As we were viewing the Opcore concept art, the question was raised
concerning the playable characters and how exactly a player might
become a better combatant even if they’ve decided upon the
Archeologist archetype. “We have specializations that a
character
can progress down to learn some of these other skills that they may not
be immediately proficient in,” Kevin said. “We
haven’t announced anything on these yet, but we’re
going to
be showing when the time is right.”

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The Opcore are like
the evil counterparts to the SG-1 team.

After that question, I switched subjects as I had been thinking about
what Kevin had said about jumping back and forth between Stargates. In
my mind, this sounded like a system that could be instanced fairly
easily, so I asked Kevin about it. “We’ll use
instances
where it makes sense,” Kevin said. “It’s
not going to
be an instance every time you go through the gate. When you do
instancing on a massive scale, you’re actually taking the
‘massive’ part of the game out of typical MMOGs. We
want
people to feel like they’re part of something big. But there
will
be parts of the game where instancing makes sense.”



The idea of a story-driven game certainly was important to Kevin and he
wanted to express that to us as we viewed the screenshots.
“We
want to tell a story,” he said. “We’re
not shooting
for quests that you’ll find in a fantasy game, where an NPC
tells
you to go out and kill 10 of these creatures. Then you
walk…and
you walk….and you walk. You kill 20 of the creatures to get
the
10 items that you need, then you walk back. And you do this all over
again.”



“In Stargate Worlds, not only are our quests better, but
you’ll have access to the Stargates,” Kevin
continued.
“Even in the show, all the action takes place around the
Stargate; you go through the Stargate and it drops you right in on the
action. You’re going to get a mission that drives the story
forward then go find out what’s happening very quickly.
You’re not going to need to walk and go hunt down 10 animal
ears
to progress the story.”

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Stargate Worlds will
allow you to reach the end game levels without entering into combat, if
you so choose.

On top of the quick story-driven gameplay, there’s also the
underlying facet of puzzle-solving that we discussed with Stargate
Worlds guru, Joe Ybarra, back at OGDC. I wanted to follow up with Kevin
on the puzzle-solving aspect of the game and asked him about how
puzzles were going to be solved inside actual quests.
“It’s
going to be a combination of puzzle-solving to advance the story and
puzzle-solving to simply unlock doors, chests, and other
items,”
he said. “As an additional comment, it is possible to go from
your first level to level cap without entering into any sort of combat.
If that’s what a player wants to do, it is
possible.”



Being a fairly combat-oriented player, I instantly asked whether the
inclusion of that much non-combat gameplay would leave me with nothing
to do in certain areas. “No, there’s going to be
plenty of
action to go around,” Kevin said. “Like I said,
it’s
possible to do this, but it might not be the fastest way to get through
the game.”



Finally, staying on the combat motif, I was curious on whether CME had
made any sort of official decision regarding the PvP in Stargate
Worlds. When I talked to Joe at OGDC, he mentioned having to fight over
contended battlefields, but that seems to be the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to PvP. Kevin, unfortunately, couldn’t offer
anything new. “There will be PvP in the game,”
Kevin said.
“We haven’t announced any details on the system
yet.”



Thanks again to Kevin for guiding us through the new screenshots, and I
look forward to the time when CME can discuss every little detail about
the upcoming MMOG, Stargate Worlds!

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