A Pre-E3 Stargate Worlds Interview with Joe Ybarra

Since Stargate World won't truly enter the E3 limelight until next year, Joe Ybarra (VP of Product Development at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment) won't be joining us in LA. Undeterred, we met with him last Friday in Phoenix, Arizona. He shared his incredibly well-spoken views on how Stargate Worlds is progressing, and answered our questions about gameplay and thematic elements as well.

[Ed. note: Ybarra on where Stargate Worlds is at in pre-production:] "We’ve got enough of the tech base worked out with BigWorld that we can actually make comments about the size of shards, play environments, the number of areas that we can instantiate, the density of population with players and NPCs. We’ve actually made a lot of progress with the technical side. On the design side, we’re zeroing in on completion of the combat system. The combat system is the most complex system that we have to build. The reason is, it has to evolve. It’s not a static thing; as a player advances through his levels, we expect the way he plays is going to change several times in the course of his evolution. For us to be able to develop a combat system that sustains that over a game life of about 500 hours to completion is a fairly complex task.

This information-packed interview is presented in it's entirety because, well, we couldn't find anything to cut out! Learn why we're already excited for Stargate Worlds by reading our pre-E3 TenTonHammer interview with veteran developer Joe Ybarra.