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A few weeks back, Pro-G had the chance to sit down with Alistair Hallsby of Kuju and Romain De Waubert De Genlis of Ubisoft to talk about Might & Magic: Dark Messiah. After being wowed by some exceptional single and multiplayer antics, the interview commenced…
Q: Because of the way the game is designed, do you expect people to play just the single-player or the multiplayer, or do you expect players to jump between the two?
Romain De Waubert: You always have the hardcore players who’ll run through the single-player to get to the multiplayer aspect of the game, but what I hope is that people will do both. The single-player experience is so rich and rewarding, I guess and I hope that they’ll play through that. With the multiplayer, we believe that the player should have everything from the single-player available and not dumb down the graphics because the engine can’t handle it. Everything is there in the multiplayer except the traps, as we wanted it to be more spontaneous. So we’re able to offer everything from the single-player, with the same level of detail and the same scale, but obviously in a more multiplayer friendly environment.
Q: How long do you keep the skills for in the multiplayer as you work your way through the Crusade mode?
Alistair Hallsby: The Campaign in multiplayer has a time limit you can set. We wanted to make something that was a really good game for a lunch hour, or a quick session. So you keep your skills until the server limit ends. It might have an open-ended campaign which only ends when one side defeats the other; so, as long as the campaign is running, you keep all the skills you’ve built up. It’s entirely up to the player as to how they set the server up.
Q: In terms of balancing, I’ve noticed that when parrying, if you’re playing as a warrior, it’s hard to see what stance the other player is in – so it’s hard to parry. How much time has been spent on balancing the online play?
Alistair Hallsby: In many ways, the biggest problem for us was the anticipation of lag, and being able to deal with network events, so what we went for was more a sense of striking swords. It’s more Highlander than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It’s slower because it’s supposed to be about pace and timings, so stamina can affect sword blows. It’s largely about meeting the attack with your blade – anticipation. So if you can’t see their stance, they also can’t see yours.
We looked at medieval fighters and one of the things is that you don’t want to be too close to an enemy, and equally, you don’t want to be too far away. It’s a lot about judging distance. So, the inexperienced thing would be to charge in and attack, attack. In general, the person who steps back will tend to win the fight.
Q: So how do you deal with the lag problem then?
Alistair Hallsby: Unlike counter-strike, everything in the game is a physical object, so we have arrows and swords, all having different effects on lag. We tried very hard to get the same speed and movement as the single-player, and we’ve succeeded, because everything as a physical object has its own effect on lag, meaning we can compensate for it. There is of course one main difference: where in single-player, you’re fighting six or seven people who aren’t as clever as you, in multiplayer, you’re fighting one, who is at least as clever, if not more so.
Q: What would you say has been the biggest technical challenge working with Source?
Alistair Hallsby: If I were to say the biggest technical problem with Source, I’d have to say there isn’t one, because it’s excellent at what it does. The biggest problem on the project has been networked melee combat, but by a long margin. That was the thing we had to fix. But Source itself has a good interface; it’s very quick to test stuff and technical information wise, it’s got lots of debug information to see what and how you’re doing it. So it’s very easy to test stuff out and actually get it working.
It’s really a question of knowing the network environment. Everything you do has a 200ms round time before one of my friends gets that information. One thing we have managed to do is to cater for global online play. It’s designed to be the same game for someone in America, as it is with someone in the next room. It’s very easy to make a game that suffers from lag if you don’t design in that point two of a second. It’s fine if you’re next to each other, but as you get further away the difference is easy to notice.
We saw it in Quake, which is great, but they released Quake World later, which is optimised for the lag problem. So everyone designing games today knows about the lag problem, so that’s definitely one of the things we have to do from a technical aspect.
Q: It certainly seems like each team has put a lot of effort into its respective areas of production, but why was the decision made to contract the multiplayer side out from Arkane?
Romain De Waubert: We approached Arkane and they began development of the single-player and the team were incredibly focussed on the single-player. Should we split that team up and get half of them to work on multiplayer, or hire another team to work with them to make the best possible game? We chose to work with Kuju, who have done an excellent job. It’s very easy to lose focus when needing to work in separate teams, so I think we made the right decision to double the team, keeping the structure in place and building on that. It’s very difficult, because you need to keep the teams working with the same assets, but the end result is that the player will notice that he’s in the same environment, and it doesn’t look different.
