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]

Continued on next page…

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]

Continued on next page…

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.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for all of our readers who maybe unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself to us tell us a little about what it is you do at GamesCampus .

David Chang: My name is David Chang, I’m the EVP of Marketing and Business Development for GamesCampus.

I’m in charge of all of our advertising and marketing activity, as well as our business development activity. Which involves working with partners like Major League Baseball, all the way down to payments.

The MMO Gamer: You just finished giving me a very interesting demo. I have to admit to our readers, when I first went to your website I was thinking to myself: Pool? Baseball? Golf? What’s my editor on, giving me this assignment?

But, you proved me wrong. I didn’t think that it would be humanly possible to work baseball or golf into a persistent online world that meets the definition of an MMO, but you have managed to accomplish it.

David Chang: That’s awesome!

The MMO Gamer: Can you give a brief rundown on how the system is set up?

David Chang: Sure. One of the things about the baseball game in particular that’s so great is that there is a leveling component, not just to the team, but also to players.

So you’re exactly right in terms of the persistence. We want people to do not just play a baseball game, but we want people to grow their team and their players over time. So, there are things where if you win a game, that’s how you gain experience points.

If you win against a higher level opponent you get more experience points, if you kind of bottom feed and you take advantage of lower level players, you don’t get as much, and so on.

There are a lot of MMO-type concepts in the game. If you’re talking about individual players, if you hit a lot of homeruns, or if you steal a lot of bases, your power or your stealing stat will increase over each season.

So, a large part of the game is about growing not just your team, but your players on your team.

I think the example I used for our game was Juan Pierre. Juan Pierre is my lead-off hitter, and I’ve been able to do quite well with him. Over time, my batting power, my batting accuracy, and my run statistic with him has increased.

There are some people that like to collect players, like they want to have Vladimir Guerrero, and they want Bobby Abreu, and they want Mark Teixeira… you can do that, obviously. But, there are people like myself that like to grow players over time.

And, if you take your players and you grow them over time, they can compete head to head with the marquee players that are out there. So, you don’t need to necessarily need to choose one path over the other.

It’s also like an MMO, in that there are different ways to play a baseball game. One example I gave in our conversation was you can play long ball, right? You can play a power game, you can play a finesse game… kind of like [laughing] you can be a damage dealer, or you can be a stealth guy.

There a lot of different ways to think about how to play these games, that are very similar to MMO concepts. The only things we have are missions, that are very much like quests in MMOs, where you have to accomplish a certain set of objectives, like beating all the teams in the AL East, or pitching a shut-out.

The MMO Gamer: I was just going to bring those up in my second question. You have actually found a way to create missions that do not involve killing 10 rats. That deserves some kind of a medal.

David Chang: [laughing] They’re even a little bit more fun than killing 10 rats, right?

Even the basic missions, like beat your cross-town rival—so for the Dodgers it would be the Angels, or the Giants and the Athletics. What that involves is playing a really heated game against another person, online. And I think that’s a lot fun.

It’s not just simple hunter-gather missions, or grind. I think the one improvement above MMO games it that with our sports games, you can’t really grind out levels.

There isn’t this thing not where there’s this exploit, where you get a bunch of mobs to trail you, and then zone damage somebody… That stuff isn’t necessary, because all of our missions are gameplay missions, where you’re playing against other people.

I think that’s a good way to make it fun for everybody.

Continued on the next page.

Topics covered include the surprise of hardcore players trying out the game–and liking it–and the difficulties in designing a game that is at once both fun to play, but also easy to stop playing any time you want.

The MMO Gamer: The game’s been out now since the end of April. How’s it been meeting expectations, pre-release compared to now that’s in the hands of actual players?

Laralyn McWilliams: It’s always interesting when you’re making a game, you’re sort of placing bets on what you think people will like, and what you think people will do.

To some extent, it really exceeded our expectations because we hit over two million registered players before we’d been out a month, and we’re past three million, now.

