In Studio Briefing - Part 4
We continue our mission into gathering new intel on SOE Seattle’s upcoming The Agency.
Part 4 – Intel Received 2/27/09 (Discuss) (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)
We continue where were left off, moving onto questions about economy.
JonnyG: Awesome stuff. On to our next topic, the world. I’m not talking about the locale to locale travel because we already know it hehe, will players be able to fly through cities, forests and other various places with the aid of helicopters or things like that? Piloting air(or sea) vehicles in instanced missions/public area missions, possibly?
Hal: As it stands probably not, you’re not going to be standing there and watch a helicopter fly by that has a dozen agents hanging off the struts. Which would be cool, but once again it’s all about performance, performance, performance.
In the world, you will find subways, taxis, limos, those in-context travel points that will take you off. When you activate the limo will see yourself get into the limo and drive off, that may be largely a client side affair, so we’re putting a little flavor into something that others will see as you walk up to the travel point and boink you are gone.
JonnyG: Is the game world large enough to keep explorers satisfied?
Hal: That’s one of the cool things about the investment we made in our tile editor. The speed that we can put these things out is incredible. I reviewed two areas that were started just a couple of weeks ago. That’s not including the final art pass and beautification pass, but we’re very exciting.
I’m not saying as large as all of Norrath, as in end to end explorable. But even one of our smaller zones takes a few minutes to do a straight run across. If you start investigating every nook and cranny you can be in there for a few hours.
Lorien: I think one of the interesting things is the versatility that the tools have given us so far. We’ve seen with the exact same tile set and art, variations on locales with different themes and backgrounds that truly look and feel totally different. It’s been very impressive to observe how two different locales built with the same exact art can be so different and quick to achieve.
Hal: I’ll even give you a scale reference. We all remember the world of UO was the size of Central Park when it shipped. That was the entire size of the game world. In our world, one of our smaller public zones is usually around 32 of our external tiles.
Corey: That’s 132,000 square meters.
JonnyG: How many players do you see being in one of these zones?
Hal: We are going to be intelligent about it, and not just allow everybody into the same place. In a phase based game you can shove 600 people into a raid space and it doesn’t matter if it’s a slide show, you’ll still be able to play. A shooter is different. We are breaking the world into areas that are explicitly combat and non-combat, which will have different stacking rules accordingly. Right now code is working on giving us real numbers, so I don’t know if I have any quotable numbers right now.
JonnyG: So if multiple people are coming into a zone and it’s full, do you just spawn another zone?
Hal: It’s stacked instancing rules, it’s not waiting for 100%, so at 80% it starts pushing people to another zone, so that straggling teammates can still get into a zone where there friends are. And then we have to provide a robust UI for being to navigate any kind of instance stack that may exist.
JonnyG: If there are people that are not teamed up, will they be able to switch to zone where a someone else is?
Hal: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, teleport to friend is another concept as well. Now teleport to friend will have restrictions so that you can’t stealth your way to the boss fight and then announce “come join me guys”.
JonnyG: I’m one that actually likes to play through the content, so that wouldn’t be my thing.
Hal: I’m so glad to hear to that!
Steve: I probably fit the archetype of the person that asked that question. I’m that type of person. Just to be clear on the context of the environments that we’re building here… these are cities, towns, street areas with back areas. That kind of stuff. It’s not like you’re going to walk to the edge of town and see the rolling hills of Norrath and you go wander off shooting antelope and cows.
Hal: Unless they are spy cows of course.
Steve: Yeah, of course. So the exploratory nature of our game is within the context of our genre, it’s a spy space.
JonnyG: Great, next category a whole bunch of questions on general game play. The first one is near and dear to my heart as an info fiend. Why the dearth of information? The last video is over a year old. The last Q&A’s have been from last summer.
Hal: We love supporting the community. We also don’t want to fall into the same trap as other games have- In an effort to build community they come out with announcements of features and snippets of art, and they have to keep feeding more and more. Our team is actually very small for an MMO, we have 87 active developers on our team. The second that we start distracting ourselves by pumping out this information too early is time that we could be spending working on the game. There’s part of us that would kind of like that mystery to be there.
JonnyG: That’s me, info fiend is permanently attached to my name.
Hal: I wish that we had folks that were able to provide that drip, drip, drip of features as they were implemented. I wish that we had that bandwidth. But there are teams that are out there that by the time that they were at the point of production that we are had 170 people on the team. There are single player games that had 200 plus developers.
When we’re working under those constraints trying to build something lean, mean, and fun, that meets the promises and goals that we’ve set for ourselves, we want you guys to be so happy that if something isn’t 100% we’re like no, no, keep the baby inside, keep the baby inside. Don’t let the baby out, the sunlight hurts his eyes. {Ed: I think this is some kind of coded message, I’ll get my operatives working on it ASAP}
Lorien: Another thing is that we listen to our developers on some of the points of satisfaction they got for being allowed to be really heads-down working on features and progress in the game. Programming actual game play rather than a PR form which is what you have to do in order to have PR assets.
Hal: I love talking to people about this game. I mean I really love talking about this game.
JonnyG: Really, your body language just doesn’t show it. {Ed: Jonny is trying to be sarcastic here, but it doesn’t come across very well. Let’s just say that Hal is very, very animated when talking about his baby}
Hal: I love talking about it, but I only want to talk about what the finished full product will be. I do not want to over promise and under deliver.
I want to thank the development team and SOE Seattle again for taking the time to answer our questions. We’ll continue to release weekly updates, for a preview of the questions that we asked, click here.