Stargate Worlds Interview

If there was one video game genre that stood out at Leipzig Games Convention this year, it was the MMO. At the show the VideoGamer.com HQ team saw Jumpgate Evolution, Champions Online, Warhammer Online, Aion, Age of Conan, Empire Sports, The Agency, Free Realms and Wrath of the Lich King. Phew. But that wasn’t it. There was one last MMO for us to see as the three day show came to an end – Stargate Worlds. In the back seat of an air-conditioned Hummer (that’s right, a Hummer), we grilled studio head Dan Elggren on a game that hopes to take fans to another dimension when it comes out early next year.

VideoGamer.com: Tell us about the combat.

Dan Elggren: (Points towards TV screen showing Stargate Worlds trailer) You see those guys moving into that ice planet? They had to take cover. As they were shooting the mobs the mobs were taking cover as well. So there’s this interesting dynamic of how the mobs and the players utilise the environment to play flanking positions and ultimately remove the opponent from cover. Cover is like a buff in the environment. We’re not really a first-person shooter, we’re still doing dice rolls within the combat system, but you can auto-target, you can open up and fire, sustained fire, suppression and throwing grenades and really playing with your abilities to ultimately take on the enemy in the best way possible.

VideoGamer.com: Do you snap to cover?

DE: There’s a little circle piece of the UI at the bottom and there’s a green bar and there’s a blue bar and that’s your health and your focus. Your focus is battlefield focus, so if you lose your focus on the battlefield you start to lose a lot more health, so you want to keep your focus clean and you have abilities to keep that focus up. But within that circle there’s a very dynamic colour indicator that shows you as you move up to cover what type of cover you have and what angles you have cover at – yellow for medium cover to green for high cover. And you can really play with that and you can also see where you’re taking damage. So if you’re taking damage within the areas that are in colour you can see that those are places that you’re covered. If you see you are taking damage from other locations you’ll want to move yourself to make sure you can get to a better position so you’re not taking the damage. If you’re out of cover you’re going to take damage very quickly. So it’s that little indicator as well as knowing the environment. It shows you very quickly how the environment gives you that buff. So it’s not really snapping. But you know when you’re in cover. There’s other indicators. At the top it will say my target, what type of cover he has, my cover to him, and it’s really that feedback going back and forth with the mobs.

VideoGamer.com: Why did you decide to go down the cover route for your combat?

DE: It was sort of looking at the SG universe. Range based combat, even if it’s from the staff weapons, or the P90, it just made sense that we had to have some sort of ranged combat. We still wanted to live in those RPG elements of how we do the dice rolls but we needed to have it more dynamic. Cover gave us that freedom to make not only the AI smarter and move throughout the environment but also force the player to use the environment and move and anticipate. It felt right within that universe and from there we grew that initial idea from inception and then we built upon it as we iterated upon it since pre-production.

VideoGamer.com: How does the story fit in with the story of the TV series?

DE: We took the game and we fit it right between series eight and nine of the series. It’s sort of this big break that the TV series had before they moved on to some new storylines. It allowed us to really play with things that happened during that time period that were more implied and weren’t really gone into detail. Lucia, this desert planet, there’s a Lucian Alliance that was formed and they talked about it but you never actually went to Lucia. So we were able to create Lucia, and at six square kilometres it’s one of our largest planets that we have. But we also wanted to have an evergreen story in the sense that you’re not necessarily following a season of SG-1, you’re actually following a season of Stargate Worlds which has got its own ultimate threat in the universe that you within the game have to go out and explore.

VideoGamer.com: Do some of the characters from the show make an appearance in the game?

DE: Yeah. We’re looking at the majority of the show cast being in the game. You’ll start as a newbie for the SGU side, the Stargate Command, in the SGC. So you’ll meet some of those main characters and actually take missions throughout your gameplay.

VideoGamer.com: Normally in MMOs you start with character customisation and picking your class. How does it work in Stargate Worlds?

