Fan Faire 2008 - Interview Part 4 - Death, Gambling, and Influence
Welcome back to part 4 of our Fan Faire interview with The Agency developers: Steve Kramer, Lorien Gremore, and Hal Milton. Check our part 1, part 2, and part 3 if you haven’t read them yet. We continue quizzing the team about how missions will work.
JonnyG: What about the death penalty? How is that going to work?
Hal: I want to talk about death, because we’re experimenting with one system right now. But I don’t want to spoil it in case we actually change out the concept. But I can talk about what we’ve already said.
There is a check point system. There will be checkpoints within the mission that you are in, that will have a cost associated with them. That’s what I can’t talk about, is what that cost is. And then there is the med center at the local field office, which has no cost associated with it except for time and a reset. You’ll have to run all the way back, and fight your way through to where you were.
Plus we have a field technician who has a custom checkpoint skill. So, you know it’s a big fight, so you can drop a checkpoint if it’s not a black out area. And you’ll be able to respawn at that point as opposed to relying on a mission checkpoint or the field office.
Shooters are about dying as opposed to typical MMO’s which are generally about not dying. Our game is about learning through failure. That failure cannot be too punishing, or you’ll never do it. We do want to have some risk involved with it, and we think that time, ammo, etc. is enough incentive.
We are actually working on several ideas as we get closer and closer to beta.
JonnyG: Will death be handled different in PvP?
Hal: It depends on the game type.
Steve: Yeah, it’s based upon game type. The first thing I’m trying to do is to have an elimination match that works properly, so I can have a deathmatch. If I know I can stop you from respawning after dying, and you have to wait around in spectator mode. Then I know that I can have you respawn, respawn, respawn, and then I have that mode as well.
Then it will determine whether we place people in safe areas when they respawn as they get prepared for the next round of the fight. Or if they want to keep popping back into the middle of the fight. And then you learn where the respawn points are and people start taking advantage of that. I’m not a big fan of that type of gameplay personally.
JonnyG: I think you could combine the two, give them a list of spawn points/checkpoints along with associated costs.
Hal: The flexibility of our game is in our different match types, which include different respawn rules. Steve, we need to talk about spectator mode, I have some ideas for cheering and booing that I think would be very cool.
Steve: What it really comes down is that we have to play it ourselves to see if it’s fun. What is the most fun will be what makes it into the game. If we find people getting annoyed when we do play tests we tone back or try other things.
Hal: That’s one of the reasons that we are very excited to have Kramer on the team is he’s been in the think of hardcore shooting fun for quite a while.
Steve: Yeah, I’ve been doing this for some time. My very first play test after joining the team I completely dominated everybody. We keep stats, so I had this score way above everyone else, and they’re all like who is this guy. The next thing you know Matt ‘M’ Wilson is announcing, that is our new PvP designer, you should be very happy he’s joined the team. So I got bragging rights immediately upon joining the team.
Hal: We’ll see if that continues.
Steve: Yes, it does continue, because I am dominant!
JonnyG: I suck at PvP, so it doesn’t take much to dominate me.
Hal: Yeah, I’m a good bullet sponge as well. I exist to increase others self esteem.
Steve: I’m working on having them build me a really neat outfit with a big target on it’s chest. People will be saying…that’s the PvP guy, get him.
JonnyG: Make his model twice as big and give others a chance. What about inviting people into the missions. If you’ve created a mission, can you invite others in?
Hal: We’re of course going to control that, because it would suck if people could jump into a boss fight after a stealth guy snuck their way past all the content.
But we will have a goto friend option that will allow you to join them. But we’ll probably start you at the beginning of the mission, or perhaps start at the last gate that they closed.
JonnyG: What if someone has put checkpoints in, can they go to those checkpoints?
Hal: That depends on how much you’ve already contributed to that mission up to that point. We’re actually tracking which checkpoints you’ve passed by, which objectives you’ve solved, so that people cannot just exploit the hell out of it.
Steve: You can’t just call your friend and finish it without going through all the work that everybody else did. Because there might be dependencies, like a keycard that you need to access the computer. So just getting to the end might not be enough to finish it anyway.
Hal: The one thing that we want to make very friendly is getting to friends really quickly, especially in public spaces. The last thing you want to do is run for 20 minutes in order to find somebody.
We have a pretty good travel system, but that implies that there is still additional running to do. You should just be able to click a button on your PDA and get to a friend.