So that’s really been tremendous. We’ve been getting great reviews, so we’re really happy about the response from that perspective.

From the perspective of the players in the game, that’s where it really gets interesting for us because we get to see where we were making the right bets and where we really weren’t.

We get feedback, and then we start responding to it. So we’re generally really pleased. We’re working out some technical issues still because 3 million is a lot of people to accommodate all at once.

But I think we’re doing pretty well, and I think people are really enjoying the game.

The MMO Gamer: I would think that too many people to accommodate would be one of those good problems to have.

Laralyn McWilliams: It is, actually, and we’re getting a lot of press as well; there’s a great New York Times article. It’s just been really fascinating for us as a team to watch and really exciting because for a long while we were the sort of little game nobody had heard of.

We were SOE’s small project, and so it’s really great for us to finally get it done and get it out in front of players and then have players enjoy it as much as they are.

The MMO Gamer: We talked briefly outside, before we sat down for the interview, and you said that the types of people playing the game actually surprised you… more of a hardcore demographic than you were expecting.

People bringing their WoW guilds over to play in between raid lockouts, things like that.

Laralyn McWilliams: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what’s really interesting to us because when we first released Free Realms it was out for a couple of weeks before the TV ads started to run and all of that. So the people who had most heard about the game before we launched were MMO players.

MMO players are really quick to try every new game that comes out. And I’m one of them too, right? So I buy every new MMO that comes out, and I always try all of them.

So it was great for us was to get these MMO players – some of them in our beta, some of them not – really see them stick with the game and enjoy it.

It was great, for example, we launched very late in the evening on our launch date; I think it was probably 11:30 at night, the night of launch when we finally launched. And even though we’re on the West Coast, so obviously the furthest behind time zone other than like Hawaii, there was still a ton of players who had been waiting all night to play the game who just poured into the game as soon as we opened the doors.

So reading that people are…it’s interesting because we didn’t place a lot of focus going toward launch on some of the features that established MMO players really latch on to, because our primary focus was getting the mechanics fun [?] and getting the base of the game to play there.

But now we’re getting a lot of feedback from those more hardcore players of that they love the game and they want guilds and they want to be able to have more incentives to group and those sorts of social activities; which we always plan things like an auction house which we had always planned to do and in fact were developing before launch.

We just were focusing our priorities in making the game as solid as possible and as bug-free as possible.

The MMO Gamer: So there wasn’t really any, “Please put in a dragon to kill, and some epics, please!”?

Laralyn McWilliams: No, we’re actually not getting any of that, and it’s funny because some of our fans are our biggest supporters on the forums.

So every time there is a post from somebody on the forums saying, “I’m already level 20 on this job. I feel like I’m done,” somebody else says, “Have you tried racing? Do you have a pet? Have you tried cooking? There are so many different things to do, stop being so focused on trying to race to the maximum level as fast as possible, that’s not what Free Realms is about!”

And it’s really not; it’s really not about the race to the highest level possible. It’s all about doing what you want to do, and having fun. If you want to play and max out one job at a time, that’s cool. If you don’t want to do that, you don’t have to.

Even for the players who get all the way to level 20 there are all sorts of leader boards, which then becomes another race to get to the top of those.

The MMO Gamer: You said a very strange word in that answer: “fun.” Can you explain what you mean by “fun” in an MMO? I’m not very clear on the whole concept.

Laralyn McWilliams: [laughs] That’s really the heart of Free Realms.

Looking at all of the different things that you can do in the game, and not just providing you with variety but also making sure the activity itself is fun.

Our goal was that the activity you’re doing to level up is so fun that leveling up is just a side effect. You just want to play the game.

We’re seeing that now with a lot of our players. For example, a lot of the more casual players and some of the parents who play the mining game, which is sort of a Bejeweled, match three-style game, some of them are sort of accidentally leveling up because they just like playing the game.

