Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Hermann Peterscheck: It takes a lot of discipline and dedication. First of all you have to be convinced that running on a lot of machines is more important than requiring some new visual effect. Second, you have to be convinced that it is possible to do this and still make a good looking game. Those are really two commandments that we have and we do our best to follow them. From time to time they are in direct conflict with each other, and you have to be creative to come up with good solutions. My personal opinion is a lot of games, especially MMOs, do not reach close to their full potential because many customers experience poor performance in their games. I don’t care how awesome your game is, if the frame rate is low, the game sucks; it’s really that simple. Some people may disagree, but try watching your favorite movie with hitches, sound pops and blackouts from time to time… I guarantee you it will suck. Games are no different.

So with that said, you need to make sure that as many people have a smooth game experience as possible, and that is your base. Once you have that you can add bells and whistles so that if people have some monster system they can get more. I think that a lot of high system requirements are a result of developers wanting to push the envelope all the time instead of thinking about if they should be doing that. Once you design your game around high system specs, it’s almost impossible to lower them later on. If you constantly focus on running well, it’s comparatively easy to add high end effect later.

The other issue is longevity. If you make the most amazing looking game (technically), it’s likely you won’t be that game in about 3-6 months. If you make a game that looks great, but it’s not because of some new graphics technique you are likely to still look good after 6 months or a year. You’d be surprised how many effects can be faked with cheaper implementations. You’d also be surprised at how creative your artists and programmers get when you give them tight restrictions.

Hermann: Anyone that has worked on MMOs for the last 5-10 years knows that the “rules” for making a successful MMO have changed drastically. If you have been on a project that ended up not doing very well, you know these lessons even better. I believe that a game that was successful in 1997-2001 would likely fail in today’s market – just as a car built in 1997 would unlikely compete with ones built in 2008. A lot of the things we are doing are a result of living though those changes and learning those lessons. The justification is in the result. One of the worst things that can happen to an MMO is that they feel “empty.” It’s the kiss of death. The way you make your game full is by attracting lots of players to it. So, the goal is to design a game that appeals broadly in a general sense. Then, you have to make deep experiences which tend to appeal more narrowly. An example of this is PvE and PvP. There are people who hate PvE and people who hate PvP – each may never believe that the other has value. So, if your game does not cater to both, then you will lose one or the other. However, making a deep PvP experience can not isolate the PvE players and vice versa. I also believe that if you design them well, most people will actually try both. I know I do.

Hermann: This is an area where we have been a bit scarce on sharing information. We’re lucky in the sense that we have a rich history to draw from as well as an excellent writer who is creating a compelling story for us. I feel that reveling a story before it is complete is a dangerous thing to do. If we have to change something early on because of something we need to change towards the end, we will be sending out a confusing message. So the answer is, yes, you can expect a great story, but we are being deliberately quiet about it.

I think a lot of MMOs are “story light” because players want to get to the “end” of the game. I know that people play World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 and never read any of the stories. Does this mean the game has a weak story, or is it that players don’t want a strong story? I don’t know the answer to that. Both of those games have a rich story and spent a lot of time writing thousands of pages of text. I also think that the nature of MMOs is that you are constantly in contact with other real people who have their own experiences and stories. This makes it harder to tell an immersive linear story – and I think that’s fine, actually. What is not fine is to have a world that seems flat and meaningless, or to make it so linear that you lose all the MMOness of it.

Hermann: I think we have one large advantage in that this is our second time making a space MMO. I don’t think any other team has that advantage. If you look at other companies with successful titles, they tend to do better with their second shot. Think about the evolution of Halo to Halo 2, or Quake to Quake 2, or Warcraft to Warcraft 2… and on and on. I think the appeal of making a space MMO comes primarily from two sources. The first is the unusual level of success that EvE has enjoyed in a brutally competitive field. The second is the fear of going head to head with World of Warcraft. So, if you are a publisher or developer and you don’t want to compete with WoW and you are worried about unproven genres, space seems like a pretty good choice.

Our motivation is that the space genre was our first love and it’s an area we have years of experience in. I feel confident that our second offering into the genre will be better than the first. This doesn’t mean that the original game isn’t good, it simply means that if we are doing a good job we should get better and better with time and iteration.

