Fan Faire 2008 - Interview - PvP
At Fan Faire 2008, I had the chance to sit down and interview some of the developers of The Agency. In part one of this interview we discuss PvP with Steve Kramer, with Lorien Gremore and Hal Milton joining the interview while underway.
JonnyG: I’m with Steve Kramer, developer for the Agency. First of all can you give us a little background on what you do for The Agency?
Steve: Sure, I’m Steve Kramer, currently the PvP designer for The Agency. My primary responsibility at this moment is to come up with the maps for PvP and the game types. And to make sure all of that is fun and makes sense to player base out there that is really into that kind of thing. And also to try to make that more accessible to people that probably wouldn’t normally try to do competitive gaming in the shooter genre. So we’re trying to make that fit in with the rest of the PvE content in The Agency, and have it make sense with all that.
JonnyG: Can you give us a little detail on what being a designer of PvP means?
Steve: My daily life at first is usually getting coffee in the morning. Then I get the servers patched up. Because we actually have multiple servers that we use, and some might have the newest content from the coders, the others have most of the new stuff from the designers. Sometimes it doesn’t match up, so we have to merge the builds to make a playable version. Usually my day consists of answering questions about what the intent is for PvP or going through our database and wiki pages internally and make sure it is all updated.
Right now my current daily work consists of maintaining a page that has the latest information on the newest map that we’re working on. This map is going to be the first official map in the game for release. The work I’ve been doing recently involves coming up with a paper design. I drew it out just like you would imagine any kid in his bedroom coming up with his own D&D map or his own deathmatch map before he built it out. I do the same exact thing, I’ve been doing it the same way for years. That’s how we operate here at SOE, we do things traditionally that way.
Eventually, I moved it over into Visio and cleaned it up to make it to literally nice. All I’ve been doing lately is revisions on that. After that point I’ve been doing experimental pieces of builds to try to see if I can make the game play space actually fit the way we want it to. You don’t necessarily know if a room feels too long until you build it and stand in it as a character, run around, go from point a to point b. That’s what I’ve been doing lately.
I’m working with a team of guys; we have a couple programmers, an artist, there’s a few designers involved in it. I’m pretty much trying to keep everybody on track and get towards the end goal. I’ve got my vision out there, and everyone agreed that this is what the first map is going to be, and now we’re executing it. I’ve built a good chunk of what the map is going to be. Even as I’m here at Fan Faire, there’s an artist already working on it making it beautiful.
JonnyG: So how long does it take to build a map like that?
Steve: I actually don’t know how long it will take. I’ve only been on the project for 3 months. I’ve done some test maps using the tile set editor that you’ve seen in the videos and talked about here. It’s very easy to make a fully functional map in a matter of hours. We’re talking with all the respawn points, game play points, all of the ammo boxes, everything all arranged and lit and running. We can have it uploaded to the server and people playing it and testing it out.
Going from there to actually build it from that point to something we want everybody out in the world to see. To go on disks for the PS3, is a much different process. I’m doing it in small chunks and over the course of the next few weeks I’m coming up with the baseline content and geometry of what that maps going to be. We have an artist that’s going to iterate beauty on top of that. All the way from things like scars on the walls, to beams over your head, to catwalks, pillars, and crates, and whatever else I might need.
I won’t get into exact detail as what my map is going to be, but there are specific set pieces that have to be made. So he’s going to make the rough versions of those and that’s what were doing over the course of the next few weeks. The goal is over the next nine weeks we’ll have a finished map, but that includes all the programming that goes into creating rounds, creating a score board, doing all of that internal work.
We do have functional PvP, the game actually works. This particular map is intended to support 32 players. We support 32 players easily already, even at this stage in development. We are already doing internal play tests with up to 32 players without any lag. We’re already having good times fragging each other. It’s actually keeping track of all the scores, and the scores are being uploaded to a web page so we have bragging rights.
Lorien Gremore: Steve generally wins.
Steve: I win a lot of the time. I don’t win all the time.
JonnyG: What type of PvP game play do you see in The Agency?
Steve: When I was designing the paper map, the idea was that I don’t want this map to be this one map that can only be used for this one purpose. I don’t like the idea of making content that cannot be reused in other purposes or expanding out the game types. So the intent is for this particular map to have multiple modes. I would like to be able to do a capture the flag style of game play which would be to go get the intel from the other team and bring it back to your base.
The other one would possibly be a bombing run style that you’ve probably seen in Counter Strike where someone is planting explosives, and the other team is trying to defuse that. Or perhaps there are explosives that already exist in the map and you have a set amount of time to get to them and defuse them. And the teams may only get credit if they are the ones that defused it.
We can do a lot because our missions are actually really robust and we’re trying to tie the mission system into PvP if we can. That’s something that’s being researched right now to see if it’s feasible and fun. It has to be fun or it’s not going into the game. So we have to decide how it’s going to go. Otherwise all this stuff will be hard coded into the game outside of the mission system.
