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

Ten Ton Hammer: What drew you to Carbine Studios? What initially drew you to the project?

Many of the original Carbine team members worked on World of Warcraft.

Eric: I’ve been with Carbine since a few months after the studio was set up, which was June of 2005. What originally drew me here was the fact that some of the guys that had founded Carbine had worked with me before they went on to work at Blizzard. I was contacted by the team when they started looking for a producer and I was just blown away by the set-up. It is an incredibly talented team of people, some of whom I worked with before.

On top of that, I was definitely impressed with the success of WoW. The chance to work on a project with a similar focus really drew me. There are so many elegant little things about WoW… it’s just an incredible game. The quality is fantastic. They nailed so many little things and then choose the right problems not to fix, like character collision. It seems brain dead in hindsight, but I’ve worked on games where we had characters getting stuck in doorways and had to deal with that for months.

So the chance to work with a team that had made such a high quality product and learn from those guys was incredibly exciting. Doing it for a company like NCsoft that’s committed to this as a business is interesting too. When WoW was as successful as it was, a lot of companies thought it’d be good to try building an MMO, and they had no clue what it would take. NCsoft had been doing it for years before WoW came out, so that’s definitely a positive thing. I mean, they were generating huge numbers in Asia before WoW came in and showed that it could be done in North America too.

Ten Ton Hammer: I mean, Lineage had an ungodly amount of concurrent users in Korea on the original Lineage.

Eric: Exactly! I remember being at Interplay when we were working on games like Baldur’s Gate, Stonekeep 2 and Fallout when UO came out. We were all saying, this is as good as Baldur’s Gate! But it was way beyond the scope of anything we were doing.  I mean you were online all the time and you could get killed!

Ten Ton Hammer: I don’t know if it was as good as the original Baldur’s Gate…

Eric: Baldur’s Gate was a great game, but UO was light years ahead of anything we were even thinking at Black Isle. It floored us, y’know.

But then it was repeated by the EverQuest guys, and you heard stories of them digging up landlines because they were sucking up as much bandwidth as the whole San Diego metro area. It was just a crazy, crazy time.

Also, it has just been a great experience working on an MMO title with a group like Carbine, and it feels great to be back in the PC market after working on consoles for a few years.

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s your major focus in the development process at this point?

Eric: We’re creating and iterating the early content of the game.  Once we have processes and our content bar set where we want it and feel like we have the ability to spread that knowledge across multiple content teams, we will do our final staffing and move into full production.  It’s getting close!