JonnyG: What about scaling the missions? Say someone has gold in every missions, what about replay ability? Is there any way to make mission more difficult?
Hal: We’re talking about dynamic difficulty, but that’s something that’s going to be coming after we balance the existing content. We can’t just increase the count of AI, because we have to balance the number of AI that are in the scene.
And then you don’t just want to arbitrarily increase the difficulty by pumping up their health and armor. Because that feels like cheating. So we want to make sure that if the difficulty is raised it’s in the most natural way possible. So we’re looking at AI profiles and the ability to modify AI responses and actions. For the most part our priorities are getting our initial PvE content balanced and playable, and providing a significant end game that feeds into PvP. There is nothing more challenging that other players.
JonnyG: I’m more of a PvE player, so I’m looking at it from that stand point.
Hal: I think you’ll find that the bonus objectives are pretty tough, getting golds is not going to be a walk in the park. We want to make that something that you’ll have to practice and work as a team in order to accomplish.
That’s the best way to encourage replayability. You can advance with a bronze or silver, but don’t you want this shiny, pretty gold medal and it’s rewards. Get some friends, come back and challenge me.
JonnyG: Some people don’t mind the method you call cheating, bumping up the stats.
Hal: I totally agree, that might be a fallback. We want something more elegant though, so the fallbacks exist in all the standard stuff we can do. But frankly, elegance is far more desirable so we’re going to keep working on that.
JonnyG: Yesterday we talked about episodic content and how it would come out every couple of weeks. What about live events?
Hal: SOE has a long tradition of live events. From the basic that we’ll have in this game like the R&D center shown in the field headquarters where we’ll be changing things up on regular basis. Imagine that the winter holiday season is coming up and you get a fairly contradictory snowman with flame thrower.
So we’ll have little hints and tidbits that if you get those intel snapshots will useful. As far live event content goes we’ll be building the support in. So the players will have some fun reasons to come in and do the events.
Steve: That’s always been SOE’s position, it’s very important from SOE’s viewpoint that the player base, their customers, deserve to get cool free stuff. I know it’s our intent to do this kind of stuff.
JonnyG: What about developer actors, stuff like that?
Hal: We haven’t gotten to that point yet, but we have a rich variety of communication tools and wide ways using them. I love live events. In Ultima Online I was the first event coordinator, and I learned a lot of important lessons doing that. I wrote the first six week live event series that ran, which was “the touring bones of Mondaine” that were going around and being attacked by what’s her face was attacking at each point, “how dare you take his bones everywhere”. It was so much fun.
Steve: {__Growling__} That was you, I remember that.
Hal: {__Cackles maniacally__} I learned a lot of important stuff. It was really exciting because we did get a lot of on the fly experience. It was happening across all of our servers simultaneous. There were no tools built to do this, we just had people using chat lines and customized characters. It was just a huge guerilla, grass roots effort to get that content in.
Ultima Online was always huge surprise for everybody. We expected it to sell 20k – 30k units, and it sold a lot more than that. So we were like, okay, what do we do now. Even if the content wasn’t always up to standards, it was something that had never been tried before. I’d be really remiss not to support live events.
Steve: It’s some of the most fun content to put in as a developer.
Hal: That’s one of the best things about our team. Because we have a background in live MMO development, we know how to make quick, goofy decisions. That reuse assets that just capture the flavor of the moment.
JonnyG: What about character slots, how many will we have?
Hal: Right now we’re toying around with 5 character slots that you can have on a server.
JonnyG: My kids just create character after character, they like creating more than playing.
Hal: It’s an arbitrary limit that we’ve put in as a constraint to design around. We will revisit it and make sure it fits with our gameplay.
Steve: We have lots of storage space, so we could do that. But with the way roles work, your one character will be plenty.
Hal: Technically, you only need two characters. If you want to try Unite’s side, and Paragon’s side. All the roles are accessible with that.
JonnyG: On the forums we were discussing if you ever needed more than two. That’s why the question was on the list.
Hal: I’m sure that the coders on the team would love to hear people say, well you only need 2. But designers are going to make sure we have an arbitrary number that’s slightly greater.
JonnyG: What about alias actions? You’ve mentioned walking into a bar and needing to do an alias action like buy a drink to keep your alias bar from being attacked. How will this work? Will you have multiple choices of what they can do?
Hal: The plan is when you have your alias outfit on, based upon the accessories you have with you, you’ll have at least one alias action to perform. It fires just like any other skill, you cannot spam it, it will have a cool down associated with it.
