers a little about  Heatwave Interactive and what you do there?

Anthony Castoro: My name is Anthony Castoro, I am the co-founder and CEO of Heatwave Interactive. We started Heatwave right at the beginning of 2007 by bootstrapping the company.

We did some consulting with MTV and some other game companies to fund our activities, but after 6 months or so we realised we needed more capital to do what we wanted to do, so we went out there and raised $7.5 million from a venture fund called Syncom Venture Partners in the D.C. area.

We really started the company to address a couple of things. Firstly, my partner Donn Clendenon, who co-founded the company, he is a long-term entrepreneur with a lot of success and several exits, and he had done online games.

I had started a game company directly out of college and learned a lot, but I didn’t have success with that, so I wanted to go into the corporate world and find out what it took.

And over fifteen years I learned a couple things: one, it’s really common for game companies of all sizes to get started with a project and not know why, not have good reasons for doing it, not have the resources to do it, not have the right plan.

Online games in particular are very powerful things, and the nice thing about them is they don’t have the same economic issues as console games, they have a long tail, if you do something even for a small group of people you can do very well.

EVE online is a great example of it, as was Ultima Online what, thirteen years ago now?

We started the company with that in mind, and also, the really great games are popular enough that they can make mainstream new IPs very successful.

Everything we do is also cross-media, it’s designed to be a television show, be a movie, be a comic-book. Not that we’re going to focus on that but you just should, there’s no reason not to do it.

The MMO Gamer: What drew you to the Gods & Heroes IP in particular?

Anthony Castoro: I had seen Gods & Heroes as a publisher when I was at Codemasters, and we all thought it was  pretty interesting.

I actually knew one of the co-founders, Chris McKibben, because he had been the general manager of Origin Systems back in the day when I was a lowly QA guy. Actually, I think when I started as a game designer at Origin he was still there.

I was interested in it because it’s fantasy, but not high fantasy, it was mythology. That was a niche that hadn’t been addressed, and everyone knows Roman and Greek mythology, so I thought it was a really smart move in terms of what product to make in this very crowded market.

I was really sad when Perpetual went under, I think it was a really cool idea, they had some issues obviously, but everyone has issues, and if they’d been able to figure those out I believe it would have been a very popular game.

The MMO Gamer: One of the really interesting aspects of Gods & Heroes when details first started circulating was the idea of the player controlling one hero and a squad of mythological allies.

What are your plans for that aspect of the game?

Anthony Castoro: I think the Minion System is here to stay, and if anything it should be blown out a little bit more. Since that idea came out there have been other games like Grado Espada, and to some degree Star Trek Online had minions, but I agree, in addition to the setting the Minion System was one of the biggest unique things.

That and some of the things they were doing with the combat. They hadn’t quite finished figuring out what was going to happen with combat, but the finishing moves and the tandem combat action was pretty cool.

We’re definitely focused on the Minion System, ideally making it more important and more fun. I think they have the basics there, and that will be a good place to iterate.

There are other things we’re going to do that will change it a little bit. Heatwave has a mass-market appeal take, so some things we’ll do with the IP, if you go to the website you can even see, the one little piece of art we’ve got there is in a different style, a little more dramatic, a little less clean.

There are some small things, overall, the look and feel of the game is still good, pretty competitive, but the characters themselves I think need some work, so we’ll probably do some work on the models and the customization available there just to make sure it stands up for a couple of years after its intended release.

The MMO Gamer: So what hard data can you give us in terms of release dates and monetization models?

Anthony Castoro: Our goal is to release it in 2011, but if there’s one thing people know about this business it’s that you have to release the game when it’s ready.

We’re spending a few months right now playing the game – it’s running in the office – getting to understand it, what the tools are, what kind of shape they are in, bringing in some former team members and a lot of new people.

We’re going to spend at least three months figuring out what we’ve got before we start talking about how we’re going to get where we’re going to go, doing some market research, and then we have to figure out if we can get the game into open beta twelve months later, what we can keep, what we can improve, and what needs to be new.

That also includes the business model. Subscription versus free-to-play with microtransactions is a big question, and ideally after we do some homework and we see how the audience feels we can make that decision.

I think free-to-play is far more viable than it was even 12 months ago, and so when you’re forecasting eighteen months in the future that might be the case but if you’re going to do a free-to-play game it has to be good, it has to be designed for free to play.

So that’s all a big consideration for us given the time. DDO has done it with some success and they’re probably a really good model of how to do that, they’ve done a really good job.

Continued on next page…

Steve sits down with David Webber, Executive Producer at SpriteBox Studios to discuss their inaugural title, Sword of the Ultimate Destiny: Battle of the Three Kingdoms 9.

Topics include the process of importing Eastern games into the West, resolving culture clashes, and what may well be the ultimate incarnation of real money trading.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at SpriteBox.

David Webber: Sure. My name is David Webber, and I’m the executive producer for Sword of the Ultimate Destiny: Battle of the Three Kingdoms 9.

What that means is I’m basically in charge of the day to day operations here at SpriteBox, bringing the game to the American market.

The MMO Gamer: Do you have any sort of official abbreviation? That title is a bit of a mouthful.

David Webber: Internally we like to call it SotUD:BotTK9.

The MMO Gamer: How about just SUD?

David Webber: I guess that could work, too.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, could you start things off by telling us a little bit about the game? I admit that I hadn’t seen much of it before I was assigned to do this interview.

David Webber: Absolutely. SUD is a brand new massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, originally released in China in 2004 as Battle History Warrior: Romance of the Three Kingdoms 9.

We didn’t feel that our primarily male, 18-35 year old demographic would necessarily gravitate to a game with “History” or “Romance” in the title, so that was one of the first big changes we had to make, once we received the license.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sorry… but doesn’t the game being six years old no longer make it “brand new”?

David Webber: Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s like those commercials you hear on the radio for used cars with 5,000 point factory inspections. We went over every line of code in this game with a fine-tooth comb, to the point that it’s now better than new.

Not only that, our localization team is second to none. We don’t want players to feel like they’re foreigners in their own living rooms the first time they log in.

The MMO Gamer: Could you go into a bit more detail on that? Localizing games from East to West is a subject I enjoy discussing with companies like yours.

David Webber: Sure. The biggest example of that I could give would have to be the game’s setting, the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history.

That lore, the backstory, was originally what attracted us to SUD when we were looking for a game to bring over.

You want to talk about source material? The Chinese have written so many books about this stuff it’d make Tolkien die of shame—if he wasn’t already dead.

But, the problem we ran into early in the alpha was that something an Asian player might immediately recognize as a cherished part of their history, an American player would just think is some kind of Babelfish translation error.

I mean, Wei, Shu, Wu? Who ever heard of these guys in Arkansas?

So, we had to make some hard decisions in order to ensure the game was accessible, and that was when we came up with the idea of “fantacization.”

The MMO Gamer: …Fantacization?

David Webber: Exactly. It’s like Westernization, only better.

We looked at each of the Three Kingdoms, and decided on a theme for them that American players could more easily relate to:

For instance, Wu is always portrayed in the narrative as the evil, war-like nation… and we  just had a light bulb moment and were like; hey, that sounds a lot like traditional fantasy Orcs!

Then we figured we’d use Shu for the Elves and Wei for Humans, add in a little magic, move the action from China to a planet named Mythadon… now that’s a game a Western player can understand without even looking at the manual.

And our partner studio in Shanghai already had several dozen published fantasy games under their belts, so it was all just a matter of asset swapping, at that point.

The MMO Gamer: So you’ve taken a historical Chinese MMO… and turned it into a fantasy Chinese MMO?

David Webber: I prefer to say that we took the Three Kingdoms backstory as a base, and built upon it to create a rich, original fantasy world all our own.

The MMO Gamer: To be blunt, there’s an awful lot of competition out there in the free-to-play Asian fantasy game market these days.

What could you possibly do to set SUD apart from the herd?

David Webber: I’m glad you asked me that, because SUD has a huge number of innovative features that we think are really going to make it stand out from anything out there on the market, East or West.

The MMO Gamer: Such as?

David Webber: Well, our microtransaction model, for one.

The MMO Gamer: I assume like most East Asian import titles, you’re going with the free-to-play cash shop model?

David Webber: The game is free-to-play to a point, yes. You can log in and stare at your naked level 1 character all day long without ever paying us a dime.

But, if you really want to play the game, well, then things get a bit more complex.

The MMO Gamer: Complex?

