TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: How is that going to work with the Asgard drone? Will the players directly control the drone to take cover with them? How is that going to work?

Chris: There’s a lot of AI built into the drone, and yes, the drone will pretty much be following the Asgard around. The drone will have some basic commands, but you just basically need to think of the drone as a detached weapons platform. It’s a little closer to what a drone is rather than a real pet.

Ten Ton Hammer: What do you think the ratio between combat and general exploration is going to be in Stargate Worlds? Is it going to be a fifty/fifty combat to exploration ratio? Or is it going to be a bit heavier on the combat side of things?

Chris: The basic leveling paradigm for a lot of the classes is going to be combat. However, it will be possible to level with the archaeologist and the scientist through the play of the mini-games. Fifty-fifty is not really accurate, but it’s closer to 60/40 or 70/30.

Dan: Like Chris was saying, we wanted to give people a different way to play the game with the scientist and archeologist. With these classes, we didn’t want them to have to go through combat all the time. We wanted people to have different options, and different ways to socialize within this community.

Ten Ton Hammer: What kind of information or media should we expect next from Stargate Worlds? Are you just going to start unleashing information to the public, or is it something where you’re staggering the information that’s going out there?

A shot showcasing an interior in SGW.

Jeremy Taylor: What we’re going to do is basically work directly with MGM and the Sci-Fi channel in doing different cross-promotions and cross-tagging going forward.

The way we look at it, we’re trying to do a phased approach. Right now we’re in that sort of “introductory” phase and we’re going to be doing more as we go along. There will be new worlds and new characters introduced throughout the marketing run, and we’re going to be staggering that throughout the year.

However, we want to keep this whole thing relatively straight-forward and steady, but we want to have peaks in our coverage. For instance, like what we’re doing around Comic-Con and some of the Stargate DVD releases. So there will be different peaks as we go throughout the year, with steady coverage the rest of the time.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you going to continue to have a close web presence with your community? Are you going to continue to bring exclusives to your community?

Jeremy: We truly value the Stargate fanbase and the people that are loyal to our forums, so we’ll continue to post things on those forums. But on top of that, we’re going to be doing things externally as well. I think we’d like to have a nice mixture of both.

Kevin: And we have given our community exclusive looks at screenshots from the game and videos of content. We definitely have given our community first-looks at things that no one else is getting, so it’s a great thing for our fans to continue staying around the forums.

Jeremy: I really enjoyed some of the conversations that were going on in the forums over the weekend concerning the trailer. I read it all – the good and the bad – so I really want to keep our community thriving.

Ten Ton Hammer: How are you going to make Stargate Worlds appeal to the largest general audience?

Chris: From my perspective, it really means that we need to introduce styles of gameplay that don’t require you to be an MMOG expert. For us, this sort of gameplay is exemplified by our scientists and archeologists.

The second thing we’re doing is crafting the introductory experience for every archetype to thoroughly explain the Stargate universe as well as craft an experience that has more in common with console type gaming. This means that the first ten or fifteen minutes will be crafted and guided so that the player isn’t just thrown into this social soup too early.

We’re not requiring players to know the Stargate universe. We’re delivering that information to them as they play and if that drives them to watch the DVDs, that’s a wonderful thing. But the game isn’t just made for the Stargate geeks; it’s for everybody.

Jeremy: From a marketing decision, we wanted to communicate the kind of gameplay that Chris just talked about. We want people to know that we’re very accessible as an MMOG. The whole MMO genrPlanet Agnos 3e, in general, has been more about more intensity and complexity, and we want to community that we have a very accessible gaming message.

Chris: WoW certainly taught everybody a lesson in that simple and polished is better than overly complex if you want to build a large audience. We’ve played WoW, and we heard that message loud and clear.

Ten Ton Hammer: Speaking of consoles, are you considering giving Stargate Worlds the console treatment as well as having a PC version?

Some concept art of a "slums" area.

Jeremy: Not at this point. It’s a PC game, that’s what we’re focusing on. If other avenues present themselves in the future, we’re definitely open to other options. But for right now, we’re focusing on finishing the PC version.

Ten Ton Hammer: From an art direction standpoint, the game looks great. However, when I initially saw the trailer, I was surprised at how vibrant and stylized the game looked. I had expected more of a “realistic” feel to the game. What drove this decision?

Howard Lyon: We really made a conscious decision to go the way that we did. We do have two of our most vibrant worlds in the game exposed in our trailer. Not all of them are going to be as bright as the pair that you see from the video. We did pick a couple of very colorful worlds to be in the trailer.