It may be as simple as your character stands in space twiddling there thumbs. Then in the environment we’re going to nest smart objects that will have an alias action on top of them. Now that alias action may either complete stop, or temporarily slow down, the alias decay. There probably would not be multiple on a given smart object, because we want to make it essentially a maze or puzzle for characters.
You’ll have essentially three ways of navigating the space; an inherent alias action, the smart object alias action, and your teammates acting as the distraction. Intentionally letting their alias bar decay by jumping around and acting suspicious.
JonnyG: Jumping, that’s a question that came up yesterday. Can you jump?
Hal: Yes you can. We’ll have both free form jumping, which is just hitting the button. And we’ll have advanced movement, point source interactions, where you’ll actually do a specific leap. That’s not a free form one, that’s running to the end of a building, activating the indicator, and leaping for the other side.
Steve: You won’t jump forever though, you’ll get tired.
Hal: Yes, stamina is important. {__Ed: substituted a pic from the site instead of the movie he’s referring to__} That’s the old hud there, but next to her portrait there is the old version of the stamina gauge. Dodging, jumping, using skills will all require stamina. So if you’ve fired off a few big time skills, you might not have the stamina left to jump until you let it recover. When you dodge, you’re actually temporarily invulnerable, but it eats a lot of stamina to dodge.
JonnyG: Okay, onto gambling. You’ve mentioned gambling as a mini game, what kind of gambling do you see being in the game? And how will you get around gambling laws?
Hal: There’s several games out that already have versions of gambling in them. One of the big rules is that everything that you’re earning in the gambling space you cannot commoditize outside the gambling space. So something that helps you out for advancing your agent, like influence, is allowed. Because that is an intangible object that cannot be sold.
So essentially, don’t expect to go in and earn a whole bunch of cash that you’ll then be able to bring back out. It’s more earning the resources to prove your ability to gamble. And in some cases, it’s a simple mission objective. Go in and waste a million bucks in order to attract attention of the bad guy, who then gives you a leg up for other things.
JonnyG: What about gold farming?
Hal: That’s one of the reasons I’m a little reluctant to talk about the economy. We have some very smart systems designers on the team. Dave Fung being one of them, he has some incredible ideas on how to abstract the resources, to make it difficult to game it. You actually have a hard cap on what you can earn at any rank. Kind of like your facility storage, it can be increased a little bit more through operative tasks. We may be exploring currencies that you have to convert stuff into to use for local purchases. Essentially, you’re always working off you operating budget, which I can’t really talk about. It’s something we’re very concerned about.
JonnyG: You are what you wear, you’re getting these 6 specialty outfits which essentially define your class. Since you’re wearing these, how does armor work?
Hal: Fantastic question. Obviously we’d expect that a combat specialist has more armor than a spec or psy ops character who are dressed light. There are also extra gadgets that you can dock to yourself that will provide you armor boosts. And you’ll have gadgets that will refresh your armor.
Those three things in combination; the level of your outfit, your chosen role, and the gadgets that are on you will all modify your armor levels. Lastly, the field technician has skills that will enhance player armor.
JonnyG: Helmets, will we have them? Can we hide them?
Hal: We actually show that in the walkthrough that we do here. She’s a spec ops character who is helmet optional. So in public you’re looks will have some optional characteristics. In PvP we will turn those options off so we maintain firm character silhouettes.
There will be helmets, which can be optionally displayed. They will provide armor and potentially skill bonuses.
JonnyG: How much affect will attributes have on the game? Will it be more RPG like where they have a lot of effect?
Hal: There is a focus on skill mixed with progression. Our progression focuses on your core attributes; Your health, stamina, and armor. The curves for armor and health have to be a lot shallower than a traditional MMO. Lastly, it’s about the skills that you gain through weapon usage, the outfits that you have, and the gadgets that you have.
It comes down to how you’re able to manipulate those to further provide bonuses to your core abilities. What that means is that the higher your stamina is the longer you can sprint, the longer you can jump, or use skills. We didn’t want people playing our title to be required to play the formula games, of strength plus dexterity plus these bonuses, etc., that requires an external website to keep track of.
We really wanted to avoid that and make it more self evident. When I use this stuff it unlocks these abilities which I can use tactically to modify these stats as needed in order to proceed through this encounter, either combat or non combat.
JonnyG: Here’s another from the forums, will there be trench coats in the game?