David Webber: How much is your time worth to you? Ten dollars an hour? Twenty? Fifty? Think about how many hours it takes you to get that suit of epic armor, or that top rank in the PvP tournament.

When you’re getting around a hundred hours /played, it really starts to add up.

Our core philosophy is that time is money.

Why should anyone have to go grind out rats, and spiders, and goblins for days or weeks at a time just to get to the meat and potatoes of what they really want to do?

We think that all these games like WoW that are moving toward a softer leveling curve are missing the point entirely.

In SUD, you can reach the maximum level five minutes after you first log in… as long as you can afford it.

Continued on next page…

Steve sits down with Alan Crosby, formerly SOE’s Director of Global Community Relations, and current Senior Producer of EQ2 to discuss the ten year history of the EverQuest franchise.

Topics include the changing tastes of players over the years, the prospects for an EverQuest 3, keeping the game on store shelves, and the next ten years to come.

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

Alan Crosby: I am Alan Crosby, and I’m the Senior Producer on EverQuest 2. I’m essentially the shepherd of the game.

The MMO Gamer: EverQuest has been around now for over a decade now, having hit its tenth anniversary back in March.  

In terms of the online gaming industry, EQ was released when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, and yet it still survives into the present day.

How has the game managed it?

Alan Crosby: It’s done very well, it continues to grow, it continues to add expansions, new features, new content.

Its customer base, the community out there is very loyal, very passionate, and they stay around and keep playing, and demanding change.

We try to give them the change they want. They’re the main reason that the game has been around for ten years.

Yeah, we continue to put out content, we put out an expansion every year, we put out live content every few months, but it’s the players and their passion, their friendships, their social bonds that keep this game going.

The MMO Gamer: Do you have any figures as to how many people, in total, have played EQ over the years?

Alan Crosby: The total is somewhere over two million people have played EverQuest during its ten years.

The MMO Gamer: And do you know off the top of your head how many people have been playing it, consistently, for each of those ten years?

Alan Crosby: We pulled those numbers, I don’t have them readily available, but we actually announced it on the website for the tenth anniversary, some of the people who have been around since the beginning.

The MMO Gamer: Are there bronze statues of them in the middle of Freeport by now?

Alan Crosby: [laughs]

The MMO Gamer: What about the development side? Is there anyone still working on EverQuest who’s been there since the beginning?

Since the 989 Studios days, with Brad McQuaid at the helm?

Alan Crosby: I’m not sure if anybody from the original team is still on it. We have people from the original team still in the company.

Roger Uzun, for example, started with the original EverQuest team at 989, he’s now on the EverQuest 2 team. But I don’t know if any of them are still on the EQ team.

The MMO Gamer: EverQuest was pretty much the father of the MMO expansion pack, which, as you said, you used to release every six months and you’re still continuing to release on a yearly basis.

The base game, by the standards of the time was very large to begin with. Which makes me wonder just how large it’s gotten now, with all of those years of expansions under its belt.

Alan Crosby: I don’t have the number on-hand, but we did release how many square miles it equates to in the real-world on the site. But it is enormous. I dare say it’s the largest MMO out there in terms of land space.

We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 zones, each of them unique, each of them different with their own flavor.

And, we’re actually hard at work on the seventeenth expansion pack right now.

The MMO Gamer: EverQuest is also one of the few Western MMOs to have spawned a sequel. Asheron’s Call 2 notwithstanding, I wouldn’t include that because it did not long survive.

We’re currently at the point in EQ2’s lifecycle, around five years after release, where it was coming out during the lifecycle of EQ1.

But I haven’t seen any indications from SOE that an EverQuest 3 is in the making. Instead, you seem to be moving away from your roots, the traditional fantasy MMO, into more varied genres and age demographics.

Is this a trend that’s going to continue into the future? Will players ever see an EverQuest 3?

Alan Crosby: I can’t say whether you’re going to see one any time soon… I do know that we have not given up on the EverQuest franchise.

The brand is strong, in fact we now call it the EverQuest Universe, and we’re continuing to work on EverQuest 1 and 2, adding expansion packs and new content.

Eventually, I’m sure there will be some announcement… I’m not sure when, I’m not sure when work will begin… but this franchise is not going away.

Continued on next page…

Steve sits down with Joe Morrissey, a Senior Designer at Paragon Studios to discuss the inspiration behind, and current implementation of the Architect user-generated content system in City of Heroes.

Topics include preventing exploiters, how high-quality material can stand out from the crowd, and even whether the system allows a player to create art through a video game.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about what it is you do at Paragon Studios.

Joe Morrissey: I am Joe Morrissey, and I am a Senior Designer at Paragon Studios.

My primary responsibility up to the past year was Mission Architect, bringing user-generated content to the massively-multiplayer space.

That was a lot of fun to bring to life, and now to see what players are making of it. My primary responsibilities now are shifting to maintaining Mission Architect, while also beginning to work on the Going Rogue expansion.

The MMO Gamer: So, day one, you’re sitting in a meeting room and someone says, “I’ve got a great idea—let’s let players make their own missions!”

Joe Morrissey: That was me. [laughs] It started with a cry for better tools among the development team for missions.

I was the only mission designer on the project at the time, and we had thousands and thousands of players, tens of thousands of players to support. The tools we had were really good, but I was hoping to get some upgrades for them.

At the time we were still a part of Cryptic, and we just didn’t have the manpower, or the money, or the resources to really do that.

So, it was kind of this joke that I would go to the engineering department and be like, “Hey, can I get some tool support…” And they’d say, “Joe, we love you, but we have to support all these players, too. So, it’s either we support these players, or we give you support and take the same amount of time.”

So I was like, “What you’re saying is that if I make what I do so something that the players can do it, then you’ll support me?” And they’re like, “That’s not what we’re saying at all, no.” [laughs]

The MMO Gamer: And then you said, “No take-backs!”

Joe Morrissey: That was what started it. But it went onto the backburner because we were a small team, and there was no way we were going to pull that off.

Then, once NCsoft acquired us, they pretty much asked, “What do you guys want to do?” and we said, “Three things: Power customization, Mission Architect, and a boxed expansion.” And they’re like, “Okay.”

The MMO Gamer: So the idea originally wasn’t so much to let players design their own content, as it was to kill two birds with one stone?

Joe Morrissey: Really for me, wanting tools so the rest of the team could actually come up with content was the idea. Because we have a lot of guys on the team that are hardcore players, they play the game all the time.

Then they come to me like, “I’ve got this idea for this story, we should really do this arc with this guy!” And I’m like, “That’s great. I haven’t got time to do it. I’ve got plenty of other story arcs to work on.”

But, if we made the tools easy enough, then they could actually come up with the arcs, and we can put them out.

Then somewhere along that road it dawned on me: Why stop with the rest of the team?

It was a scary venture, because we were getting momentum from it, and the studio leads at what is now Paragon but at the time was NC NorCal, they wanted to differentiate us from other games out there.

Architect just kind of kept coming back up like, “How are we got to do that? That’s really scary to do,” and I’m like, “That’s why we are going to do it. We are not going to do it because it is easy.”

We definitely have learned that you have to take risks, even when your game’s been up for five years, especially if your game’s been out for five years, you have to keep reinventing yourself and keep yourself fresh.

And that is what we have seen now that Architect is out, and we have fifty thousand arcs that players have made with it.

The MMO Gamer: How do you make that transition, from a group of professionals working on something that they are getting paid to do, to fans who are paying you to play the game?

How did you ensure that everyone wasn’t just out there making five second missions, giving them fifty bazillion dollars and the Flaming Girdle of Swank Iron?

Joe Morrissey: The good thing is that all of our rewards are exactly the same in Architect as outside of Architect.

It is an equivalent system, so if there is any exploitiveness in it, it is in our regular game, as well. We’ve had five years to kind of dial that back. We don’t give them access to directly say like, “This guy is going to give me two million experience, or I am going to get this, or this.”

Your rewards are based off of kills. So, the way players would exploit the system is that they create villains that are easy to kill for them. And with that, we actually scale the rewards according to how easy the guy is to kill.

If you make a guy that is just a minion and doesn’t really have good powers, you aren’t going to get that many rewards because the risk isn’t really there.

That’s primarily what we’ve been doing. But it’s a good system, since it is based on the kills we can monitor what you are killing and control the amount of rewards based on that. You are still getting the equivalent that you get outside, because you go through those guys that are easy to kill much faster than you would with somebody else.