However, we want a game that will be both realistic and vibrant, so that when you’re in the game and running around in it that the world itself will be easy on the eyes. We want each place to be easy enough on the eyes that you’ll be comfortable playing in it for hours at a time.

There are definitely other worlds where you might find a place devastated by volcanic activity with lava and brimstone shooting everywhere. We understand that that – even though the mood is dark on that particular world – it will still need to be a place that is visually compelling.

We decided not to go with the ultra-realistic look because we want to offer something new. The stylization that’s in the locations and the characters offers a different kind of interest than what you’d find in an ultra-realistic game. There are a lot of photo-realistic games out there for players to enjoy. I wouldn’t say that our look is necessarily “cartoonish”, but I think it is somewhere between photo-reality and that stylized look you might find in some other games.

The overall goal is to create a game that’s really appealing to a large audience.

Chris: Brad Wright and Robert Cooper told us exclusively to “Do the things that we can’t do on television!” I fully agree with Howard in that the way to go here is to deliver a beautiful and fantastic vision for the players to enjoy. We don’t want to be creating their world over and over again.

Howard: However there will still be elements that are familiar. The SGC is going to look like the SGC. It’s not like we’re going to take the locations the show knows, tear them apart, and redo them. That’s not our goal.

On the worlds where we can be a little more fantastical – as long as it sticks within the fiction of the universe – lets go for the gold here.

Another thing that I think the players will appreciate is the diversity we have between worlds when you go from Stargate to Stargate. You’ll have a completely different visual experience. You may be going from a lush, rich jungle to a barren desert.

Or you could be going to a world like Agnos (Editor’s Note: This is the initial world seen in the trailer.), where there are huge crystalline formations and these huge plasma seeds with energy coursing over them.

Being able to go through twenty-some worlds in the game is going to be a very different experience for the player.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you guys have a set number of worlds that you plan for launch?

Jeremy: We do have a set number, but I don’t think we’re ready to define what that is right now.

Howard: We want to have a lot of variety for a player to go through. We want players to be able to go through the gate and explore the galaxy.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will the characters have a home base that they go back to often? Like the Stargate Gate Command on Earth?

A female Goa'uld.

Chris: Each side will have a home base where a lot of mission work and training will be done. The SGC is a story-related location in the game, and you will go back there, but not as your home base.

We want to do the same kind of thing the show does, where encounters and battles happen in the SGC. The best way for us to do that was to make your actual hub of activity a different place.

The SGC is very confining, right? There are a lot of tight hallways with not a lot of room in them. You certainly could have built the area so that the elevator connects you to 500 different rooms, but that visually isn’t as interesting as doing something else.

Ten Ton Hammer: Since you’re doing things off-world for the good guys, does that allow you to make the home base the essential social hub for the characters? Are we going to see all the player characters in this area socializing?

Chris: That was the idea of trying to move the home base out of the SGC. There will absolutely be lots of socializing done there.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will Stargate Worlds be using DirectX 10?

Howard: It’s still up in the air on how we’re going to be using Dx10 to beautify our world.

Chris: Right now our focus is definitely getting our game to run on as many systems as we possibly can. We’re definitely going to be looking at how we can implement some of the amazing features you find in Dx10.

Ten Ton Hammer: The game has been rumored to be linked to a particular Stargate series, one that’s expected to be announced at some point this year. Can you guys shed any light on that rumor?

Chris: What I’ll tell you is this: From the very beginning of this development, the executive producers of the show and I discussed the links between the game and the television show. It may not be public knowledge, but Brad has always endorsed what we’re doing in the game. As far as he’s concerned, we’re one big universe. The only difference is that he tells stories on television while we do it online.

As far as links between the content, we’ve discussed many things, not only on the TV show but on other things beyond just TV. This isn’t the conversation to talk about that just yet, but we are indeed the same universe. It isn’t like they don’t know what we’re doing.

Ten Ton Hammer: How’s your time frame working out for the 2008 launch? Do you have any dates you can give the readers?

Jeremy: We’re definitely going to be tapping into the community a lot more in the next couple months to test certain areas of the game and that sort of thing. The timeline is still flexible because we want to make sure we ship a great game first and foremost rather than boxing ourselves into a particular date.

We’re definitely going to insure that the quality is there, because we don’t want a game on the shelves that is anything less than top notch.

---