Fan Faire 2008 - Interview Part 3 - Missions and Combat
Welcome back to part 3 of our Fan Faire interview with The Agency developers: Steve Kramer, Lorien Gremore, and Hal Milton. Check our part 1 on PvP and part 2 if you haven’t read them yet. We continue quizzing the team about how missions will work.
JonnyG: You’ve mentioned three levels of rewards based upon objectives. You’ve also mentioned side objectives. How does this fit into the reward structure?
Hal: We’ve got primary, secondary, and bonus objectives. Career missions and side missions have the exact same structure. Career missions are the ones that advance your rank, their gated by influence level. You’ll play through career missions and then play side missions to raise your influence. Take intel shots, gain achievements which we are calling service rewards, a whole host of activities to raise your influence in that space. Side missions are optional missions that help you advance your character and raise your influence in order to go on the remainder of career missions.
As far as side objectives are concerned, other than primary, secondary, and bonus there’s not going to be a true side objective. We’re toying with the concept of competitive objectives that may come in. These are secret objectives that one or more players in the party might get. Whoever accomplishes it first gets credit for it. That’s something that we want to make sure isn’t a smack in the face to people before we unleash it.
JonnyG: How different are the rewards between the different mission medals, gold, silver, and bronze?
Hal: It’s fairly standard, the level of role XP, influence, the rarity or specialty of outfit, weapon, schematic, or operative that becomes available. All of those things vary based upon the medal ranking. Another thing we’re toying with right now is when you complete a mission you don’t have to necessarily return to the person who gave you the mission. The game has cell phones and PDA’s, you should be able to go boop and you’re turn in your mission when your done with it.
That services two things for us. One, it says when you finish the primary objectives you may say to yourself, “you know what I can hang around here and see if I can accomplish some secondary objectives”, or you could say “I’m done, I don’t have enough people to accomplish the other objectives, I don’t care about the bonus”, and turn it in and get credit for it. When you turn it in a debrief screen comes up.
The debrief screen will show you the bronze rewards you got, or the silver or gold, that are the static rewards that are awarded. And you’ll have your influence that’s awarded to you, and your role XP.
Below that we want to have a little repeatable mechanic that even if you’ve got all the ratings you’ll get a little slot machine of items. And the slot machine will be based upon the rating level that you received. So you might see only two options for a bronze, four for a silver, or five options if you got a gold.
Then you have a decision where you decide which of those you want. The gold one is really rare, but I’ve never seen that one come up for the bronze level. Argh, which one do I pick? We’re trying to come up with ways that players can replay missions and always get something from them.
JonnyG: If you win the gold, do you get the rewards for the bronze and silver?
Hal: The way we’re thinking now is that if you get the reward for the gold, the static rewards for the other two levels will be included. If you get the gold the first time, you get all the goodies, although the slot machine aspect will always be active, so you’ll always have rewards based upon your level of accomplishment.
JonnyG: You mentioned having rare operatives as rewards. Do you always get the same one for completing a specific mission?
Hal: In some cases it will be a statically offered operative, in other cases it will be a random loot drop. It depends on the type of mission, career missions have more statically defined stuff and side missions have a little lesser of that. But there will always be that random chance at the bottom as well. The path of operative collection we want to make variable for people.
There is always the chance of “so if I could just get Black Mamba, I’d be the happiest person in the world”. But she’s incredibly hard to get, either I’m going to have to trade for her, or I’m going to keep replaying missions and see if she pops up in the random table. Or I’m going to go out on the web site and find out that it’s every Monday and Tuesday from eleven to one in the morning that she’s inserted into the loot tables. {Ed: You heard it first here at HQ, check for the Black Mamba on Mon and Tues between 11 and 1} That’s what makes her so rare.
JonnyG: On static operatives, are they always going to be the same?
Hal: Right now we’re saying that the 480 that we’re defining are statically defined. So if you get a Black Mamba and I get a Black Mamba, when those cards start, they are the same. As they advance through ranks they may start to vary based upon the pro’s, con’s, specialties that they earn. We want to have a nice predictive set so everyone is kind of collecting from a template here, and then as they advance them there’s a variety of templates that they go into.
Another nerdy aside on MMO development. One of the biggest, most capable things, is truly unique items. One of the biggest headaches for Star Wars Galaxies was that they were generating millions and millions of records for all these tiny little stat differences between items. It’s a gorgeous idea, one as a designer that I found to be delicious from day one. Until we can get the computer power necessary we have to do some clever things to give people the sense of variety without crushing our database. So that people can have a fun shooting game.
JonnyG: What about bosses, we’ve seen sub bosses like Vytautus, who feels no pain. How will boss battles work? Will we be able to kill them with a headshot? Will there be minions involved?