At the end of the day when you do the math the numbers come out pretty much equal.

Continued on next page…

Jeffrey Philipp had the opportunity to talk to David Allen and Hue Henrey to talk about Quest Online’s upcoming MMOG, Alganon. The in depth and candid interview can be found after the jump.

The MMO Gamer: Could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us what you do at Quest Online?

David Allen: I am David Allen, co-founder and President of Quest Online, creator of Alganon. I do pretty much anything that needs to be done. I make sure the right people are hired, the project milestones are on time, the core vision is shared and followed, and ensure Alganon comes together best as possible.

The MMO Gamer: First I was curious what the end goal for the studies system is going to be. Chiefly I am curious if there is going to be a hard cap for the amount of ranks you can learn on a character or if they will be able to study in perpetuity. If the latter, what are the plans to prevent players who have been playing for longer from outpacing newer players simply due to the fact that they have been playing and studying longer. And conversely, if there is no hard cap how are you going to make the increases meaningful without making them overpowered in edge cases?

David Allen: We will be launching with years of studies, and the available studies will grow over time, allowing players to focus on extended studies in the areas they are interested in pursuing. Keep in mind the study system is a “support” system first and foremost. A player can learn core studies they wish to focus on in just a few month’s time, but refining (or maximizing) those studies takes substantially longer. So one example could be a player can get +4% melee crit in 8 days, but get to that 5% crit it’s 30 days. The system is actually very well-balanced, so a player could get to max level and get great gear, but they may be lacking that 3-4% crit or 5% armor bonus that another player who has managed their studies has. This does add up, but the difference isn’t enough to cause problems, only enhance the gameplay for those who manage their studies wisely.

The MMO Gamer: Regarding the studies system, I am also curious as to your thoughts on the EVE online system that resembles it. Was it an influence on your plans and designs for your own system, and if so were there any parts you planned to improve?

David Allen: EVE has a great time-based progression system; they proved it works and works well. We have learned a lot from all major MMOGs, and simply put, all good MMOGs grow based on learning from each other. We do have a few things planned for the study system we haven’t announced yet, but these are features for next year, not at launch. Obviously it’s something that will grow and shape as the game progresses.

One last question about the studies system, I am just curious if you have had any particular feedback on the usefulness of the system, and whether players are finding that it helps. Also, a quick note/suggestion from a new player I wouldn’t mind having a slightly longer training queue.

It takes some time for the application of studies to shine, since it’s 1% here and 1% there, but over time it builds up. More importantly, it provides small differences between players. Two players, both of whom choose to play Soldiers, may choose two different weapons to specialize in. The one who specializes in swords isn’t going to see an enormous, game-altering advantage when they equip a sword versus an axe, but when they have to decide whether to have the local blacksmith craft them an epic battleaxe or an epic longsword, they’re going to choose the sword, even if the stats on both weapons are identical. The soldier who chose to study axes will make the opposite decision. Expand this concept across dozens of studies, and decisions more complex than just “sword or axe?” and you’ll see how the study system allows two otherwise identical characters to develop their own unique quirks.

We’re also taking a look at the study interface and training queue time, but the training queue is a delicate balance. The longer the queue, the longer players can work on their studies without actually logging in to the game. While the idea of players who pay us money, but never play the game, may sound good from a financial standpoint, we’d rather make a fun game, and to do that, we need people to play. A short queue time is there to encourage people to log in and enjoy the game, not just study.

The MMO Gamer: Again, pardon me if this is just me missing it because of my newbie status, and I understand the game is still currently in beta, but during my explorations I was not able to find the larger overarching plot or story. I personally am very fond of plot and story based gaming (though I’m likely setting myself up to get knocked down much of the time in this genre), so I was hoping to find myself at least tangentially entangled in some major event taking place in the game world. Are there any plans to bring that game world, it’s history and lore, and the current events of same to the forefront?

David Allen: Actually the starter quests on both continents are tied to main storylines. For example, the first quest on the Asharr side is to find out why the wolves around Andar have come out in the open, rather than hiding in their dens. (It’s not normal for the people of Andar to have a front yard full of wolves.) The cause of this strange activity leads to accusations of necromancy and the recovery of a bloodgem. This leads to the Scholars in Greenvale, and the discovery that the same madness has also infected the farmers in the area. The story continues to expand from there, as players discover the source of this plague, a secret Death-cult, and fight to put an end to the madness plaguing Asheran Forest. Even actions that may seem to be side stories or extraneous to the main story come back into the story at later levels. The quests only get bigger, better, and more in-depth the more one progresses throughout the game.

However, players aren’t forced to read the story if they don’t want to. If they just want to play the game, they only need to read the quest tracker, which tells them exactly what they need to do next. We’ve found that most players end up doing that. They tend to ignore the story and enjoy the game without it. As Alganon grows, we’ll add additional story-related features, such as cutscenes and scripted events, for those players who enjoy them. However, for launch, we are using those resources to improve gameplay, and so players who are interested in the story will have to read the quest logs.

The MMO Gamer: Another quite popular aspect of many games recently is PvP, though so far I haven’t managed to really get into it for some reason I’m still hoping one day that there will be some implementation that grabs my interest. What, if any, are the plans for Player versus Player content in your game?

David Allen: We will definitely have PvP, but we want to do it right. It is slated for the first major expansion in mid 2010. We are actually taking an approach that will allow us to balance PvP and PvE separately by giving each action the option of behaving differently based on the application (an NPC vs another player).

Read on as the two discuss matters of heroism and villainy, time devoted to story versus combat, the misconceptions of it being a “Massively Single-Player Role-Playing Game”…

And, of course, why anyone would want to play something other than a Jedi in the Star Wars universe.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself, and tell us a little about what it is you do at BioWare.

Blaine Christine: Sure. My name is Blaine Christine, I’m a producer at BioWare Austin. My job is primarily interfacing with LucasArts on all aspects of the game.

The MMO Gamer: What does “interfacing” entail? I’m sure some of the more hardcore fans hear that and picture George Lucas sitting atop a tower, meddling with knobs and dials and playing you like The Sims.

Blaine Christine: [laughs] I wish it was that cut-and-dried. Typically it’s myself interfacing with the LucasArts producer, Jake Neri, on pretty much a daily basis for everything about the game.

It’s them essentially looking at the game at whatever state it happens to be in, looking at the artwork, anything that’s going into the game, or website, or any other aspect, and giving us feedback.

Essentially just collaborating with us on making the game great.

The MMO Gamer: So then, how does one go about making the game great?

Blaine Christine: [laughs] Well, I think for BioWare the formula is distilled down pretty well, at this point.

Our lead designer, James Ohlen, has been with BioWare for eleven plus years, he was the lead designer on Baldur’s Gate and many other games.

In terms of quality and what goes into making a true BioWare experience, I think he is the key reason we’re able to succeed, and head in the direction that we’re heading.

But really, as with any other game it’s about really great planning, great design, but it’s also about listening to feedback that comes all sources.

Whether that’s from LucasArts, from within our own company, or eventually when we get there hopefully opening it up to fans to play, and listening seriously to the fans and their feedback to help us make a great game.

In an MMO I think it’s key to get feedback from as many sources as possible. It’s such a big undertaking, it’s not quite as simple as some other games, where you can plop down a focus group and have them look at it for a short period of time.

Looking at that feedback is critical.

The MMO Gamer: Ever since TOR was first announced there’s always been a very big emphasis on heroism; you, the player, aren’t just some regular schlub who wandered in from off the street, you’re a hero! Everything you do is heroic!

But if you’re an “evil” character, say, playing a Bounty Hunter or a Sith, wouldn’t you be a villain, not a hero?

Blaine Christine: [laughs] I certainly can’t deny that.

I guess what we mean by hero is not necessarily in the good guy sense, but hero in the you feel like you’re taking on a ton of enemies at once, your storyline is impactful and meaningful… you don’t feel like you’re being sent on quests to collect ten boxes for some random vendor.

The MMO Gamer: So you can play as an antagonist, the story for the “evil” classes doesn’t just swap names and places around from the stories of “the good guys”?

Blaine Christine: I would say yes, very much. The storyline for the Sith Warrior, if you want to play a bad guy, he is a bad guy.

Your storyline as it goes through, he’s not a nice, friendly dude. You see that in the gameplay footage we’ve released, where you get the choice to save or kill the captain.

