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?

style="margin: 10px; border-collapse: collapse; float: right; width: 136px; height: 165px;"
border="1">

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/11723"
title="Castle Interior"> src="/image/view/11723/preview"
width="200">

style="font-style: italic;">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?

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border="1">

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/13734"
title="Lucia Slums Vendor"> src="/image/view/13734/preview"
width="200">

style="font-style: italic;">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?

style="margin: 10px; border-collapse: collapse; float: right; width: 136px; height: 165px;"
border="1">

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/13739"
title="Goa'uld Female Concept Art"> src="/image/view/13739/preview"
width="200">

style="font-style: italic;">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.

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