This map is currently being designed as a team, red versus blue, team elimination PvP match. So it’s a death match style game play as elimination. As you’ve probably seen in Counterstrike, in the maps where you just have to eliminate the other team. The reason we are doing is to make the game fun on the baseline. Then we can add the modes on top of that, which add complications such as where’s the flag at, who has the flag, how many points does the flag count, etc.
Right now we just want to shoot players and have them eliminated out of the match, so that they have to wait till the next round, and all that other kind of functionality. Once it’s in there, everything kind of cascades from there like a waterfall. So we get the base and then we kind of let it trickle down so that it instantly makes multiple modes from there.
JonnyG: So number of teams, do you see going more than 2?
Steve: Interesting question. Hal would be the best guy to ask about that. Certainly I wouldn’t put it past us as a capability for our staff. It’s a question of design and time. If we tie it into the mission aspect of the game, then it’s totally a possibility. Let’s just put it that way. We could have teams of two and have six teams doing that. Or teams of four and have three different colored or four different colored teams all going for the same goal.
Lorien: I actually think that’s kind of a fun possibility. Like teams of two, each of them has their partnership objective that they’re going for. It’s very much in the theme. It would be fun to try out.
Steve: Certainly it’s something that we’ve discussed.
JonnyG: What about rewards? You mentioned tying it into missions, will the rewards help your PvE character?
Steve: The current intent is that whatever you do in PvP does not affect your PvE game. The reason why is that we want to make sure things are balanced. We don’t want the guy with the best gun in the world to come in and take that into the level E rank PvP match? But we may have matches that actually incorporate bring your best stuff, show off what you can do. This is going to be a ranked match, the best of the best from the world. We’re going to try to bring the best from all the servers into one place to combat each other.
There is no reason we cannot do stuff like that. We can go either way if we want to. The current goal is that you don’t have to do PvP in order to enjoy PvE. In other words, we don’t want the only way to get x gun in the game is by doing the PvP mode. We don’t want to require anyone that’s not into that part of the game to go through that to get it.
JonnyG: So is there any advancement in PvP then?
Hal Milton: PvP advancement will have it’s own kind of ladder which will unlock weapons, gadgets, outfits that you’ll be able to use in PvP. Right now we’re planning some cross over between PvP and PvE, so a trickle you’ll be able to generate in PvP will be able to advance some of your role XP, weapon XP, etc. Rank though is only increased by playing through your career stories, that’s how you increase your rank. Role XP is primarily increased through story and side missions. And then we’re going to provide a few other ways where you get a trickle of role XP through operatives, etc.
JonnyG: Will you be able to bring operatives into PvP matches?
Hal: That’s one thing we’re balancing right now. We’re doing it in PvE right now, basically you have this ops org chart, and one of the sections of it are your field ops. And as you go up in rank you unlock a different number of field ops you can bring into PvE to help you out on a mission. In PvP we want to have an analog to that, so that one side can have field ops that are docked on a player, so if they come across an operative moment you’ll be able to dock them and use them. This might give them access to a door that’s blocked, to give them quick access to a route, ammo stations, armor stations, and some other little goodies were working on now.
JonnyG: What about leader boards and stuff like that?
Steve: We fully have the intent to have leader boards that would be linked of course to The Agency web page and all that kind of stuff. We intend to keep peoples scores; let them have their bragging rights, display that on their character page. We’ll have leader boards in ranked matches and stuff like that. We have that functionality already working; I might have the most frags already in the game right now. I’m not sure though.
Lorien: Yes you do.
JonnyG: What type of match making do you see?
Hal: Actually let me answer that. The key thing to understand is there is you have your two primary interfaces; you have your PDA and you have your commlink. Your PDA is everything that has to do with you, your missions, your stuff, your operatives, and your intel. The commlink is your community link, it has everything to do with the game itself, the other players in it, your friends, chat, matchmaking, etc.
So for launching PvP and matchmaking we’re going to handle through the commlink. The way that’s going to happen, the main kind of communication, is what we’re calling the transmission section. You’ll be able to set up kind of PvE matchmaking criteria, kind of standard LFG stuff.
For PvP mode, when you go into PvP Anytime and you drop into a lobby, there will be a generated list of games that are currently running. There will be a series of filter criteria to be able to sort those. Right now we’re investigating some kind of rank matching stuff. So basically as you play PvP and improve yourself there, we’ll start matching you into matches with folks that kind of hook up in ranks.
Anyone that’s played a standard shooter should be pretty familiar with that routine. We’re going to make it pretty easy for folks to either instantly get into a match if it’s a casual match that doesn’t care. But for official matches we will do our best to put you into an area where you are with folks of the same skill level. And if you decide I can pick a game myself, okay you can pick a game your self. We’ll provide good ways to filter based upon map, match type, player count, etc.
I’d like to thank Steve, Lorien, and Hal for the time. We’ve made it through 15 minutes of our massive 97 minute interview, so be sure to check back soon for the rest.
Fan Faire 2008 Coverage: Session #1 Interview – Operatives & Missions Interview – Missions & Combat Interview – Death, Gambling, and Influence