So some of them will be level six or seven and then somebody will say, “Have you done this quest?” And they’ll be like, “There are quests?” Then somebody just turns them on to the idea of, “You mean there’s some dude who’s going to pay me to do this. Really?” And now they’re getting into the quest line.

The TCG is the same way, a lot of people play the TCG a lot and say, “What? There are scenarios? I can challenge NPCs?” That’s a whole new thing for them cause they just like playing the TCG.

That’s a part of what’s really revolutionary about Free Realms, creating a progression system and persistent characters around things that are actually genuinely fun to play.

Continued on next page…

The MMO Gamer: Based on our previous conversation, I guess my first question is: What changes have been made to the game in this latest patch which embody the philosophy of fun over tedium?

Craig Morrison: We started the process with the previous updates that introduced content like Ymir’s Pass and Xibuluku, and I think the content in this update does continue the progress on that front we started with those updates. I think the experience in Tarantia Commons is a fun one, there are some great moments to be had in the area, from the ever evolving civil unrest that dynamically generates based on players interactions (or goes ahead on its own if they choose to stay out of it!), to the roof-top game-play that adds another element to an urban environment (in particular on a PVP server!) through to things like the boss encounters in the Crows Nest group instance that players seem to be reacting really well to!

So I don’t see those as much as ‘changes’ more of the focus that we ask the team to have. We ask our content designers to try and inject interesting and engaging elements to their designs so that they are interesting for the players. I am really proud of well the team approach this and that the game-play experience in these new areas is really interesting and feels fresh to players. Yes, the mechanics are largely the same, it is about how those mechanics are applied, with a little imagination the designers can take their tools and craft something a little different for the player. It is those little things that make the experiences memorable.

At the risk of a slight spoiler, the boss called Jovus in the Crows Nest is a great example. He uses a special powder in a fireplace to generate toxic gas. At certain points in the encounter, he runs over to the fireplace mid fight and throws something into the flames, that creates fumes around the room that applies a debuff of some kind… all pretty much standard sounding MMO mechanics so far.

The difference comes with how the players have to deal with the gas. In order to remove the clouds the players have to grab fire-side fans and actually fan the smoke out of the room. The fans are visible and have an animation, something visible the players can see and appreciate. So rather than just saying ‘have players apply X spell or item to remove debuff Y, the designers came up with an imaginative way for them to have to remove the debfuff. Something the players remember and react to…’oh this is the guy we have to do the thing with the fans’.

It is all about making those encounters have something to them that makes the player go ‘that’s cool’, and to be able to achieve it within the confines of our usual mechanics. Basically it’s just not accepting that the ‘standard’ thing to do here is have another player cast a spell that removes the debuff, or have them just use an inventory item to remove the debuff. Sure, some of the time you will do that as well, but it’s important to have the designers also come up with those moments that twist things a little and let the players have a little fun with it, even if technically the response is the same – they did after all use X to remove Y, just not in the way that the players might expect.

The MMO Gamer: You had quite awhile to get most of the kinks worked out on the test server, so there shouldn’t have been too many surprises. But now that it’s gone live, have you been taken aback by any reactions to it from the playerbase?

Craig Morrison: I don’t think surprised is the right word, at least not in any negative sense. We always knew, and told people quite clearly, that we fully expected there to be tweaks and adjustments we would have to make after the update went live, and that is the case.

If anything we have been encouraged that those issues haven’t been as serious or as difficult to address as you sometimes fear with your ‘worst case scenario’ head on, which as producer is pretty much my default state! There are of course some things we need to address, as we expected, but by and large, outside of the expected balance adjustments, the changes seem to have been quite well received.

The MMO Gamer: As a bookend to that last question: How do you respond to the derogatory “Age of Casters” label being applied to the patch on the boards and in global chat?