Hal: Oh gosh, that’s a tough one. We have some great weighters working on our game. What I mean by weighters is there the guys that take the characters, weight the skirts, and try to get the below the knees right. No one wants the trench coats, skirts, dresses, etc., crossing through the calves. Trench coats are a huge challenge to get absolutely right.
Steve: We don’t want cloth sim on because it takes CPU cycles away from the shooting. So we do a premade animation that looks really natural.
Hal: Elaborate trench coat action is something that may have to be introduced later. Or our weighting staff may actually figure out a solution for it. I hope that they do, but as it stands, I hope that people appreciate that we’re going to have a wide variety of alias ware. You’re still going to look like a bad ass agent. It breaks my heart to not have the shady guy with a trench coat hanging out. As long as I can have ten shady guys with skills that are bad ass, that I use a cool gadget on that makes them explode and fly into the air, I think we’ve covered our bases.
JonnyG: What about sitting down at a bar or table?
Hal: Absolutely, social spaces will have a wider variety of animations that players are going to be able to do. Essentially, there is no combat in that space, so we can have sitting, a wider variety of emotes, and other stuff that I’d love to talk about.
JonnyG: Is there any difference between the factions in regards to characters? Is a combat specialist the same in both Unite and Paragon?
Hal: We want to make sure that the two sides are accurately balanced against each other. What’s more important to us is the inter role balance, so making sure that the skills and counters exist between combat, stealth, and support to make the two sides have a nice predictable engagement.
We weighting operative and gadget collection differently between the two sides to emphasize the difference between the two. The differences that we’re going to have are largely thematic, story wise, mission, and personal display later on, etc. Because game balance is key on our title. We don’t want people to go I hate stealth, I don’t want to play that stupid Unite group. Well you don’t have to do all stealth, they’ve got a wide variety of combat stuff that you do as well. They’re stuff is just a little sleeker or smaller.
We are also going to be exploring some other bonuses that we might apply in PvP that are due to what Unite or Paragon as a whole has accomplished in the world. But the tangible differences between the two are small, we want to always ensure it’s a predictable fight.
JonnyG: Can you talk a little more about the Psy Ops skills and their role in the game?
Hal: Spec Ops are about the more traditional stuff, cloaking, camouflage, getting close, maybe laying down one distraction, taking out guys from close or afar, point source security, navigation, etc. Psychological Ops are about disguises and manipulating AI, converting them to the side that you are on, making them fight against each other. Making them freak out and get afraid.
There a much more thoughtful version of what would be a mezzer in a typical MMO. If you want to go spec ops it’s about the up front, down and dirty, cloak stuff. If you want to go psy ops it’s about seeing a guard, taking him out, and activating a disguise to look exactly like him, and wandering as that guard towards his two friends. When I get close I can deploy a gas bomb that makes both of them think that they’re enemies of each other and I’m friendly. Which is pretty fun.
JonnyG: You’ve talked about how aliases and credentials get you into locations within the area that you’re in, but that influence would control access to parts of the world. Can you elaborate?
Hal: Our game is different from a standard MMO. A standard MMO kind of gates your progress by saying you’re this level range and the creatures in the area are the same level range. However if you go over a height map open world terrain to here, all the levels and all the enemies you’re fighting are so high that you’re just going to get ganked. There is nothing that you can do about it until you level your character up.
We use influence as a different gating mechanic than that. Since our game doesn’t have the same power progression curves, it doesn’t have the same gating mechanics as those titles have. As you play the game you’re gaining experience towards your overall rank, but you’re also gaining influence in the area that you’re performing missions.
Influence essentially starts at zero for every new region that you come to. Nobody knows who you are, not only is your reputation zero, you’re nobody. The more stuff that you do in that region the more reputation and influence you get. Basically as I pursue career missions, side missions, or other activities I’m adding to my influence for that area.
When my influence hits a certain amount it may unlock a career mission, or it may allow me with my alias to saunter into the VIP section of the casino that will allow me to unlock a certain side mission. Or it may be the blocker into the casino in the first place. Without the influence the bouncer may look you over and say who the hell are you? Guest list only.
Influence is all about raising being able to raise your awareness of the map through playing it. And that’s represented by your access to aliases, your access to people, and your access to missions.
I’d like to thank Steve, Lorien, and Hal for the time. We’ve made it through all of our massive 97 minute interview.
Fan Faire 2008 Coverage: Session #1 Interview – Part 1 Interview – Part 2 Interview – Part 3