Posted by Lethality | 5 Comments

FSS 2011: Group Q&A Sessions With Developers

A big part of the Fan Site Summit this week was interaction with the developers whom are all busy working on our upcoming obsession.

While each site had the chance to interview one developer in a one-on-one situation, there were also Group Q&A sessions structured where each site in attendance could ask 1 or 2 questions.

The Group Q&A Sessions were as follows:

• Damion Schubert
• Blaine Christine & Daniel Erickson
• Georg Zoeller

There wre some really great questions asked by all of the fan sites – from roleplaying to crafting to PvP to theorycrafting. In particular, the Georg Zoeller Q&A was great – Georg puts forth the same straight-forward approach he’s become known for on the forums.

Thanks to Brooks for handling the sound recording duties for these sessions, and providing us with quality audio!

Daniel and Blane

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FSS 2011: Damion Schubert Video Q&A

Earlier this week at the Fan Site Summit, each site in attendance got to list their top 3 preferences for a one-on-one Q&A session with one of the developers working on Star Wars™: The Old Republic™

Lucky for us, we got our first choice!

Lead Systems Designer Damion Schubert originally answered a few questions on the Crew Skills system for us back in February, and due to the response and feedback from all of our readers, we really wanted to do a followup!

During our interview at the Fan Site Summit, some of the topics we covered included:

• The Archeology gathering skill
• Crafting stats to improve your chance to crate
• Breaking items down into components to gain resources
• Design inspiration for crafted items
• More than one companion on a mission?
• Rare resources vs. obscure crafting locations
• Quality of items
• Boss loot tables
• … and more!

Here at Ask A Jedi, we couldn’t be more excited for the Crew Skills system. We think it’s a truly innovative way to satisfy players who are dedicated to crafting activities in MMOs, while at the same time works for players who want some of the benefits without some of the traditional tedium. And think of the possibilities for expanding this system in the future!

Thanks to Damion for the time this week at the Fan Site Summit!

Enjoy the interview and please let us know your thoughts on the Crew Skills system below!

Posted by Lethality | 1 Comment

Yellow Posts: Playing Favorites

With the fan site summit getting underway this week, as well as having a major holiday one would expect developer posts to be slow.  Lucky for us, this was not the case over the week.

Damion Schubert had a somewhat lengthy post addressing a few key points about grouping and how conversations will work:

We’ve put a lot of time and effort into making sure that group play and playing with a partner is important.  To answer some of the individual questions: 
1. No, Republic and Imperial players cannot meaningfully group or play with each other.  For the most part, they have entirely different content and progression paths through their planets.
 
2. If you’re on the same side, once you leave your Origin World, your class stories will tend to take you to roughly the same planets, areas and quest hubs at the same time (even if you are not the same class).  This has proven pretty vital to keeping groups together and happy.  There are quest areas that the class stories do not drive you towards, where play is more freeform.
 
3. Most of the key moments of a class story happen in a class phase.  You can enter the class phases of party members (to, for example, help out with combat events).  Many players choose to, but many also choose not to, instead choosing to craft, farm xp, or do their own class quest if it happens to be nearby.
 
4. There are moments where the class quests send you to largely divergent locations (for example, a Jedi might be sent back to Tython to report in to the council, whereas another class is sent to an abandoned asteroid facility).  These tend to be relatively obvious and relatively synchronized with each other.  In most of my own playthroughs, the group typically chooses to do these events on their own time.
 
This is, obviously, an area of great importance to us, and one we continue to iterate on, but it is one area of the game where we’ve made a lot of progress, design-wise.  It’s quite fun, right now, to play the game with a steady group.

 

This should relieve some fears that if grouped together, one person would not have any of their class quests or have any real quests to do.  From what Damion said, if you group and do those quests you will arrive and leave planets around the same time.

Damion also gave us some insight in response to a question about which faction the developers will be playing:

Having worked in the industry for many years, I can tell you the answer is “whichever one you’re not playing — whatever that is.”

Wiser words have never been spoken.

With the next issue of PC Gamer hitting store shelves in Europe, a few lucky subscribers had a copy early and tried to translate the articles and interviews.  Translation is always tricky and Georg Zoeller was on the case when it came to a bad translation.

