by Jeff Woleslagle on Oct 01, 2007
This week we have an exclusive interview with the Lead System Designer
for Gods and Heroes.
See the Video of our
Hero Camp Experience right here.
Transcript of conversation with Travis George, Lead System Designer
style="font-family: tahoma;">
At Hero Camp, San Francisco
style="font-family: tahoma;">
The
item system is one of the most memorable things about the Diablo
series, and it's something that Gods & Heroes Design Director Stieg
Hedlund had a big hand in while he was at Blizzard. Items in Gods &
Heroes will by distinguished in power and name by suffixes and
prefixes, right?
Suffixes, we actually took out
prefixes. The way we redid the loot- we actually went back and did a
whole pass on the loot system in the last couple months; we're just
wrapping that up right now. Our item guys are making our elder game
stuff right now; we're doing an iteration on that. So for a while we've
had the combat and minion stuff ready, this is just the first time
we've actually shown it to the press.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
The "minion L" is
a pretty new part of the user interface too, lending a much greater
degree of control over your minions.
style="font-weight: bold; font-family: tahoma;">
We call it the "minion L"
technically it's called the minion control interface. It's just like
the "squad L" you know what I'm talking about? (laughter)
style="font-family: tahoma;">
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/12419">
src="/image/view/78292"
style="border: 2px solid ; width: 150px; margin:10px;" align="left">
style="font-family: tahoma;">
So you can set a
threshold amount for your healer minion so that when my player
character's health reaches a certain point, he or she will switch from
dealing damage to healing me. Can you do the same for, say, a DPS
minion so that he or she will stop doing max damage at some point to
avoid getting aggro?
We talked a lot about that, we asked
ourselves 'how much detail do we give to the AI of the minions? Do they
know about threat?' Our current thinking right now is that minions
don't self-regulate their threat. We're doing a big pass on threat and
hate right now, and that's obviously coming into play with the elder
game. What we're doing specifically with the minion system, we're
taking the approach that we're going to tune the minions to they're
not going to do an insane amount of DPS or an insane amount of healing
that they're going to pull hate. Ultimately the question was: who
wants to protect a minion that pulled hate when the player had nothing
to do with it? That's not fun.
The basic question that I ask myself
every time we talk about minions is, does that make the minion
experience fun? Or is that a potential liability? 'Oh no, the healer
pulled hate again, and now I have to rescue him.' That's a potential
liability, where you're like, 'Oh, don't do that again. minion.' Then
you tell him to not do anything and he just stands over in the corner.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
That's kind of our approach with
that; we're kind of taking the simple route and saying, minions aren't
going to be doing crazy, go-nuts stuff unless you specifically tell
them to. If you just keep saying, 'Hey, keep doing your über
area-of-effect deal,' they might pull aggro. But you brought that on
yourself. The goal is to not let minions be a liability in any way that
we can possibly prevent.
Minions each have
quite a detailed backstory, and it's been said that the color text when
you talk to your minions may change depending on which minions you have
in your group (lending the game a sort of party-based RPG feel). Does
that effect extend to morale of the group members, too? Will they fight
better if they like their minion groupmates?
style="font-family: tahoma;">
We actually had a concept for morale
a little while ago; we took it out. It's something that we may revisit
in the future, but to get these minions, you've already completed
quests some of which are really, really long you've killed the
Cyclops to get these minions. We pretty much think that minions are
loyal to you, right? We took that out as another potential liability.
Especially because it's a new system and sometimes when people get in
front of it, they send their minions to die a couple times. If that
minion turns on you, you kind of feel like the game has set you up for
failure.
It's something that we may revisit,
but they're loyal to you. They're in your service; they're with you
till the end. How many times do you see the troops question the general
as they go into battle?
We do have the concept of and I
think this is a post-launch thing collection bonuses for minions. So
like I have a whole squad of Romans and now I get a special bonus based
on that. Their comradery with each other has risen, right? Or I have
collected all the infantry minions in the game, so all my infantry
minions are better at fighting. So there's definitely a concept of
fighting better for you by doing certain things, but we kind of wanted
to take out the negative aspect of that. We didn't want to
penalize someone for trying new things with their minions.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
Just to clarify,
when the character dies, do the minions continue fighting?
style="font-family: tahoma;">
They do right now, yes. I'm not sure
what our final stance on that is, we've actually looked at it quite a
bit. It kind of doesn't make sense to me to have them die when you die.
But of course you can't issue them commands or anything, they'll just
continue doing what they're doing.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
Is it possible
that you could have a high-level minion that could resurrect (or "rez")
you if you fall in combat?