These are heavy choices, and if you strike him down, you get dark side points that are going to influence how your character develops, influence how the rest of the story goes. You kill somebody, they’re not there later.

The MMO Gamer: That morality system, the dark side and light side points, seems to be carried over directly from Knights of the Old Republic. But in the MMO, what is that actually going to do?

I would assume that with the breadth of content you’re dealing with the story can’t change all that much, even if you’re all the way light side playing as a Sith Warrior… you’d still have to be out there doing bad things and killing people by nature of its being an “evil” class.

Blaine Christine: The best answer to that is it’s going to be similar to the other games we’ve done. If you look at KOTOR and how that worked out, if you played light side versus dark side, there were distinct different in the story, and distinct differences in how your character developed.

It’s going to be very similar to that.

The MMO Gamer: But in KOTOR, it was the exact same story regardless of what you were playing. A Jedi Consular had the same story as a Jedi Guardian. Here you’re dealing with a lot more variables.

Blaine Christine: That was sort of the thing where yeah, all of the classes were bound by that one story, which is not the case here.

Each of our classes has a distinct story, but within each of those stories, if you go light side or dark side, there would be differences similar to what you saw in KOTOR.

The MMO Gamer: So you could play a fully light side Sith Warrior or a dark side Jedi?

Blaine Christine: Absolutely.

The MMO Gamer: Interesting twist. Being a Sith and going around saving kittens?

Blaine Christine: Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

The MMO Gamer: From the beginning, BioWare has always pitched story as the centerpiece of the game. But you’ve also said that this is going to be a true, “traditional” MMO—and in a traditional MMO you spend about 99.95% of your time engaged in killing things.

So, is story really the centerpiece of the game, or is it combat?

Blaine Christine: That’s a great question, and another important point: Essentially, if we break it down, and this is really rough in terms of percentage…

We’ve talked a lot about story as we’ve delivered demos over the course of the summer, but a very important message is in terms of time spent, you’ll spend more time in story in our game because we have the fully voiced system, and we have the conversation trees instead of just getting a quest from a quest-giver that is text on screen…

But in terms of how you play the game, it’s going to be a relatively small amount of time that you’re going to spend in these conversations. Let’s say roughly 10-20%. Whereas the rest of the time, we’re assuming, you’re going to be running around.

There is exploration, there is combat, it is a wide-open world. Going to have crafting and harvesting, going to have guilds and social activities…

We certainly expect you’re going to spend a lot of time doing that.  We don’t want to mislead people into thinking, there’s been speculation out there, “It just looks like a single-player game!”

We’re trying to really get the message out, all of the other stuff is there, it’s just a little harder to demo that. Of course we want to demo the coolest stuff, and things that we feel is new into an MMO, but all of the other stuff is definitely going to be there.

The MMO Gamer: To follow up a bit on some of that speculation you just mentioned…

Word association: What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the phrase, “Massively Single-Player Online Role-Playing Game?”

Blaine Christine: To me, right now, it’s something that I want to try to avoid. I don’t know if people perceive that as a positive or a negative, but I want to make sure that people know this is a true MMO.

Yes, there are elements… but it’s up to you as a player, right?

You’ve seen where we show conversations with multiple group members taking part, so even when you’re in story mode you can do that within your party. To me that’s still the MMO experience, and that’s what people don’t understand yet, because people haven’t seen it in context.

The MMO Gamer: So then, can you put it in context? What’s the experience going to be for the average player, the breakdown between time spent doing essentially solo activities versus group based ones?

Blaine Christine: That’s entirely up to you. We want to cater to different play styles.

Our intent is to make the game entirely solo-able.  If you want to go through and solo, if you’re that type of player, you can play it as essentially a single-player experience.

Of course, you’re going to have other people running around you when you’re in the areas like Hutta, just like you would in any other MMO.

But if you choose to pursue the story on your own, you can do that.

Similarly, if you’re a social gamer, and your core gameplay is you want to get into the game, play with your guild, group up with a bunch of people, and either just do combat or do quests together, we’re going to have a lot of opportunities for group quests so that you can do that.

I got a question the other day, “Hey, if I’m really into more the crafting, harvesting, auction house type of gameplay, are you going to support that?” Absolutely.

If you want to spend a lot of time in the game being great at crafting—we  haven’t talked about the specifics yet, but we’re going to have an entire system like you would expect—you’ll be able to play the game of crafting, harvesting, selling things on the auction house, do that type of gameplay, as well.

The MMO Gamer: I think we’re just about out of time. I know there are a lot of things that you aren’t able to discuss yet, but before we go is there anything that you, personally would like to talk about?

Blaine Christine: We get a lot of questions about, “How are you going to make sure that players don’t just want to play as Force users or lightsaber wielders?”

To speak on that a little bit, we’ve shown gameplay with the Smuggler, shown gameplay with the Bounty Hunter, so I just want to get the message out there that we’re doing everything to make sure that each of our classes is really fun to play.

My personal favorite now, when I play through the game is actually the Smuggler. The Smuggler has that cover dynamic, and that one element, that one tweak that is different about that particular class, makes him especially fun to play.

And then in terms of tools, if you watch our demos closely a lot of people say things like, “Well how are they going to deal with a Jedi?”

What we’ve talked about here is that idea which we’ve talked about before of true heroic combat, and that you’re a hero in the Star Wars universe.

When you think of a Bounty Hunter, when you think about Jango Fett taking on Obi Wan, if you’re the cream of the crop elite Bounty Hunter, if you have the right tools… you may just have a shot.

That’s a pretty prolonged battle, he’s able to use the whip cord, able to use the flamethrower, and different things to keep the Jedi off balance.

Similarly with the Smuggler, he has many tools at his disposal. He has cover, he’s got flash-bang grenades, so maybe it’s not an inherent ability like the Force, but he has other things he can use to incapacitate say, a Sith Warrior if we’re talking about a PvP situation. He’s going to be able to deal with that situation.

Again, because he’s not just an everyday ordinary smuggler, he’s an elite smuggler.

And then Trooper, another class we’ve talked about, same sort of thing. He’s not just your every day, average Clone Trooper, this is the cream of the crop. He’s part of an elite military force that we call Havoc Squad, so he’s the best of the best.

If you think of the absolute best Trooper in the Star Wars galaxy, would he have the tools and the abilities to take on a Jedi? We think he would.

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

So, why do you make games? Why do you wake up every morning, go to work, and do what it is you do?

Blaine Christine: Good question. For me, I grew up playing games. I don’t know if I was the first generation of that or not, but back to the Atari 2600 and the Commodore 64.

Even before that, I remember playing games on a Vic-20 with a tape drive that a friend had when I was in the third grade or something. It’s just always been a part of my life.

When I got into college and I was like, “Hey, what are my options?” I initially went into computer science and engineering. I stopped, because I figured out pretty quickly that I didn’t like programming games, I actually enjoyed playing games.

I got a degree in acting—actually, two degrees in acting—and I didn’t know what to do with that. I moved to Los Angeles and didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, and I found out that there were many gaming companies around.

Sort of my happenstance I was like, “Oh, who’s here?”

Ended up getting a QA job, just a temp tester, and working my way over the course of about four and a half years to a producer position, and finished being the producer for X-Men Legends, the first Legends game at Activision.

For me it really was a life-long pursuit. I always knew I wanted to work on games, just my path of getting there was a little bit odd. But I eventually made it there and it’s a dream for me, I love it, I love it every day.

For me to work at BioWare, been here a little over two years now, it’s really a dream. Ray and Greg are fantastic, they have a great company. I think the message of our company, the quality of our games is fantastic. And I’m also a huge Star Wars fan, so it’s the perfect convergence for me.

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

Blaine Christine: Awesome, thank you.

Stay tuned to The MMO Gamer for additional information on Star Wars: The Old Republic in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime, beta sign ups are currently underway, and if this interview has whet your appetite you can head over to the game’s official website at: http://www.swtor.com

Topics discussed include the “stickiness” of session-based games, striking a balance between FPS and MMO players, and whether or not The Agency even falls under the definition of a traditional MMO at all.

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

Lorien Gremore: I’m Lorien Gremore, I’m the Lead Producer on The Agency. I’ve been with the project for a couple of years now… a little bit more than that, actually.

What I do is I lead the production team, we help to coordinate across all the different disciplines on the team, making sure people’s work comes together appropriately on time, and moves through the process of pipelines, distribution, and delivery.