Hal: We have bosses and sub bosses. Sub bosses will be your standard guy who has a few perks, special skills, or abilities. So there might be a guy who a headshot will bounce off his head due to a steel plate that’s inserted in there. Or there will be a pair of sub bosses that is this pair of assassins from one ocean. These twins that have speed skills and the ability to wink in and wink out in spaces. Then there will be guys that have minions that will come in and flood the room and you’ll have to make your way through them to get to the main guy.
Then we’ll have multi phase big bosses. I don’t want to spoil it because there will be a big reveal for it as we show new stuff. But imagine the standard element where some bodies in one state and they have these abilities, you manage to wear them down or do the damage necessary to make them show the next phase.
So expect multi phase bosses, sub bosses that have enhanced abilities, properties, and stats that make them tougher to kill or tougher to fight. And guys that are leaders for AI that their sending against you.
JonnyG: What about the environments? Will they be destructible? Will we be able to interact with the environment?
Hal: We’re not going the whole destructible route. DC and The Agency made some design decisions early. Each put their stake in the ground, DC is about full physics on the server, The Agency is about hundreds of projectiles flying around.
We will have limited destruction. We’re working on developing hard and soft cover, so destructible cover elements that you’ll be able to break out. In some of the instances we’re going to have elements in the environment that you’ll be able to target and destroy.
But as far as freeform destruction goes, that’s not in the cards for us. We’re going to have more specific and targeted destruction for our players. So we can make sure the shooting and skill use stays as fast as can be.
Steve: It’s hard to add exotic locales and then have them look like rubble. You don’t want to be the next player that walks in and finds rubble.
JonnyG: In an instance though that’s not as big a problem.
Hal: Exactly, that’s why were planning some of the more destructive elements for the instances.
Steve: But the way that we’ve constructed our spaces we can’t do freeform destruction.
Hal: So there’s no seeing a wall, blowing a hole in the wall, and going through it. Unless we’ve already determined and you already know that that wall is ready to be destroyed.
JonnyG: What about things like a bridge that you blow up behind you for tactical reasons?
Hal: That’s a very good idea, or a top level you collapse to fill in the sewer below you to prevent guys from using an alternate entrance point. Pre-planned destruction like that is the stuff that were really excited to explore.
JonnyG: How will people know that an environment is destructible?
Hal: We’ll have usable object hits that will be in the world. Some of them will be explicit, and some more subtle. Some of them will be keyed off the gear that you have on you. So kind of like our action UI comes up and filters the skills that you can use on objects here in the world, we’ll have the world to filter the in world hits that are made available to you.
JonnyG: We’ve seen several agency moments, the merry go round, flying a jeep into a helicopter, and blowing up a truck. How will you initiate them?
Hal: We want that to be a bit more of a surprise for players. Needless to say it’s based upon the mission that you’re on, the team that you’re on, the operatives you have with you, and the gear that you have with you….no I cannot talk about more secrets. I want players to be surprised when they see agency moments happen. It’s like “oh wow, we finally got another one.”
Some will be the huge slam bang ones, those will be the smallest in count. Then we’ll have a host of smaller ones like you shoot out the skylight on top of the chateau causing the guy to fall through to the bottom. Good for you, that’s an agency moment right there.
JonnyG: What about the zip line in the video?
Hal: Some zip lines are standard. Some are cool, like if you trigger the agency moment in a hospital that’s about to explode and zip line out, everybody in the public space around the hospital will see you zip line out and it explode with a big boom.
By the way that’s a really important thing we’re trying to do. Instances and public spaces, we want to have cross over moments between them. So when you get to the finally of an instance there may be some feedback in the public space. So players see it and ask “what just happened, why is smoke coming up from the manholes?” or “why did a flaming subway car just go by?"
JonnyG: And then they say, wow I want to do that mission.
Hal: Yeah, and a couple guys walk by dusting themselves off. And they go, “What did you do? How did you do that?” That’s all part of our game experience.
JonnyG: Will you be able to play missions with people on other servers?
Hal: That is something we’re exploring right now. We’re setting up a global space for PvP games. Which means that if you’re on a given server cluster and join or start a game of PvP we’ll be able to propagate with people from any of our servers.
Being able to swap between servers like FreeRealms does for PvE in general is a bit more challenging for us. We have a whole bunch of complex data that would have to be transferred back and forth. So although it’s not off the table, it’s something that represents a good challenge for us technologically.
It’s something we want, I love Toontown, I love FreeRealms, I love flexibility. If I’m willing to experience a little more latency because my friend is in Britain and it’s the only way to play together, we should be able to. But it’s a challenge.