Craig Morrison: See, that why I said, ‘outside of the balance adjustments…’ above, as that is of course where our attention has to turn now. As we have already addressed on our forums, that is definitely one of the areas that we will be looking at in the post-update tweaks and adjustments mentioned above.

There are two factors here, the first in more of a general distinction between spell using classes and melee classes in our game. The spell using classes in Age of Conan are inherently easier to play, or rather more forgiving to play that leads to the opinion of them being easier to play, and they are certainly easier to master. That element won’t really change. Those classes are a deal more forgiving and easier to really master. That said I think that I think on the other hand a really well played melee character is a far more challenging foe and adversary at the hands of a skilled and experienced PVP player.

All that said, and to get down to the bare bones of it, No, the balance there isn’t quite right out of the gate as it were in respect with 1.05 and that is an area the subsequent balance adjustments will focus on. As I mentioned above we always knew there would be issues like that this that would come out of the changes as players adapted to the new power scales and abilities. It is something we were prepared to react to and already are preparing the follow-up update to address some of these issues.

The MMO Gamer: Has the reaction to the item stats changes been as positive as you hoped it would be? Or has a new vocal minority sprung up already, to pine about how things were better in the old days?

Craig Morrison: I think the item changes themselves have been pretty well received across the board. The majority of the issues people have are with the balance concerns, like those we have already discussed, that people have now they are getting used to the new system.

Of course there are a few players who preferred the ‘old way’ completely, but if you set aside the balance issues (only for the sake of this question, they are off course very important and being worked on…just to be clear before someone quotes that previous sentence out of context!), then I think those who don’t like the new items at all, are a very small minority, and by and large players understand and appreciate the benefits of the revamped RPG stats.

It would be great to be able to please everyone, all of the time, but alas in an MMO setting that is rarely possible. I think most though do see that these changes are very beneficial to the games continued success.

The MMO Gamer: When we last spoke, you cited the Tortage experience as an example of quality storytelling within the game. Having now had the chance to play it since our interview, I would tend to agree with you. But, it also seemed as through the story aspect ground to a screeching halt the moment you left the island, when the next step in your epic quest basically says, “Well, good luck, come back in ten levels!”

Is there anything in this patch, or a patch to come in the near future, that keeps the story at the forefront after you get out into the world?

Craig Morrison: I think it’s about bringing players into the rest of the quests, and leading them to the other areas where there are also other great quest lines. That’s an area we will keep improving on over time. Is there still a slight ‘step’ when they arrive in the mainland? Yes, that is probably still there to some degree, and is something we will be trying to improve further as time goes on.

The MMO Gamer: You are sitting across a table from someone who played Conan at launch. They quit after the first month, and vowed to never return without some serious changes being made to the game. What would you say to get them back?

Craig Morrison: Firstly I would say that there have been serious changes made to the game! Then I would say that they shouldn’t just take my word for it and to them come back and try it for themselves! I am of course a completely biased opinion in that respect!

There is a free trial available and there will soon be a reevaluation offer to previous players so they can come back and try it out for themselves. Try it, speak to people playing the game, and they might just find that the serious changes they wanted to see have been made!

The MMO Gamer: Word association. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the version number: “1.06”?

Craig Morrison: The first thing? That would have to be ‘guilds’, which doesn’t really do justice to everything else we will be looking at adding in the 1.06 cycle! Things like a new raid dungeon and another new dungeon for groups and multi-group activities, and new goals and objectives for PVP in the Border Kingdoms… but ‘guilds’ is certainly the area where you will see the major new addition to the game.

That’s something we will be talking more about very shortly once we have worked through these immediate post-1.05 updates!

The MMO Gamer: Thank you for your time, Craig.

Stay tuned to The MMO Gamer for more Age of Conan coverage in the days to come. In the meanwhile, as Craig mentioned, the game is currently offering a ten day free trial. If this, or our prior interview with him has whet your appetite, you can give the game a shot right over here: http://www.ageofconan.com/trial/