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 <--

 

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Stargate Worlds and the MMORPG Market

Will you target casual or hardcore players with Stargate Worlds?

Ybarra: Casual gamers. Actually, casual isn’t a good descriptor. Our primary target audience is players that are new to MMOs, and when I say that, I mean players that are playing games right now, but have not tried MMOs for whatever reason. Our secondary audience is the existing audience. Two years from now, the players that are naieve are going to be hardcore. That being said, we know we have to build in some pretty intense content.

How do you attract non-MMO’ers?

Ybarra: It’s more than just user-friendly, but yes, that’s one component of it. Easy to learn, hard to master is another. Depth, you know, layered depth, I want to teach it to you as you go, keep you in the game longer. There’s a lot of different techniques you have to do to get to that audience, make sure you invest a lot of time doing your UIs for example, they have to be transparent.

The third level of audience we’re going after is international customers, which is going to prove to be a fairly interesting challenge, but what it does force us to do is embrace PvP right from the beginning of the design, so that we are building a PvP-PvE environment simultaneously. Because we know that some of these things are mutually exclusive, that we have to design game systems up front and say ‘Great, ok, it doesn’t work that way in PvP, are we ok with that? Sure. Ok, then let’s go on.’

How much of a groundswell is there for Stargate Worlds in the international scene?

Sara Barker, CME's Director of Marketing:  It’s actually huge in Europe, especially in England, Germany, and France. Right now on our forums, there are way more users from Europe than there are from North America.

Joe Ybarra: We’re finding, now that we’re talking to some of the publishing partners [in the Far East], that there is Stargate, but more importantly the fact that there are no science fiction games. We know that we are filling a massively big hole.

Is SGW culturally of interest in the Far East?

Ybarra: Based on the interest we’re getting from the publishers I would have to say yea. If they’re saying ‘We want your product because there’s nothing like it and we could sell a billion of them’, I’ll build it! The problem is that the folks in the Far East consume this stuff at an even higher rate of speed than our folks do. It’s pretty frightening how fast those guys can burn through this material, so we have a little bit of a challenge in addressing their needs.

Our fourth level of target audience is Stargate fans. But in order to be a successful game, my first priority is to make something that’s really a lot of fun. It just happens to be about Stargate. If it’s not a good game, we might as well not show up.

Is it worth comparing Stargate Worlds to another similarly licensed game, Star Wars Galaxies? Have you learned anything from SOE's perceived mistakes?

Ybarra: I really have to say I've learned more from World of Warcraft. When you compare competitive products, what you’re looking at is, what are the consumers taking as the play experience that got them to play? That’s the part that I care about when I’m playing these games. The other part of it: how do I actually build this? I could have the best game design and the best intentions, if I have no clue as to how to build it, it’s not going to happen.

What, in your opinion, is special about World of Warcraft?

Ybarra: I think accessibility is one of the biggest reasons it’s that way. And I think also the ‘simple to learn, hard to master’ aspect of the game design is really compelling. I think that also, by and large… after many months of playing, I finally got a level 60 character this week, I can now speak to aspects of the game that obviously I wouldn’t be able to talk to if I hadn’t done that. As you move through the content, they do a really good job of keeping your expectation level high; it always feels like there’s something new I’m going to learn about or there’s some new spell I’m going to get, or some new adversary.

The feedback loops are extremely good in that game, and they do a reasonably good job of pacing. There’s a stretch of gameplay in there where they lost sight of the good technique that they used before and after this stretch, and this stretch I’m describing is from level 35ish to level 48ish. And what happens in that space is some of the goal orientation, the quests are harder to find, they’re spread out, they’re less interesting for whatever reason. This grind period is where you, since you don’t know what you’re going to do, you spend your time beating up on pigs and other random things. And there’s enough reward system though because I’m still leveling, and I’m still getting new spells, and ‘as soon as I get to level 40, I can go to that other area there.’ So it keeps you going, but there’s that gap of pacing in there.

But once you get to level 49-50, it all of the sudden goes right back to where it was before. There’s more stuff to do than I could possibly imagine. In fact, I went from level 50 to level 60 in about three weeks. I just ripped right through the game at that point, and it was exciting and really compelling and that’s the way the game is right from the beginning: so you go from level 1 to 20 feeling exactly like that. ‘I can’t wait till I get home, because I can’t wait to get this spell…’ Then you hit the doldrums, then you get it back again. I’m picking on this aspect of World of Warcraft because there’s precious little you can pick on in that game.

Do developers put these “doldrums” in the game intentionally?

Ybarra: That’s one of the interesting theories about MMO design: ‘The way I’m going to keep my customers, I’m going to make it take forever to get to the level cap.’ So it takes 2,000 hours to make the level cap in EverQuest, and there’s no way I’m playing for 2,000 hours, I don’t care how good it is.

Does Stargate Worlds have a target age range?

Ybarra: I’d like to go to the same age group as the World of Warcraft type people. But basically it’s the folks that watch the TV show that are going to be the target audience. They map very nicely into computer users and game players.

Any closing impressions on the progress of Stargate Worlds?

As you can probably tell, we’re pretty passionate about this project. We’re all excited because many of us have built products before and we want to use this as a vehicle to take all the skills that we learned and apply them and at the same time explore new possibilities. You always stand on the shoulders of the people that came before you, and the good news is we have some of those people here.

These games, when they’re at their best, are about families. My buddies and I, we’re a family playing this game. The guild is a big family. Our orientation is to bring that to the forefront, and rewarding the player for thinking on that basis. I think that’s a really exciting aspect of what we’re trying to do. What’s fun about it is, this is more a philosophy and design problem than it is anything else. The code that I need to actually support this is trivial. The trick is figuring out how to do it.

As a creative process (and this applies to products other than just MMOs),when we’re done building, the end result of the product is our personalities, the personalities of the people that created the product. Our beliefs, our thinking, and our attitudes are really referenced in what we do. I’m making that statement based upon the fact that I’ve been building games for 25 years, and I’ve built a lot of different kinds of games, I’ve worked with lots of people that have built different kinds of games, that seems to be a pretty unifying trait. You can tell a Will Wright game from a Sid Meier game. I mean, there’s a personality in there, and you can see it.

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