Stargate Worlds Site Visit / Joe Ybarra Interview - Page 3 of 4

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Posted May 7th, 2006 by Ethec

A Stargate Worlds Interview with Joe Ybarra

Page 1 - Stargate Worlds Production Status Update
Page 2 - Gameplay Questions
--> Page 3 - Storyline / Thematic Questions <--
Page 4 - Stargate Worlds and the MMORPG Market

Storyline / Thematic Questions

What’s SGW’s core conflict? Humans versus goa’uld?

Ybarra: Actually it’s going to be a little more robust than that. If you follow the TV series- we’ll take Atlantis for this discussion- the bad guy du jour is the OORI, and there’s a certain degree of cooperation at a kind of hands-off level between the humans and the goa’uld. But if you look at the relationship between the humans and the goa’uld over the course of the ten seasons of the show- well, nine that have aired- there have been times they’ve been at each other’s throats, there have been times when they’ve had to be buddy-buddy for short periods of time, and then there’s this weird détente thing, where they’re constantly threatening the humans that ‘we’re going to come and beat your planet into submission!’ but they never actually do it.

But you’re right, one of the foundation conflicts is human vs. goa’uld. That was probably the first major document that we produced on the content side… was articulating what the faction system is all about at the grand strategic level. We ran this material by the producers of the TV series when we went up to Vancouver, and they told us that we really figured it all out. There’s really basically three competing factions in this storyline. There’s the free-will people (which are the humans, basically), the control people (the jaffa or goa’uld), and what we call the entropy group (people that kind of ride for… we’re either in it for ourselves and we don’t care, or we’re just here to make life miserable for everybody).

The way we’re architecting the game is to take advantage of this triad of potential different viewpoints and conflicts, and find different ways to interconnect them in interesting ways. For example, going back to the Goa’uld sometimes allies with you and sometimes doesn’t, we want the content to drive the user into interesting decisions like that. We have a really interesting one that we’ll throw in because we’re modeling Jaffa as a player race: the betrayal quest. The Jaffa start out as being subservient to Goa’uld, but at some point you get to make the decision: ‘I don’t wanna do that anymore, I want to be like Teal’C.”

We want to give the user lots of choices like that. Really good game design is about presenting the players with lots of choices, and they have to be good choices. We’re really focused in on doing that.

The storyline is going to be really interesting and robust. We’ve been working on this for months; we really want to make sure that when players sit down for the first time that they start playing this game, that they know why they are doing things. I have a purpose, so when I fire up my first character, let’s say it’s a Sam Carter character… I’m an astrophysicist, and I’m a human. As soon as I start reading the character description, as soon as I’m in the scenario or first quest, I understand where I’m going for the first 100 levels of play. That’s how strongly we feel about that. And then along the way of that thread, we will take you in twists and turns, and you’ll get choices of going this way and that way. That’s why we think it’s really important that our storyline and our content is way, way superior to what you normally see in these products. One of the things that’s really painful about building an MMO is that we have to sustain at least 500 hours of gameplay. That is a huge amount of content to do, and to try to tell a story, and to have a rich play experience and do all that, is an intensely huge amount of work. But we’re going to pull this off.

How will the game interface with the Stargate TV serials?

Ybarra: We’re still trying to figure out what the best working relationship is. Both the TV series folks, ourselves, and MGM all have the same motivation to tie in the video game with the TV show. To the extent that, now that we have a feel for the production cycles and we understand what our goals are, there’s no reason we can integrate live game content into airing shows when they come out. They finish these shows months before they actually air, and I need to be finished with my content months before I actually deploy. So there should be a way for us to connect those dots together.

That’s one of the major differentiating features of our product, we think.

Will you need a large team to match production cycles with the television shows?

Ybarra: No, there are two things that influence that. The first one is: how good is my production path? How good are my tools? How good is the code base? How fast can I turn something in to the game; get it tested, and then deploy? The second is planning: knowing what it is I’m going to do. If I wait till the last minute to decide what to do, then I’m not going to have any opportunities to get this done.

One of the philosophies we’re trying to work towards here, as a practice, is a 6 week dev cycle: 4 weeks in development, 2 weeks in QA, and then deploy. If we use that cycle throughout production, so that by the time we get to live team, it’s built into the cycle of the team. If we work with that, then the real problem solving is making decisions about what you’re going to build in those four weeks, and being really wise about taking on as much as you can get done. If we do those two things, we should be ok.