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

One of the things I can definitely say is that everybody here that’s working on design agrees that directed play is the way to go. Directed play means that you always know what you’re going to do next as the player, that the flow of play is really obvious, and that we encourage you by dangling carrots to take you from place to place. It’s really more how do we choreograph the flow of play, as opposed to how you define play spaces.

Having said that, the other side of the coin is that, when we talked to the producers of the TV shows, they flat out told us we could do things in the MMO that they cannot do in the TV show, and they want us to do that. We can put the players in places that the special effects budgets can’t take TV viewers to. And we’re being very highly encouraged to do that by everybody. So we want to put some pretty exotic alien planets in there, some really interesting locations, put players in bizarre locations doing interesting and crazy things.

We’re talking about the universe here so, you know, the list of possibilities is longer than we have enough human resources to actually build. I’m really looking forward to nailing that aspect of the design down: what worlds are we building, how big are they, and how many of them. We already have a pretty good idea as to the number of worlds we’re going to have and sort of the scope of play each one needs to have, so now that we have a structure, what do we drop on top of the structure to make it really cool.

We’ll send them back to places they’ve already seen too. But as a percentage of play activity, revisiting stuff they already know will be a smaller percentage than going to new places. Because that’s the whole spirit of what science fiction is all about, the exploration and discovery, and we definitely want to reinforce that.

The interesting question that is asked when you say ‘non-combat’, the real issue that is raised is: in the absence of running around and shooting things, what do players do? To be able to do that, to have a system that is elegant enough so that players want to do a lot of it, we have to have a system that’s fairly robust, easy to learn, one that expands and grows in the same way combat does over time, and essentially is something that people will feel like, ‘boy, if I’m really good at this, I’m just as studly as the guy with the big gun.’

One of the things we discussed at length is that players are going to want to play the archetypes you see on the show. How do you make being Daniel Jackson fun in our game? What does he do, in order to play for 500 hours and come back at level cap and say ‘wow, that was great, I want to do that again!’ We invested a fair amount of design research on trying to do non-combat game activities, as part of things like deciphering ancient ruins, or putting together block puzzles inside of play areas.

One of the more interesting game design elements that our game has that is somewhat different than what other games have is that we have a real need to have people that are forward observers. That are not necessarily people that are combatants, but somebody that can spot for the heavy weapons guy with a mortar that has only three round of ammunition, and he’s sitting back 200 yards away (out of tactical combat range) waiting for the forward observer to say, ‘Okay, launch your shell to this location.’ To that extent, a Daniel Jackson character can do that kind of thing, where he’s in combat but he’s not actually going to fire a gun. His job is to sneak around, figure out where the best location is to drop a shell, get to that location, radio back to the actual combatant, and coordinate the fire as it comes in. That could be very interesting as a play type.

The stealthy thing: a lot of what you see in the show is Daniel Jackson talking his way out of something or sneaking his way out of something. We can embody that kind of play activity in many different ways in our game design.

That’s the area that we’re looking at because some of the other areas are really pretty straightforward. For example, in trying to be the Sam Carter astro-physicist / engineer type, it’s kind of interesting in that the way that they model the researchers in the TV series, they’re kind of combinations of pure scientist and engineer. It’s not sufficient for Sam Carter to be an expert at quantum physics, she actually can build things that use it. As a combat or gameplay mechanic, half of what I’m doing is learning new things, the other half is applying that new knowledge into the play activities that are going on. That’s a pretty compelling thing. Yea, I can make a +5 shield for this location. How do I go about building that thing, and what scenarios and quests are forcing me to go in that direction.

All of these systems have to have a certain amount of continuity from one another, so if I’ve been playing Archeologist and I get tired of that and want to pick up and be a scientist for some gameplay and start another character; that the things that I learned in being an archeologist carry forward in being an scientist. And both of those tight sets of game mechanics and game knowledge have to carry forward into the combat system. And I’d learn things in the combat system that come back in the other direction.

A simple way to think about how to handle that of course is that if you look at the user interfaces for products like World of Warcraft where you would basically have a plugin user interface. You’d want to put the things you use the most go into the areas of the hotbar in the right places. We see that that’s probably going to be one of the key components of gameplay: knowing when to have what activities available at what time, at what level of speed and accuracy. So a lot of work there.

But, and we’ve talked a lot about this, the quantum of the game is the squad. And we want to really craft our content so that players that work together as units of four or five or whatever number… we’ll pick on four since that’s the number they use in the show. If I have three buddies that we play every week together, that as we are doing this, the content is actually rewarding us for getting better and better at working as a team. We really believe that, as we get to the higher-end content and players hit level cap and ‘what am I doing now?’, that the majority of the play experience for players at that level should be in squads. And that, we will have large-scale ‘Molten Core’ like content where there are 40-man raids and bigger, but we don’t expect the users to be doing a lot of that. What we’d rather them do is take the squad that they’ve been working with for the last 500 hours, and giving those guys really satisfying and interesting challenges that are repeatable and take them into new areas… just really challenge their teamwork. In crafting the game that way, we’ll be able to get something really quite different than what you see now, because we’ve taken that orientation from the beginning.