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David Cook Interview - Page 2 of 3

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Updated Wed, Jan 02, 2008 by Jeff Woleslagle

Stargate Worlds Q&A with David "Zeb" Cook - Page 2 / 3

Other attempts at making video games out of TV series make it clear that playing is a much different form of entertainment than watching. I asked if MMORPG newbies who jump in because of the branding might feel intimidated by SGW’s open-endedness?

It’s important that you always have a goal. One of the big things that the whole design team has been involved in and the whole content team will eventually be involved in is: what’s my purpose here? Why am I here as a character? You sit down and play for the first time, you talk to the first character, and you see kind of where you’re going in the long term. Those goals, we would like them to be different depending on which side you choose. Beyond that though, obviously, you always want the player feeling like here’s what I want to do next and be able to see something in front of them that says if I want to do that, this is what I should probably do to get to that goal. If you hit this level, you’ll unlock this step, that sort of thing. At the same time, people want to wander off and do their own thing.

The worst thing that can happen is that the player gets to a point that they don’t have anything to do. All I can do is go out and hunt mobs. You always want them to feel like there’s something they have to take care of.

No matter how good the RPG, you always seem to arrive at a droll, repeatable endgame where players spend enough time to earn an advanced degree just to get a slightly shinier piece of equipment. Does CME have anything innovative in the works for high-level gameplay?

We’re thinking about our endgame right from the start. Boy, is that a convoluted, backwards statement. MMOs kind of divide into 2 things, there’s the getting to the end, and then there’s a different kind of game that takes place when you get to the end. We have some pretty clear ideas about what the end game is about, we don’t know exactly how it plays out. Now how does the getting to that point kind of relate to that endgame so you feel like all that stuff you did before has purpose towards what you’re doing in the end.

How is CME using BigWorld?

BigWorld is an MMO toolset and engine. It provides a lot of our server issues, a lot of things that are basically huge issues but it’s all behind the scenes or under the hood. One of the really useful things about going with BigWorld is that is lets us focus more on the actual building of the gameplay system. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t stuff you have to do in relation to all these other things, but it’s not like we have to sit around for 6 months to a year before we start to see things happening. BigWorld let’s us put things together and test them fairly rapidly.

Stargate Worlds will boast an innovative mechanic which rewards players that stick together. Would the "buddy system" complicate Cook's work on the combat system? How do you design an enemy scaled to a high-level soloer that's also a challenge for a high-leveler kitted out with buddy enhancements? Would the solo player feel gipped?

The Stargate series is very team-based, but all those people are individuals. Every episode is centered around one of the team, usually, as opposed to all of them equally sharing in the story. We want to create that kind of feel.

When you get into an MMO, you can’t rely on your friends being online at the same time. If it’s setup so that I can’t accomplish anything because Fred’s didn’t show up, that’s not a good situation. When you start up, you should be able to do something by yourself all the time, no matter what. It’s balancing that team based vs. solo aspect. We’re trying to make sure that no character can do everything, which is pretty standard design for MMO design. But at the same time, they need to be viable enough as a solo character, so it’s never a ‘don’t pick that guy, you’ll never be able to make it to the end of the game’ kind of thing.

There are things that players do that are basically very team oriented. We are looking at creating character abilities that if you’re on a team, you’ll want these abilities. And there not just buffs / debuffs, but more interesting things too. At the same time, you have to make sure they have enough abilities to carry their own weight by themselves. We do kind of expect that yes, as you hit the higher levels, the kind of natural progression of play is by then you have built a group of friend, by then you have joined or created a guild or SGC (we’re not sure exactly what they’ll be termed) so that you do have a bigger resource base. We do expect that to happen more.