The MMO Gamer: This has been a recurring theme that I’ve been bringing up in my interviews with SOE, and I’d like to bounce it off you, as well:

It almost seems to me as though the company is trying to distance itself from its roots, the more “hardcore” traditional fantasy games like EverQuest, and move towards focusing more on games that can appeal outside of the MMO genre, like The Agency, for instance.

Lorien Gremore: I think it’s a wonderful philosophy that SOE is taking right now. We’re seeing something that indicates that there are more stories to be told, really.

Everybody loves classic fantasy, I love Lord of the Rings, for instance. You can’t get more classic than that. People love a good sci-fi classic, as well.

But there are simply more stories to be told, and the fact that we are engaging in a modern, exclusive, dynamic world, that is optimistic and vibrant with lots of rich storytelling and missions…

It’s just something that we’re bringing new to the space, and it’s such an interesting genre and theme, I think it engages a lot of people’s imaginations right away.

The MMO Gamer: Where I was going with that is, it almost seems as if the age of the 5,000 hour, soul-sucking, life-consuming, quit your job and stay home to play it MMO is coming to end.

And now the “session” MMO, the bite-sized 30 minutes at a time MMO, is up and coming.

Do you feel that The Agency is the—I don’t want to use the word vanguard—the leader of the charge toward this new phase, if you want to call it that?

Lorien Gremore: We definitely try to deliver fun now with no waiting, that’s one of our mottos.

We definitely want to make sure that you have the option of jumping in, jumping out, having a quick experience, or a long-term experience if you’re looking for one.

There’s lots to do in The Agency, there’s lots of different varieties of gameplay available.

This is something we hope keeps people engaged, but also allows people to feel like they’re specializing, doing what they like to do, and able to do it fairly quickly.

You can jump in and do a mission in a few minutes, see how that worked out for you, and then maybe do a longer mission next, team up with a bunch of friends and do an epic mission.

These are all options we’re trying to offer players. We’re not trying to lock them into hours, and hours of long raids and things like that, that you might be tired of from other games. It’s not our speciality.

There’s fun to be had in those things, and I certainly enjoy them on my own personal time, but that’s not the game we’re making, here.

We’re specifically trying to create something that gives people a little more of the options that hopefully they’re looking for, right now.

The MMO Gamer: The flip side to that is, the advantage that the soul-sucking life-consuming MMOs have, is that they’re soul-sucking and life-consuming. They have huge, I guess the technical term would be “stickiness.” People play them for a very, very long time.

There are people, for example, who have been playing EverQuest for the entire decade that it’s been out.

One of the concerns I have as a player about this new breed of “thirty minute at a time” MMOs is, I would use the analogy of Tetris:

Tetris is a great game. You can download it any time you like and there it is, you play for 30 minutes and then put it away. But, most people don’t play Tetris on a constant basis for ten years at a time.

How do you get that stickiness, and keep players coming back month after month within the shorter timeframes you’re aiming for?

Lorien Gremore: I think it’s replayability that really helps us there. Since you are what you wear in The Agency, you have the option of playing any of the roles that are available to you based on your outfit that you choose before each mission.

You could play through a mission as a stealth role, and then play through it again as a combat role and get a new experience that way. You may also want to replay a mission because you didn’t get the highest level of rating on that mission.

So if you got a bronze the first time through, you might think, “Well, it’s fun to have the bronze, I can go on and now do the missions that that bronze level unlocked me, but I might want to go back and redo it through the silver rating or even the gold rating to get more goodies, more rewards, more advancement.”

That’s a really valid type of gameplay. I look at some other shooters out there, that people are replaying the same maps for years at a time.

My husband plays Halo all the time, and replays the same maps over, and over again, because they’re still engaging, because they’re designed for a particular type of audience that enjoys the replayability of it, because there’s such a dynamic that comes from smart AI, smart players, doing smart things, cleverly planning out their attacks and things like that.

We’re trying to offer a lot of that in The Agency. You can see in our demos that there’s a lot of planning and strategizing, working together with different skill sets.

Your experience even in the same mission as the same role might be completely different depending on who you took through that mission with you.

If you were taking a support character with you and were playing a stealth character, you might have a totally different experience than if you brought a combat character.

There’s a lot of replayability there, and there’s a lot of reasons to replay. You might find new secrets and clues, you might have a collection you’re going for in terms of intel or operatives.

So there’s a lot of engagement from the rewards you can get through replayability, and there’s also the engagement that you can actually get through the fact that we offer different types of gameplay, via the combinations of skills and outfits, roles, gadgets, all of that good stuff.

Continued on next page…

After having worked on some of the most critically acclaimed titles of all time, including Fallout, Arcanum, and yes, Grand Slam Bridge, he is now bringing his experience to bear as the Design Director of Carbine Studios, and their unannounced next-generation MMO.

Read on for his thoughts on the genre, the industry, and his plans for future retirement as a corduroy jacket-wearing professor.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, 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 Carbine Studios.

Tim Cain: I’m Timothy Cain, I’m the Design Director. Which means I’m in charge of the design department, which we split into Systems, and World.

Systems is combat, creatures, items… basically everything that requires a specification. World is all the lore, and content.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s start right off with a nice big philosophy question: Do you consider yourself to be an artist, an entertainer, or something else entirely?

Tim Cain: I’m not an artist, so I must be an entertainer.

The MMO Gamer: Do you believe it’s possible for games to become art?

Tim Cain: Yes, it’s very possible for a game to be art.

The MMO Gamer: Do you believe that the game Carbine is working on rises to that level?

Tim Cain: I think the correct answer is I hope it’s art. We always strive for it to be art. However, I think if you’re not trying to make a work of art that is fun, and accessible, I don’t think you should try. You should worry less about the art, and more about how enjoyable it is.

I’ve seen some works of art that I wouldn’t care to actually have and look at every day.

The MMO Gamer: So then what is fun to you? Define “fun” in an MMO.

Tim Cain: Well, the reason I like playing MMOs, is for all my life I’ve played RPGs. I gravitate towards them, I’ve made a number of them in the past.

But, MMOs have that added dimension of you’re there with thousands of other people, they’re trying to do the same things you’re trying to do, and your friends are there too, witnessing you do this.

I think part of the fun that comes out of that is just, the fun of it being social, the fun of it being a communal effort.

Going back to single-player RPGs, you feel lonely. It’s like, “Did you see that cool thing I just did?” It’s much more fun playing these games in a group. I always have one character, I was saying earlier, that I make that I don’t tell anybody about.

I solo just to judge certain parts of these games on just some merits that I don’t want to do while—I don’t want to bore the people I’m playing with.

I’ll do every crafting skill, I’ll do achievements, and people don’t need to be with me while I do that. But, for the most part it’s 80-90% of the time I spend playing these games in a group. That’s just kind of the essence of these games.

The MMO Gamer: As you said, you were a big RPG guy in the past.

A lot of people may not be familiar with your name, but just about every RPG fan should be familiar with what you’ve worked on: Fallout, Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines… all very good single player RPGs.

Now here you are working on an MMO. The biggest difference, which you just hit on, is you are not the lone protagonist going off and saving the world by yourself. You are one of hundreds of thousands of protagonists, all playing together towards the same goals.

So, how do you get that storytelling element, the essence of RPG heroism in an MMO, when you’re not the lone protagonist any more, when you have 50,000 people all doing the same things you’re trying to do?

Tim Cain: That actually is the challenge. That’s one of the things we explore every day. I know how to tell a story in a single player RPG, I’ve done it multiple times. What’s fascinating to me about MMOs, is the first ones that were made were very sandbox.

There were no stories, there really weren’t even quests, the way a lot of people today would view quests.

They weren’t nearly as well-defined, and described as in the game as “Hey, you’re starting a quest now, here it is. Do this, this, and this, then return to me and I’ll give you this.”

That’s what people think of as a quest now. But EverQuest had nothing like that. You had to talk to someone, and hit on a keyword, then he’d say something to you and it didn’t go into a log book or anything. You just went off and did what he said, and hopefully you’d find something that he’d want.

I think that the direction MMOs are going is if we can actually figure out how to tell a story, so that you’re involved in a storyline, I think people will view that as kind of the next step, instead of just doing a set of quests.

That’s the kind of thing we’ve been trying to solve at Carbine, and I think we have a solution… but I can’t say what it is.

Next year I want to give a talk on it. I wanted to give it here, but we had to put it off until next year. It’s called, “I’m a Special Snowflake.”