We've talked about that a lot. We
actually have minions in the game that can rez right now, but right now
there's no way to make them do that while you're dead. And I don't know
that we'll change that; that's pretty cool, but if you put that into a
group that's potentially pretty powerful. It's one of those things that
we'll look into, we're not sure exactly how that's going to work.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
But there are minions that have rez,
we were using them today. It just helps get everyone up faster. When
you have 25 players down and, 'oh
I'm the only one that lives," or the
mystic, which has a trans-migration feat, which is a self-rez. So if
you wipe and you have a mystic, you can use a rez-scroll or a minion to
rez players, so he can rez the priest or whatever. That's kind of an
interesting strategy as well. Today we had a mystic that had a minion
that could rez the mystic popped up, the minion rezzed the priest,
the priest rezzed everyone else, and we were ready to go again.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
And priests are
the only class that can resurrect in combat?
style="font-weight: bold; font-family: tahoma;">
Priests of Pluto, yes. It's a
special god power related to Hades and the Underworld. So they can rez
in combat. Nomads, all priests, and some minions can rez outside of
combat, and mystics can self-rez.
So when you said
'iteration,' describing your work on the minion system, I'm curious
about the process. Are you using the same process for elder-game as you
did for the minion system? Do most of the game's systems get one pass?
style="font-weight: bold; font-family: tahoma;">
What it essentially was: I was
leading a small team, and that's all we did. We're using the same
structure for elder-game, so we're hopefully going to see the same
level of quality and revision on that too, because we're using the same
process. Basically we get the people involved, use as small of a team
as we possibly can, so we just have 5, 6, 7 people on the elder-game
stuff 5 people to play, a couple people to do other things and just
play every day, ask ourselves what are we going to change about it,
make the changes, and play those changes the next day.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
With the minion system, obviously we
had a plan going in, but we played every day and we said, 'OK, how are
we going to change it?' The very next morning at the same time, 10:30,
'How is this better? How is this worse?' So we did that for about two
and a half to three months and we'd designed it out before that, so to
say 'one pass' is kind of misleading. It was a lot of man-hours and a
lot of tiny, little things 'did that actually work today?' So that's
what we're doing now for elder-game, every morning we play through it
and say, 'What are we going to do? Here's the list.' And we work
through it.
I'm a big believer in: the more
times you can look at it with the people who know what's going on, the
better it'll be. You can't be afraid to say, 'Something I did may have
not been the best for the game.' We do that all the time 'let's try
this and let's try this
oops, those didn't work.' You have to be able
to say, 'this didn't work for this reason, and that didn't work for
that reason. Now how are we going to fix this?' The minion stuff, the
engineers I was working with they contributed a lot, obviously they
made it. It's not like I go into a room and say, 'Here's what we're
doing, guys. Go.' They play the game just as much as I do.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
Speaking of
engineers, do you see any performance problems on the horizon with
having so many minions on the screen at the same time in more epic
encounters?
No, performance is only going to get
better. We're at the state where performance only goes up. Obviously,
there's some crashes and everything with beta, we'll find more and beta
players will find some funny stuff. They'll actually get to see what it
is; we actually list it out on the closed forums, our system designers
actually make lists of everything going on.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
Will this
practice of listing out current bugs continue past launch?
style="font-family: tahoma;">
Our plan is to carry that on for a
small, closed community, not to the general population. So we have our
closed forums and our general forums. Sometimes I'll post in the
general forums, but every day I'll post in the closed forums, saying
here's what we did, what do you guys think? We're really into what
everyone thinks, so we really want beta players to make a forums
account and tell us what you think so we can do more of the good
stuff and less of the bad stuff.
We have a really good engineering
team, so performance is nothing to worry about. Just the other day,
they baffled us all by redoing the entire skybox. All new clouds, all
new lights in the sky. They're constantly working on making everything
work better.
I'm glad you mentioned the new
skybox, it was one of the things that really caught my eye when I
logged into the game today.
This is the first time I've seen it
too, it looks great!
alt="Skybox"
src="/image/view/12421"
style="border: 2px solid ; width: 250px; height: 150px;" align="right">
style="font-family: tahoma;">
So what's the
next big thing we can expect?
style="font-weight: bold; font-family: tahoma;">
The next big thing is to finish the
game! I feel like we're at a pretty good skate with the minions. We
really took the minions from kind of confusing it's still a little
tough when you only spend a little time with it, but I talked to a lot
of people tonight that said, 'Yea, the interface itself is a lot easier
to understand.'
I'm doing the elder-game iteration,
so that's something we're talking about here. We brought that for the
first time just today. A lot of things are going to come together in
the last couple months. So it's pretty exciting every day, something
gets better. I think everyone is just trying to pull their respective
pieces together.
People want to know what do I do at
level 40, so obviously minions are a big part of that. We're churning
out minions like crazy. They're playing into the elder-game strategy a
lot, picking which ones I want, which ones make me better for the role
that I'm in within the group, and really opening up that epic scale to
5 people, but 25 characters versus absolutely giant enemies.
style="font-family: tahoma;">
When we launch the game, we're going
to launch the best game that we can. Then, after that, we have a really
clear plan about how we're going to continue to improve on that
foundation.
This interview dated 6/28/07.
Talk about this
interview
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?p=169982#post169982">in
our Forums!