JonnyG: This is one from our forums, they love the PvP orientation. When they look at something like WoW and even years after release they only have 5 PvP maps. How much PvP content will there be?
Hal: I cannot give a definitive answer, but the whole reason that we’ve architected the game the way we have, with a tileset editor, means that not only are we going to create new maps for PvP. But we want to reuse existing areas that we’ve built for PvE and have those be PvP instance spaces as well. We want people to see all the content we develop.
Case in point, we have new agent experience that takes place in this elaborate airship. If we only let you see that during the new user experience, my god what a waste of effort that is. So we’re going to be reusing that as a social space, as a PvP space, and possibly have other smaller PvE missions we want to nest into sections of it. That’s the attitude that we’re taking, we want to have a wide variety.
Actually Steve is working on the first major test cases for a PvP map using the tileset editor. That’s more than just rogue tile pieces, it’s actually finished end to end art. And it’s really awesome, I don’t know if we should talk about it, because we want to show it off later.
JonnyG: One question based upon something you said earlier. How is height going to play a role?
Steve: We don’t want a great deal of height variations. We’ve experimented with it, it’s one of the very first things I did when I started on the team. I played through everything that I could in the game, and the first thing I thought was missing was no real tall place that I could fall down. And what happens when you do that. So I built a map that was a test case that was as tall as I could possibly make, and I jumped off and it crashed the server. So we fixed that, and then we started play testing it.
We decided it’s not that much fun to fall when you’re trying to shoot someone else when you’re trying to get all this stuff. So we lowered the height little by little in iterations and having people play it. We’re trying to balance what is a height that seems reasonable. We want you to have that moment where you can look down and start firing shots at the top of peoples heads. We want people to have skills and abilities to get to those catwalks. We don’t want just every joe schmo to go up there, we want the guy with the cool grapple hook or the guy that has the scaling skill.
We want to have these vistas that they can get to. It adds advantages based upon the roles that people play.
Hal: One of the things that we’re doing is the various roles will have the abilities to get to different heights. Stealth guys get the grapple gun, they may also have a wall run ability, etc. We’re going to be making those really controlled spaces. The last thing we want is for a player to get in a space where now they are too far up to target enemies, or too far up to be targeted.
There will be height variations throughout the levels that focus on specific role abilities. One of the cool things about David Fung, our system designer, is the way we are going to evolve the game over time. We’re starting with constraints on firing rates and distances. And as we evolve the game play we can start to increase the scale in certain areas and increase the game play. And we have roles that we’re back pocketing that we’ve designed out skill powers for right now. As soon as we can support greater distances, greater heights, we bring these new roles in to exploit them. It really changes the game play.
JonnyG: We’ll move on to combat. Will there be friendly fire in the game?
Hal: For the most part in PvE no, in PvP there will be configurable options. There may be achievements related to friendly fire, ie. you know how to work as a team, good for you, these service awards are now available.
Steve: You’ve gone a whole match without popping one of your friends, and you get an award for that.
Hal: Exactly, the check your fire service award. We also have goofy service awards like killer heels, for scoring your first kill in some bad ass heels.
JonnyG: That’s a different topic, but since you brought it up. Service awards, how will they work?
Hal: Service awards are our achievement equivalent. They’ll complement the PS3 trophy system as well, so we will support PS3 trophies. In the game we’ll have service awards that are either one shot, or repeatable. What I mean by that is a one shot is the type of achievement that everyone is used to, beep look at you, killer heels. Repeatable awards are ones that may offer temporary bonuses or multipliers to weapon XP generation.
Say you’re scoring a chain of kills within PvE, and you keep that rolling, we’re going to be upping the amount of XP that you’re going to get on the weapon XP side. And give you the award you’ve scored a 5X award related to headshot chains.
Service awards are part and parcel to the game. They’re yet another way that we let people ding. I’ve said this countless times before, rather than one monolithic level ding, we’re spreading it across everything in the game. So players can always be shooting for a reward.
JonnyG: Showing off your awards, how will people see the service awards that you have?
Hal: Other than the leaderboards setups and you’re characters physical avatars, we’re discussing badging, titling, etc. And how that will work in the game, but that hasn’t been fully decided.
In the future when we have time when we finish the core “cool�? combat, we’re talking about having instanced areas kind like EQ2’s apartments that people will be able to get and expose to other players.
We’re also heavily investigating Home, because the PS3 Home system is really awesome. That doesn’t help the PC side any, but on the PC side we’re going to try to make up for on the website and future in game content.
JonnyG: How difficult will it be to find ammo? Will the enemies drop ammo related to what they are using?