The MMO Gamer: So, we’ve kind of evolved from “No story at all,” to “Kinda-sorta a story.”

But, the story as it exists in MMOs today is in a little two by five inch box, with five paragraphs of text which nobody actually reads.

Some games, like The Old Republic and to a lesser extent EQ2 have tried to circumvent that with voice acting, but that obviously starts getting extremely expensive, extremely fast.

Is there a way to tell a story in an MMO, to engage players, without the game either costing a billion dollars or putting people to sleep?

Tim Cain: Yes. We’ve got a way we’re trying to tell stories, so that not everyone may get the exact same ones. Some of the elements of what we did include…

A lot of MMOs, everyone goes to the same zone, does the same quests, and then leaves and never comes back. Our game won’t be like that.

We have a word for when you click on someone and get a big box of text, it’s called a lore bomb. We’re not doing lore bombs. I think there are other ways you can tell stories.

The people under me are the ones actually doing the design specs, so what I end up writing is what I call the design philosophy docs. I give them like, “This is what a quest should be.”

I’m not actually telling them how to make a quest. I’m saying: here’s what the essence of a quest is, and here’s what I want it to be in our game. I do the same for achievements, for storyline, for using instances in the game; this is where you use an instance and this is where you don’t.

The underlying thread behind all of them is I have a player who’s playing this game, and they want to feel like they’re moving forward toward some sort of progress.

It has to include even when you hit the level cap, so it can’t be that going up a level is your sense of progress. It can’t be finding items is your sense of progress.

There has to be some other progression in the game, and I think I’ve found several axis that you can measure progress along, that people measure themselves as making some progress in the game without having to wade through lore bombs, or having them wait to go on raids with 19 other people.

Continued on next page…

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among are readers who maybe unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about what it is you do at Nexon.

Min Kim: My name is Min Kim. I’m the VP of Marketing at Nexon.

What I do right now is mostly handle Biz-Dev, marketing strategy, and PR. But I also contribute to a lot the operations side, because that’s where I really started at Nexon, especially at Nexon America.

Having started back in around 2005, I did the local versions for North America. I operated that for North America. And through that we actually ended up opening up the office here. So, the beginnings of my career at Nexon America were actually in operations.

The MMO Gamer: To start us off, you give just a little bit of company background, for those who perhaps haven’t been following you before.

Min Kim: The company was founded in Korea back in 1994. The company in the states, this is actually our second time out, and I know people know that so there is no point to hide it.

We actually closed our doors here in North America, I think in about 2004. But then we opened again.

So we came out with Kingdom of the Winds and a few other games back in the early 2000s. Then we reopened the doors again as Nexon America with MapleStory back in 2005.

The success was so big that there was no way we could have done that or scaled it out of Korea, so we set up shop here in Los Angeles in 2006.

The MMO Gamer: Of course MapleStory has gone on to be, I guess the scientific term would be a ginormous success.

Min Kim: Yeah. [laughs]

The MMO Gamer: I’ve seen some crazy figures thrown around, in the neighborhood of 90 million registered users.

Min Kim: I think MapleStory’s logged over 92 million registration, yes.

The MMO Gamer: How many of those are in the U.S?

Min Kim: The U.S., the last number we put out was slightly over six million registered players in North America.

The MMO Gamer: Those are some very respectable numbers.

Min Kim: I think a big part of it was that we actually answered a market need, back in around 2005 where I think at that point a lot of people were saying that MMOGs or MMORPGS were meant for people that were older, maybe grew up with D&D, who were in their 20s into their 30s playing these games.

We felt the reason why was because the only way to access those games was through a payment mechanism that teens don’t have access to, which is credit cards.

When we launched MapleStory here there was a market need for it but it wasn’t being fed because there were no games that were out that teens could enjoy in an MMO sense because they didn’t have access to credit cards.

The only way they could do that was ask their parents to allow them to subscribe. And for most parents that didn’t grow up with this stuff, it’s like magic beans. It’s like a complete waste of money. So, that’s I think how we started out.

But again, if you look at Asia, MapleStory is extremely successful. It’s probably best in class. And there’s a lot of MMOGs there, and I think they just got it right.

It’s the simplicity mixed with a lot of the art style. I don’t know what came together well, but it just hit it out of the park.

The MMO Gamer: But for all of that, there are a lot of players out there, and even some in the media who don’t seem to consider what you do at Nexon to be making “real MMOs.”

Min Kim: I think, is that up to the last few years, they didn’t consider our type of games as real games. It’s like, “Oh, we don’t cover that” kind of thing. And I think some of that has to do with the fact that our games are online and the content is constantly changing so it’s very difficult to review a game like ours.

Up to the last few years it was just difficult meeting with the press, and to show them our games, because they already had the stereotype of Eastern games being low-quality.

They look at the graphics and think that we’re not able to produce high-end games. We’re totally able to do it. But we make our games like this on purpose because we want 80% of the installed PC base to be able to play.

I honestly think that the PC market has been shooting itself in the foot by constantly pushing the envelope, so that only five people can play it.

I think the controversy now, and what’s making people think is you’ve got companies offering games on Facebook and MySpace that are making a killing. Probably making more money than the next-gen MMOs.

I think what we’ve got to think about is what do the players want? What do the consumers want? And it’s not all the same thing.

The MMO Gamer: On that subject, there’s a lot of talk in the industry these days about a trend towards more casual gaming as opposed to the more AAA titles you were just talking about. There is a notion out there that players want to have their gaming time defined.

They want to know that if they play game X it’s going to take exactly 30 minutes, and then they can get on with their day.

Min Kim: Sessions.

The MMO Gamer: Session play, exactly. That’s the latest buzzword.

As Nexon has seemed, from my outsider’s perspective, to be more of a casual game focused company from the start, what are your thoughts on that subject?

Min Kim: Well, I hate the word “casual” because that’s actually put us in a box, where we’ll meet up with the press and they’ll say, “Oh, they’re a casual game developer.”

But there are a lot of definitions about what casual means. Like one example I give is Texas Hold’Em. If I’m playing with you guys and we’re playing Texas Hold’Em at my house and I’ve got a $20 buy-in, that’s a very casual experience.

You go to the casinos, where you’re playing at the World Series of Poker and you put $10,000 down, it’s not casual anymore. It’s extremely hardcore even though it’s the same game. [laughs]

I think the word “casual” just makes it more difficult, but I do think that players are looking for different experiences and I think it’s our job in the industry to basically just cater to them all and not limit it.

I feel like we’ve been limiting the market greatly. Games like Dungeon Fighter, you look at it, it looks very casual but I don’t like to use the word “casual.” I like to use the word “approachable.”

So if you’re looking over my shoulder and I’m playing Dungeon Fighter online, that game, I think, is the type of game where your friend who had never seen it before might say, “Hey, move over, I want to try,” because it looks like an arcade game, versus something that is very complex.

Continued on next page…

The MMO Gamer: First of all, 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 Trion.

Russ Brown: I’m Russ Brown, I’m a VP at Trion for Heroes of Telara. I’m kind of the top of the food chain for the whole project.

The MMO Gamer: So you’d be the man to talk to, then?

Russ Brown: Yes. [Laughter]

The MMO Gamer: You said something very interesting during the demo. You’d been in the industry for quite a long time before going into retirement. But, then this game brought you out. Why?

Russ Brown: It was the opportunity to do a game where I could change content, the dynamic content, based on what the community wants. So, so much of being in games was guessing what the community wants, guessing what the game player wants, giving it to them and then going “OK, hopefully that works.”

So now I can react, that’s very important to me.

The MMO Gamer: Well technically, if you want to know what the community wants you can just go to the forums and see what everybody is complaining about.

Russ Brown: Well, you’re a wise man. [Laughter] Sometimes the forums are right.

The MMO Gamer: And sometimes they are very, very wrong. Anyway, we should probably be talking about Telara, not the forums.

Russ Brown: Yeah. [Laughter]

The MMO Gamer: So how does this game allow you to do that, then? React to players to give them what they want faster than a standard MMO?

Russ Brown: It allows me because of the way our technology is [built]. Once I have content on your machine; so you will still have to patch. I want to make sure people understand that. Once you have the content like animations, I can tell the servers how they need to behave. Once you have a dragon, I can say “Hey dragon, go attack over here. Hey dragon, go do this.” Or, “orcs go attack over there.”

So I can figure out what the players want to happen and do that.