Hermann: As big as it needs to be and no bigger. Honestly I try and listen to the needs of the team as opposed to following some arbitrary design and content org chart. Working backwards is a difficult thing to do. If you know you want to have features x, y and z; and then you assume they will take this long and such and such expertise, that’s fine. If you think that at the beginning of a game development cycle that you can stick with that without it changing, you are delusional. There is one thing that doesn’t change in game development and that is that you don’t know what problems you are going to have before you begin the project. Will content development work the way you expect? If not, do you need more content producers? Will a certain set of features actually be twice as hard? If so do you need more programmers than artists? If you don’t have a flexible hiring methodology, how can you possibly manage these things that can, and will, come up. It’s possible that I’m just really bad at my job in that I can’t anticipate these things perfectly, but I suspect that it’s not something that can be done very well and the games that end up being the best are the ones that take a “work on it until its done” approach coupled with a “work on the stuff that matters” mentality. If you go and read the Diablo 2 post mortem it’s reasonably instructional in these areas.

Hermann: Would it? Ok, the base starter ship has a thrust of 75,800 right now. One of the upgrades has a value of 90,000. The first ship has 2 size 1 weapon hardpoints and the second one has 2 size 2 hardpoints. Ok, sorry, I’m being silly. What I can tell you is that we are making strong types of ships. For example, the light fighters will be light, maneuverable and have moderate amounts of firepower. The heavy fighters will tend to be less maneuverable but be able to carry larger weapons and missiles. Cargo tows will be able to carry significantly more cargo (i.e. think order of magnitude), but not be the best things in a fire fight. Mining vessels will be somewhere in between fighters and cargo tows. Thus they are good at mining and carry more cargo than light fighters, but are not as good at combat. Within the combat ships are also various types. For example one class of ship may have a lot of gun hard points but have fewer missiles – sort of like a jet fighter. Then we will have the bomber types of ships which will be much more missile heavy. Within that are different types of guns and missiles which each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

I think it’s pretty hard to get a sense of this without playing the game, which leads to the question of “Ok, so when can we play?” which brings us to the “when it’s ready” answer. *smiles* I understand the frustration here, but I can tell you that there is a good reason for it, and that is that I don’t believe that features will save you. I can think of, and won’t mention, many examples of MMOs that have tons of features that I never cared about because the core of the game just wasn’t any fun. So the question is, which is more important? You need to have a certain number of features to have longevity, but you absolutely need to have a fun core mechanic to have a shot at all. I think a game with rich features, but poor basic game play fails immediately. A game with great gameplay but not enough features fails immediately. A game with rich features and great gameplay succeeds for a long time. So in my mind the order of development should be great gameplay -> rich features. There’s another reason for this which is that until you have great gameplay how can you evaluate whether you have enough features? Do you ever find yourself thinking “Wow. This game sucks, but it has 15 features so I’ll keep playing anyway.” I know I don’t. Features are the temptation of the devil… they always seem so much sweeter and juicier than the tedious thing you are working on right now. It’s takes a lot of patience and self restraint to spend 50 iterations on a mouse flight mechanic when what you really want to do is add multi-pilot battleships. Giving in to that temptation opens you to the risk of having crappy flight controls for that mediocre multi-pilot battleship implementation.

Hermann: Honestly I don’t understand the “revolutionize the industry” motivation. When I was not “in the game industry” I just played games and wished there were more fun ones. I didn’t understand why so many games just weren’t any fun. Now that I am “in” the industry I think I have a better understanding as to why there are so few really fun games. It’s because making a fun game is very, very hard. There are lots of great ways to make bad games. What’s worse is very talented hard working people can make really bad games – so a bad game is not the result of a bad development team, company, or whatever. It’s much more subtle than that. So for me the goal is and always will be to make a great game – how do I know the game is great? Easy. People play it. As much as elitist game developers want to talk about the sort of abstract value of popular vs. good games, the reality is that most top selling games also score very well with both the press and the public. That is not coincidence. Once in a while there will be a game that is really great (i.e. rated highly) but fails to see… and of course there are games that sell like mad but get panned by critics. I can’t do anything about anomalies and it’s always possible that we make a great game but it doesn’t see – just as it possible that we make a game that gets panned but it sells a zillion copies. I don’t count on either of those. I count on the fact that if you make am enjoyable and immersive gaming experience people will want to buy it. If you don’t, they wont.

Hermann: I’ll tell you the exact release date the day after the game ships J. We’re planning on a 2nd half of 2008 release and that’s as accurate as I can be right now. Beta will be before release. *smiles*

Hermann: I’m just glad for the opportunity to talk about the game so much with you guys. Probably our biggest struggle is that we do not have a huge IP or the ability to place commercials with William Shatner on the Sci-Fi channel (god, I love those!). We have to rely on grass roots word of mouth which means that we have to make a game that is that much better than the competition. I hope that we aren’t being too boring or repetitive and that what we are doing seems interesting and fun.