Hal: Loot drops are a lot rarer in our game than say EQ. We will have loot bags that may appear or be hidden within safe’s, etc. Those will be searchable containers. For the most part enemies will drop ammo.
We’ve standardized ammo, it’s fun for a collector to go through all the ammo types, but not for a gamer. We’ve got a few hundred weapons that we’re developing right now that are over twelve families of weapons. We’ve standardized to small, medium, and large. AI’s will drop the equivalent ammo type that they were using.
JonnyG: Speaking of weapons, you’ve mentioned adding on to weapons. Can you go into a little detail on that?
Hal: I know that we haven’t talked publically about weapon attachments. Right now what we’re exploring is that you’ll have three visible attachments and some stat attachments that will not visible, but still affect your weapon.
These either convey individual effects like silencers and suppressors, muzzle flash suppression, etc. Or it may be a kit of attachments that combine to enable skill shots within the game. Which will be severely over the top and elaborate devices.
I think in our behind the scenes video is the first time that people have actually seen attachments going onto the gun. And how ridiculously cool the guns begin to look.
When we have some of the ones that actually have states to them, active and inactive states. I think that people are going to freak out in a great way.
JonnyG: None of the people that are going to actually read this will be able to see that video. {Ed: Big plug for releasing the video}
Hal: We’ll see what we can do, talk to the PR folks.
JonnyG: I’ve already begun begging.
Hal: We’ll see, there’s no secrets in there. I want to see that second and a half of people adding attachments, it’s really cool.
JonnyG: There it is, right there, awesome weapon attachments. {Ed: The monitor behind was playing the video and had hit the spot with the weapon attachments.} Pictures would be good too.
Hal: Ronnie Ashlok is a weapon artist in our game, he’s been doing most of the work. We’ve got some external staff that have been cranking on the base stuff. But this one guy, he’s staggeringly dedicated, and I desperately worry for his health. His commitment to the quality of these things is staggering.
Eddie Smith, who’s talking in the video as well, about how the weapons are over the top but still feel functional, we actually stole away from the Bungie team. He was a concept artist on Halo.
They bring so much wonderful verve to the guns. Then we started having Sam Wood and Pat Shuttlesworth(?) take their hands at some of the weapon designs. Sam in particular has taken it to the extreme.
We have a faction called the Millennium Syndicate, a group in South America that thought that Y2K would bring the end of the world, and when it didn’t they think it’s their mission to make it happen. There kind of a blend, we didn’t want to make them Aztec or Mayan we wanted to a blend of the two so that they are kind of unrecognizable. Even their weapons have decorative elements that were called Jaguar shapes, etc. It’s just so much fun to see sexy customized weaponry.
JonnyG: What about melee moves, we’ve seen knee to the groin, head butt, etc. How is that initiated? Will we be able to control it?
Hal: It’s a proximity based melee skill. I have to come up to you, and based upon facing and awareness, you’ll be able to pull off one of a variety of moves that you’ll unlock over time.
Case in point, everybody has a variety, but the combat guys are the most limited. They are just direct force, like the head butt. The stealth guys get the wider array. Spec Ops is about sneaking up on people that are unaware and either doing lethal or less than lethal take downs.
JonnyG: So do they choose the skill they use? Will they scroll through the choices on the action button?
Hal: Yes, they’ll have a melee skill that they be able to activate. They’ll unlock variations of it and they’ll be able to equip those. Skills that you execute, active and combat skills, you manage. We have a little selection mechanism that is pretty easy for that.
I’m pretty happy with it, we have our first implementation of the HUD in now. And it will get refined now as we go through the usability testing. I’m very happy with some of the UI choices that we’ve been making.
JonnyG: What about the different skills that you unlock. Will you have any control? Tree based?
Hal: We will not have a full on branching, thick skill tree. You will be unlocking skills, and will have some options at some point. But you’re usually choosing one skill and delaying the selection of another skill for later. So you will have some option as to what I want now, now, now.
But as far as the rest of it, it comes down to maxing out your weapon badges to find out what skills unlock on the weapons. Maxing out the roles to find out what’s there. And then outfits and weapons themselves may have additional inherent skills on top of that.
It’s going to be about you making some distinct choices on physical stuff and as you progress getting more options to add to you character. We want people to experience everything that we build, so many MMO’s build all this content, and you as a player see a small percentage of it. We built this stuff for you to see it.
I’d like to thank Steve, Lorien, and Hal for the time. We’ve made it through 68 minutes of our massive 97 minute interview, so be sure to check back soon for the rest.
Fan Faire 2008 Coverage: Session #1 Interview – Part 1 Interview – Part 2 Interview – Death, Gambling, and Influence