The MMO Gamer: So you’re trying to set up a system that’s more dynamic than most MMOs, and actually create something approaching what they used to do in MUDs, or early EverQuest with live GM events?

Russ Brown: Exactly! Something where you can actually make a difference, so it’s not the same. Right now, in a lot of MMOs, if I go to this zone it’s the same as it was three or five years ago. And also I can give the players what they want.

One of my grand visions is to not only do it on a big scale but do it on a small scale too. Have things like merchants who have sales. Don’t always have the same things. So when people stumble across him, they’ll think “Cool, this guy is selling a magical weapon he didn’t yesterday.”

The MMO Gamer: The problem that always comes in is that dynamic ability comes with a cost. How are you going to manage that? Are you going to enlist volunteers for this, or have an extremely large customer service team?

Russ Brown: So we have a full development team, and we have a pretty good pipeline for getting that done really quickly. But yea, it’d definitely something that we’re going to have to support. It’s more gaming as service; we’re there to serve you.

The MMO Gamer: Is there anything you personally would like to talk about? The sort of thing people such as myself don’t generally ask you?

Russ Brown: That’s a great question. What I want to talk about is letting players have fun. Giving the players what they want.

The MMO Gamer: In an MMO? Are you insane, sir?

Russ Brown: [Laughter] No! I’m not! It’s supposed to be fun, it’s not supposed to be a chore that I’m scheduled to do every day and eight o’clock, right? You’re supposed to be in there to have fun! And my goal is to have fun. I think so much in gaming, especially online gaming becomes a chore.

The MMO Gamer: So then why do you think that the common mindset among developers seems to be that MMOs must occupy 5,000 hours of gameplay, and therefore we must make players do XYZ that they don’t really want to do for the first 4,900 hours to get to the fun stuff?

Russ Brown: I honestly don’t know. And sometimes I wonder that. I think you can make a game fun. I think sometimes games, and not just MMOs, make a game but not necessarily make it fun. That’s the answer I’m going to give.

The MMO Gamer: A follow-up to that would be, “fun” means different things to different people. What is it to you?

Russ Brown: Two things define fun for me. One is seeing new experiences, going around and seeing cool stuff and seeing stuff change and the other one is character advancement. So for me character advancement is fun, I need to feel like my character is getting better and that I don’t have roadblocks. I need my guy to feel like his growing.

The MMO Gamer: How is advancement handled in the game then? How have you sought to make it fun?

It was very interesting during the demo, where you where showing off that any character can change between any job at any time. I did have some wheels in my head turning, thinking “Huh, this is never going to work. You’re going to have to carry five sets of armor around with you.”

And the subjob system was very interesting; can you get into that a little bit?

Russ Brown: So what the subclass system is; we have four basic core classes. And the four classes have their basic MMO roles. You have a fighter, a cleric, a rogue and a mage. The subclass system is how you do hybrids and how you get some specialization in your class. Given this example, so you want to play a paladin who is more of a fighter who can heal, you’ll play a subclass paladin on a fighter. If you want to play a paladin who is more like a cleric who can fight, you’ll play a paladin as a subclass to the cleric.

So that way, I can always, when people say “Well you know, a hybrid’s not as good as this class.”, if you want to be the best healer, be the cleric.

The MMO Gamer: Does the subclass level up as well, or does it just stick to your main class’s level?

Russ Brown: Excellent question, you’re the first guy to ask that! As your main class levels up and [in] your subclass, more stuff gets unlocked as you get more levels. So they’ll automatically appear, you don’t have to go to a trainer.

The MMO Gamer: Hello! Could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us what Divergence Online is all about and how you are involved?

Ethan Casner: My name is Ethan Casner, I’m the Project Manager for Divergence Online. It’s a hard-core 3PS Sci-Fi MMORPG we’re developing. In addition to performing the role of Project Manager, I’m also the creator of the Divergence universe in all it’s rough and ever-evolving glory so to speak. Divergence is a universe set a few hundred years into our future where human and alien civilizations collide, often violently and will carry an M-rating for violence, language, sexual themes and substance abuse. It’s currently a PC-only game but an apple port is something we hope to have the resources to attempt in the coming months.

The MMO Gamer: Now I’m sure some people who have heard about, or are just now hearing about Divergence Online are wondering what exactly a 3PS game is. Would you please explain what it is exactly?

Ethan Casner: A 3PS is what a lot of games calling themselves FPSs are. It’s a third-person shooter, very similar to an FPS, the primary difference being that by default your camera is slightly above and slightly behind your character. “FPS” however has become sort of a “catch phrase” thrown about nowadays to describe a variety of similar gameplay systems as it is not commonly looked at as it’s actual meaning which is “First-Person Shooter”. Gears of War, for instance, is not an FPS, it is a 3PS such as ourselves.

The MMO Gamer: What are some of the newer things you have added to Divergence Online to make it unique amongst some of the 3PS games out there?

Ethan Casner: The biggest difference between our game and other 3PS games would be that Divergence isn’t just a 3PS, it’s a 3PS MMORPG. To be fair, MMO combat will never compare to to FPS/3PS combat, so I’d hate to be compared in that department to games such as Gears’. Our goal is to get a close to the feel of combat in a traditional FPS/3PS as possible, with the capabilities of an MMORPG such as character progression and a persistent world populated by (hopefully) thousands of players at the same time.

The MMO Gamer: I know Divergence is independently owned, and you implement many of the things the community says into the game. How have you benefited from this remarkable decision that many game developers tend to ignore?

Ethan Casner: There’s an example I’ve been using to answer questions relating to this policy of ours and it goes like this.

When SOE gutted SWG of one of it’s best features; it’s skill-based progression, arguably 10,000s of players who chose to end their subscriptions were left without something they needed.

When it was proposed on our first website early in development before we had even begun to implement combat and saw how many people were desperately pandering for a skill-based system, we simply said, “Sure. If they don’t want those 10,000 subscribers, we’ll sure as hell take them!” and voila, skill-based progression was added to the roadmap for Divergence. No board meetings, no bickering with IP owners. The entire decision took less than an hour to indoctrinate.

Since then we’ve put many other key features to vote and in many cases were surprised by the outcome. I myself only begrudgingly agreed to put permanent-death on the docket thinking almost no-one would go for it, but at the close of polling it was discovered that something like 90% of everyone who took part in the poll was hoping for some form of permanent death. And once again, with a simple conversation that took no more than a few minutes I relented to the team (at the time), “OK, if that’s what they want. Let’s go with it.” and permanent death went on the same roadmap.

It’s great to both have that level of connection with your potential customers, and also the agility to make decisions in the blink of an eye.

The MMO Gamer: How is the PvP in Divergence online?

Ethan Casner: We have an open-pvp system going into affect that I’m sure will be at the least mildly controversial. The point of Divergence is “freedom”, and you can’t have real freedom without the ability to pull our your pistol and blast someone in the face when they insult you. Does that mean one can expect psychopaths to be kicking in the doors of dance clubs and spraying rounds at helpless patrons every day simply because they can? Unlikely when you consider that in Divergence, faction is everything. You’re given the freedom to do as you please, but with the understanding that you had best be prepared to reap the consequences of your actions, just as in real life. In that scenario, not only would that individual be KOS from then on to the guards posted outside and inside that establishment, but would be quite unwelcome in many other important places as well.

The MMO Gamer: Could you please explain the “Hybrid Interface” introduced in Divergence and how it adds in overall gameplay?

Ethan Casner: Absolutely. Our “hybrid interface” allows the player to switch between what we call “RAG Mode” (Run-and-Gun Mode), a 3PS style combat system with crosshairs where turning the mouse equals turning your character, and “MMO Mode”, which gives the player auto-attack fucntionality in addition to granting the user a cursor and essentially making the game operate and feel like a common MMORPG in terms of targeting, movement, and camera operation. All-in-all, we expect the player will most likely switch between these modes several times during each fight as the ads/disads each mode provides simply allow the player to let the game perform actions such as attacking for them, or take over total control of their actions and aiming.

The MMO Gamer: How is the balance between the two different forms of gameplay, PvE and PvP?

Ethan Casner: The difference between PVE and PVP is blurred in Divergence, first of all. The main balancing mechanism between PVP and PVE in Divergence is that In many cases the game simply makes no distinction between the two. This is for the purpose of giving the player a much more “immersed” feeling while playing. In many cases, a player will get the same amount of XP for killing a player as an NPC, and with the escalating feudal violence between the human factions, there will be no shortage of blood.

