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Storyline Exploration

Exploring a world’s geography may be fun, but following the storyline of Stargate Worlds may prove to be an even more interesting experience. The development team at CME is quite aware that having a solid story in their MMO is important, because Stargate SG-1 fans are used to having exquisitely written plots from the writers of the series.

Instead of making individual story arcs for each character combination – like World of Warcraft attempted – Joe was interested in blending the stories together and making for a separate yet combined experience that immerses players in the Stargate lore.

Ybarra contemplating his next response.

“One thing I thought World of Warcraft could have done better were things like archetype specific quests,” he said. “For those of you who have played a Warlock (like me), you didn’t really have a lot of class-specific quests. But the Druid, he had all these specific quests to unlock abilities and so forth.”

“The best example that we can share with you is what we’re doing with the Asgard,” he continued. “Fans of the show will know this, but one of the Asgard’s main motivators, as an entire race, is how to make more Asgard. They have a real problem because they don’t reproduce sexually, they have to clone themselves! So their whole genetic pool is degrading over time.”

“With this in mind, we modeled that whole concept into what the Asgard, as player characters, are trying to accomplish,” Joe stated. “The players will be totally involved in trying to find more Asgardian genetic strains, trying to find new cloning technlogies, and that sort of thing.”

And the other races will have similar storylines to the Asgard; the Stargate lore allows for the CME developers to explore these timelines. For example, the Free Jaffa are all about helping the rebellion move forward, while the Goa’uld are really trying to get their powerbase back. There’s lots of story to choose from in the Stargate universe.

“We really want players to go through this story more than once, and explore the world from every different persepective,” Joe said. “There’s so much that developers create that isn’t explored in MMOs, and we want to lessen that and allow players to see our entire creation.”

Along with the individual storylines, Joe really hopes that through the development process his team creates a reason for players to look deeply at their character types and really explore what makes them Jaffa or Goa’uld or a Human Soldier. “The reasons for us to do this are two fold,” Joe reasoned. “One, we want the fans who pick up this game to be able to see this kind of content.”

Jumping through Stargates will be a big part of the game's puzzle solving elements.

“Second, for the users who do not know Stargate; we want them to be able to see the reasoning behind their gameplay choices. Since Stargate is not a traditional MMO, there may be some confusion as to why each race/archetype can achieve certain things, and we want to make that reasoning clear to the new players. We want players to see what it means to be a Jaffa, Asgard, etc.”

As a side note, players may only get to play as a member of a species – such as a Jaffa or a Goa’uld – but Joe did mention that a “Talent” system is being implemented in the game to bring differentiation to the different character archetypes. While Joe did not go into detail about the “Talent” system, it did sound like this would bring some uniqueness to individual Asgards or Jaffa.