A lot of the game early on in almost all games is figuring out what is it I can do. How do I walk around, really basic stuff. How do I use my combat abilities to beat a mob. Then you start introducing tougher mobs, and we’ll teach you how to handle them. Maybe you’ll want to get some friends to help you out, so we’ll teach you how group dynamics work. Now not only do I have friends, so how do we start using and combining abilities on an advanced level…

The last innovation in encouraging players to huddle into groups was the "skillchains" of Final Fantasy XI, carried forward into the "Heroic Opportunity" system in EverQuest 2 (but, significantly, avoided in the genre's most popular game: World of Warcraft). Would Stargate Worlds allow players to do more damage, buff more effectively, etc. by synergistically applying their skills in some sort of "combo"?

It might, but it’s a little tougher to see that since we are not a fantasy game. In a fantasy game, you can make up ‘this thing will not work as well except when this goes off’ and you don’t need a reason why. But try to explain: well, your grenade is not as effective unless this player fires his P-90. It doesn’t quite make as much sense. But what we are looking at trying to create stuff where you have several different forms of stealth. There’s just the general sneaking around, but we have technology, so there’s the thermal blocking suit, so that means there will be several different kinds of detection. You may be invisible to one form of detection, but pretty obvious to another. You might not be obvious to thermal detection, but if you stand up, everybody’s going to see you anyway.

The combo-ish kind of aspect is that this guy over here has the thermal detector, and this guy has got a motion sensor set up. Where the combo is, we’re looking at a character type that one of things he can do is unite all of that and it gets displayed on everybody’s screen. He coordinates lots of things. We recognize that [typical MMO roles… tank, healer, damage dealer] are useful in MMOs, but at the same time, we have to try and find the right spin for them that makes sense in a sci-fi situation. You just don’t have a tank who runs into the middle of a fight, and says ‘awright… everybody, beat on me.’ That’s a bad idea. Especially when we’re dealing with ranged combat so much more. So what is the ranged combat equivalent of a tank. This is the guy that says ‘shoot at me,’ which doesn’t seem like an incredibly smart idea either. (laughter)

The USMC has a saying: 'every Marine is a rifleman.' Will every Stargate player be a soldier first, and his or her specialty second?

There is some of that, although we do branch away from ‘everybody is a soldier.’ There are a lot of characters that aren’t strictly military and we want to make sure we have a good range of options. We won’t deny that there’s a lot of guys that run around with guns in the Stargate universe.

I don’t know if you’ll be able to get through the entire game without combat. There will certainly be classes where combat is much less of a priority. Where it’s a weakness, not one of their strengths. But what we want to give them is then lots of interesting stuff to do that is not combat, and we are also looking at (this is one of the things I was designing just last week) some ideas for ways they can actually accomplish things without having to shoot people. We’ve got some ideas; at this point, we’ve sketched out some systems, we’ll see if we can implement them, then the real question is whether they are fun.

TenTonHamer talks with Mr. Cook

It's a given that the the various racial conflicts in the Stargate series will extend to the game. Will this faction system be a purely PvP thing, or will we see players attempt to curry favor with certain groups to meet future goals?

Oh yea, if you look at Stargate universe, it’s full of all sorts of different power groups going on, and we definitely want to model that. That’s part of the really big interesting stuff that goes on in Stargate, it’s the, ‘Why are the gou’ald here? What do they want? Humans and Jaffa are always bickering. Ever since the Jaffa got free, they’ve been anal.’And then you’ve got the Ori showing up, there’s just a ton of stuff that we want to make sure about; those are the hinges for our really good missions and story in the content.

Within the faction system, are your actions representative of yourself, or of your faction? Will individuals be able to sway how another faction views them regardless of racial considerations?

We don’t dictate. That’s one of the things I believe vehemently; players need to have the basically create the characters they want (in terms of the story and idea in their head). We do things where you’re directed down certain paths. Some paths might be more optimal for your species and archetype selection. But I do want to let players basically play the game, do the things they want to do. If you start as a Jaffa, at some point you’ll be asked who’s side you’re standing on. We’ll give you a side at the start; we don’t want you to make too many decisions right at the beginning and then have them go halfway through the game ‘oh, why did I do that?’ We want you to get comfortable with things and realize, ‘ah, my character’s story can go in this direction’ and then give them the leverage to go do this. It’s part of the fun of doing this.