I think the translation makes it sound like I’m avoiding something there, which isn’t the case. First, we fully understand why dual spec is a popular topic.  Currently, we do not see the need to allow for dual spec at release. It’s something that we’ll definitely monitor over time, but we do think there is enough flexibility in the class system to keep people occupied well past launch.

Not a big shock here, knowing that you cannot change your advanced class (as of right now), it would only make scene that one cannot dual spec.  I do not see a dual spec coming to TOR, since it can really change the dynamic of the class on a dime.  While this may work for groups that are short on a certain class type, it may not bode well for the game in the long run and hardly changes any class shortages.

The big news for the community was not the Friday update on Drew Karpyshyn’s book, but on the closure of the Off-Topic and Visitor Wall sections of the forums.  With only a post saying each section would no longer be available after April 22, some members were very upset.

Stephen Reid jokingly responded to Soulgazer who was asking if the update would contain any explanation as to why each area was closed:

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Damion Schubert: A Player's Stories

For those that may not be familiar, BioWare Lead Systems Designer Damion Schubert pens a design column for Game Developer Magazine entitled, interestingly enough, Design Of The Times.

In the April 2011 issue, Damion picks up the torch for role-players, and speaks to designers about how important it is to embrace players’ stories. While the developer-created narratives in a game can serve as a foundation for players to branch off of, players may instead choose to ignore them completely as they craft their own.

Throughout the piece, he discusses ideals of this philosophy to fellow game designers… and makes statements that roleplayers should find interesting:

In the current state of things, the designer should help players who want to role-play find each other, and more importantly, find those with compatible shared fantasies.

 

Finding better ways to foster and encourage better role-play is an area of opportunity for the enterprising MMO designer.

 

One part of the magic of multiplayer is that other players are, in fact, content. The designer should encourage interactions between players…

While Damion doesn’t discuss Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, you can’t help but be excited by the ideas he’s expressing. Even if only some of the philosophies imparted in the article emerge in TOR, roleplayers may indeed have something great to look forward to:

Emergent stories can be as powerful as the handcrafted stories designers create – sometimes even more so. Even though they frequently lack the quality or polish that is wrapped around the designer’s narratives, the personal investment that the player has in these stories is difficult to compete with. The designer is well advised to ensure that these player-driven narratives have room to breathe, especially in multiplayer environments.

If you’re interested in taking a peek behind the curtain of the creation of video games, Game Developer Magazine is a good place to do it. You can subscribe or buy each monthly issue digitally here, or check your local newsstand or bookstore for a copy.

Note: At the time of this publishing, the April 2011 issue is not yet available for purchase.

Game Developer April 2011

Posted by Lethality | 6 Comments

GDC 2011: Damion Schubert On Designing For Loners

The fine folks over at Massively have provided a very extensive writeup of Damion Schubert‘s most recent GDC 2011 talk, entitled “The Loner: Why Some People Play MMOs Alone:”

One of the seeming paradoxes of MMO design is that there is a large contingent of players who would prefer to play these games alone. Gamers who want to play this way are often derided by other players and sometimes even designers for their playstyle, but it isn’t as odd or exotic as it seems. This talk discusses the rationale for this playstyle, the necessity to cater to this playstyle from a business point of view, and the design intricacies of providing solo play without invalidating the ‘massive’ parts of your game design.

Massively Author and Contributing Editor Jef Reahard was able to give a great rundown of Schubert’s talking points, and extracts some great quotes from the talk as well:

Schubert states that MMOs feature “hardcore stuff. This is hardcore gameplay, and we have to figure out how to get the solo player in a position where they want to take part in this, where they feel comfortable with the social circles, where they feel like they can be contributors.”

This is a great indication that BioWare has their finger on the pulse of the challenges and opportunities that come with developing an MMO. It’s certainly a balancing act, mixing hardcore with casual with multiplayer with solo with PvE with PvP with crafting with… well, you get the idea. But BioWare seems up to the task.

This is similar content to a talk previously given by Schubert, and the presentation slides can be found here, on his web site.

Head on over to Massively for the full must-read!