Players can also loot both PCs and NPCs, making botting and AFK macroing extremely foolish as another player discovering your character being “unmanned” would be like discovering a pot of gold. To allow players to still go AFK inside of the world without being a target for murdering marauders however is a new system we’re hoping to implement before launch. This system will, when your character goes AFK, temporarily convert your unmanned character into something of an NPC itself, allowing it to auto-attack assailants and defend itself as a normal NPC in the PVE world would do, further blurring the lines between PC and NPC, PVP and PVE.

The MMO Gamer: Hello! Could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what you do at Ntreev and your responsibilities relating to Pangya?

Sang Kwon: Hello all! My name is Sang Kwon. I am the Assistant Manager for the Game Operations Team at Ntreev USA.

My job is to make sure everything is lined up and moving. Just like a mechanic who works on a car to make sure the engine oil is changed on time, and timely maintenances are being regularly performed. Let’s just say I have my hands in many different cookie jars.

The MMO Gamer: Where did the overall inspiration for Pangya come from?

Sang Kwon: Pangya’s basic concept was accessibility. The original goal was to have players play a golf game without feeling like they were playing a traditional golf game. At the time, golf was becoming a mainstream sport and we thought the attraction of the sport and pacing was a good fit for an MMO. So, take golf, fantasy, anime style art and an awesome storyline to tie it all in, and you have Pangya.

The MMO Gamer: What were you hoping to achieve with Pangya that no other online sport simulation game has done before?

Sang Kwon: We wanted to make players feel that golf game can be visually satisfying while keeping the core competitive nature kept intact. How do we facilitate an environment or sports style gaming platform so that players would not feel intimidated or bored? The answer is simple, our goal is not to simulate but to entertain using the structure of golf.

The MMO Gamer: Do you feel Pangya has reached its peak of development?

Sang Kwon: Not by a long shot, online games offer the opportunity of infinite possibilities and opportunities, and there is an active development team dedicated to future content. In fact, there has been a steady increase on the overall development of Pangya. By that, I mean that our players can expect to see some big stuff in the future. There will be of course be a “Season 5” and we’ll be sure to have some North American tailored items and content in the future as well.

To top it all off, we’ve just launched Pangya here at Ntreev USA. We have the full support and commitment of the Pangya Development Team. I’ll go so far as to say that we are just getting started here.

The MMO Gamer: What incentives do you offer to help convince those players who don’t frequently play online sport simulation games to try Pangya out?

Sang Kwon: Well, we are not trying to emulate professional golf any time soon! I guess the immediate incentive is that you don’t have to pay a dime to register for an account, download and play. Once you are in the game, you can take time to try a tutorial, play around by yourself to familiarize and head over to various different rooms to play with other players.

If you are familiar with basic rules of golf, then all you need to do is learn a few control keys and then hop right in. It doesn’t look like golf… When was the last time you’d seen a huge epically styled fantasy sword, used to knock an exploding Comet 400 yards towards a cup, set to the tone of anime style imagery, fashioned to the back drop of a world re-living the tale of a hero saving the world… in a game? Then again… that’s Pangya.

The MMO Gamer: What are some of the different gameplay modes offered in Pangya?

Sang Kwon: We offer various player vs. player modes; including a 30 player tournament mode. One particular mode, that I’m personally fond of, is the Family Mode. Family Mode basically imitates the old school gaming days of sitting in front of a TV or PC when only 1 TV or PC in a household was common.

Family Mode allows more than one player to share that one computer, and take turns at the controls to play a round together. It reminds me of the old days of sitting in front of a TV with friends & family to play a game. It makes me happy when I hear our players telling stories about using Family Mode to play with their family members.

The MMO Gamer: What are some of the new features in Season 4 that gamers should expect to see?

Sang Kwon: We have added the very popular new character “Lucia”, a new course, new items, a new User Interface and more. A new play mode is slated to go in soon as well; there is way too much to list here. There is so much involved with “Seasonal” updates that it almost feels like a new game and not just an incremental upgrade.

The MMO Gamer: What’s different with the creative anime design approach to a golf simulation game?

Sang Kwon: It’s all about opening up to the new audiences. Anime inspired game designs have a great history in Eastern Asia; take the global appeal of anime and manga for example. For all intents and purposes, I feel that it’s a fun, stylistic approach that utilizes the Pangya art team’s full potential.

Also, being in a fictional universe means that we have a great degree of freedom in designing courses and items. We are not bound to the traditional design of “golf” courses, items, clothing *ick!*, characters, etc.
Many players have told us that they were never interested in playing a golf game before, but after playing Pangya, some of them have gone so far as to watching golf on TV. At least for myself, I now understand why the game of golf is so exciting!

The MMO Gamer: Can you expand more on one of the features in Pangya: “special shots”?

Sang Kwon: Special Shots are like special moves in a fighting game. With a specific command input, players can trigger special animations with over-the-top action camera angles, and pull a shot that’ll go further, backspin, explode and even pull off certain feats that a regular shot couldn’t. If you are familiar with sports anime/manga and their so called “special moves”, then you’ll feel right at home with the Special Shots.

The MMO Gamer: Finally, where do you see Pangya in the next few years?

Sang Kwon: Pangya has enjoyed enormous success worldwide. There is a huge fan-base and we have no intention of slowing down anytime soon. My personal hope is for Pangya to be so successful that we would have the opportunity to host live tournaments in a major metropolitan convention in California or New York.

We have an amazing staff, talented developers and avid fans! Our job is to provide our players with Pangya content that they will continue to enjoy, and maybe even find that place where both fantasy fans and real-life golf fans can come together.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions!

Sang Kwon: Thanks for the opportunity and I hope everyone can come and check out Pangya at http://pangya.ntreev.net/!

The MMO Gamer: Could you begin by introducing yourself and what you do at Dragon Oath?

Martin Tan: My name is Martin Tan, General Manager of ChangYou.com (US) Inc. The company is a U.S. subsidiary of ChangYou.com Ltd (NASDAQ: CYOU), one of the leading MMORPG developers and publishers in China.

The MMO Gamer: How do you intend to differentiate your product from the many other games out there?

Martin Tan: The community-oriented game play, features/systems and the entire game platform will be the biggest attraction for the Western players. It is a well known fact that the western players do not appreciate grinding games. In addition, many Free-to-Play MMORPGs from Asia are mostly single-play oriented and grinding game play with limited quests and storylines.

However, Dragon Oath is clearly does not follow this mode. It is not possible to play alone. Dragon Oath provides players with many internal mechanisms to foster virtual relationships within the game – the entire game play follows the storyline, 24/7 on-going events with 9 different and very distinct classes with different stories and missions for each class.

Graphics and good visual trailers are not going to make players stay in the game. Simply cool looking characters will not make players stay in the game. Only the great game content and the depth of the game which will make players stay in the game. I can proudly say that Dragon Oath has it all.

The MMO Gamer: How much influence have movies and popular culture had on your design decisions?

Martin Tan: Dragon Oath (AKA Tian Long Ba Bu, or TLBB) is inspired by the popular Chinese novel Tian Long Ba Bu which means “Novel of Eight Demigods.” The story played a major role in the conceptualization of the game.

The MMO Gamer: How much focus has your team spent on writing? Both on quests and creating a rich world for players to exist in?

Martin Tan: Considerable amount of time has been spent on the conception and development of the game. The game follows a main storyline so we highly focused on writing. Even now in our Pre closed beta stage we are spending a great amount of time on localization and translation.

The MMO Gamer: How many other things will there be for players to do when they are not conquering enemies?

Martin Tan: Dragon Oath offers several non-combat options that will excite its players. In my opinion, these non-combat options make the game very additive and fun. Some of the non-combat options are:

The Guild System – The players can actually build their own guild or city called the player city

Non-Combat Events – The game offers both combat and non-combat events such as ‘Lucky Quizzes’ and Trivia Questions.

Crafting System – There is no limit to crafting skills and the player can opt lessons for being a blacksmith or a farmer.

I can’t divulge more information at this stage. But can assure the players that there is a lot to look forward to in the game in regards to combative and non-combative options.

The MMO Gamer: What do you have planned for your end game content?

Martin Tan: We are still working on it…

The MMO Gamer: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Is there anything you’d like to add that we haven’t touched upon in our interview?

Martin Tan: Thank you so much for taking the time out for this interview. We feel extremely happy and honored.