DE: We broke it down into picking your faction. There’s the SGU, the Stargate Union and then what are called the Praxis, which is like the dark side. The Praxis is a mix of this human base class of what we call the OP-CORE. Ultimately they’re trying to get the best for the human race, but we call them the Jack Bauers of the universe – how they do it is not really the most ethical. So they align themselves with that darker alliance.

Within the human based archetypes you have a soldier, a commando, a scientist and an archaeologist. And then we have Jaffa both on the free SGU side and on the Praxis side. If you’re on the SGU you can chose the Asgard which are the high-tech little grey men and then the Goa’uld on the Praxis, which is a great pet class. So there’s seven different archetypes.

VideoGamer.com: Where do you start when you first create a character?

DE: It depends on which archetype you’ve chosen. If you’re OP-CORE you’re going to start in this zone called the Castle. Essentially you’ve been captured by the SGU and imprisoned on this frozen planet. Your whole story starts with you being free from your stasis pod and now you have to escape from the planet. Somebody like the Goa’uld is in an ancient Egypt temple. The SGU either starts on an Asgard planet or on the SGC. So we have different places depending on your archetype that will not only tell you a little bit about how that archetype plays but also give you a little bit of back story. So say you’ve never heard of Stargate, we want to ease you into the universe and story as well as how that archetype plays, give you that first taste. So when you leave your newbie zone you’re going to know how the game plays and how that archetype plays so if you like that initial style you’ll be able to make that decision that that’s what you want to carry on with.

VideoGamer.com: In most MMOs you level up via an experience bar and you have a tech tree to put points in. Is it similar with Stargate Worlds?

DE: It is similar but we also wanted to give you quick feedback. Quick experience, quick levelling where it makes sense and also how you use your experience points or skill points to utilise in that tree. Each archetype has three paths that they can go down. You can either go broad and pick all three of the paths or you can specialise. The soldier is a great one because we looked at Colonel O’Neill and how he utilises his commands of being a leader. When he’s on the battlefield he has a lot of focus for his teams. You can bring that focus to the rest of the team so that tree will give you that effect.

VideoGamer.com: What’s the level cap?

DE: Currently it’s 50. We’re actually adding post-live content. We’re actually developing some of that post-live content before we launch. That’s going to consist of new story lines, new worlds, new creatures to fight, as well as we’re looking at adding two more levels, so going from 51, 52 and then so on and so forth. So that’s new abilities, new armour sets and new ways of exploring the universe as well.

VideoGamer.com: Will that be through a patch?

DE: Yeah. We’re trying to work out how we market it. But if you know that we’re releasing a season or an episode that’s pure content. That’s pure gameplay elements. A patch is more of a technical patch, there might be some bug fixes or balance issues.

VideoGamer.com: Will players have to pay for any of that?

DE: No.

VideoGamer.com: Most fantasy MMOs have grouping and instances. Is it a similar case here?

DE: We’ll definitely have grouping type of instances. We use a lot of our instances as really strong story elements that we want to tell you a specific story within the universe. Our grouping is a little different. Yeah you can do instance groups or if you want to hang out with somebody for one night and you want to group up with them. But also if you have this standard group of guys you always hang out with we wanted to let them create their own mini-guild. So they create an SG-1 team. You can register it, create a name for it and get different experiences by having that registered team and then multiple teams can go into a larger command which is like a traditional guild.

VideoGamer.com: How many players can you have in a team?

DE: Five in a team.

VideoGamer.com: Are there any PvP elements?

DE: The PvP was not necessarily the main focus at first. We wanted to really focus on PvE. We have a strong story line because of Stargate and the mission and quest system was really important for us and we focused on that first. At launch we’re looking at PvP as like duelling, being able to buy tokens for you and your friends if you want to go off and do PvP, or if you actually want to go onto a PvP server where it’s more open for people to just play around and do PvP. Ultimately I’m hoping the community will give us enough iteration and feedback on what they like and what they don’t like, even in those initial elements. So if we want to go towards battlegrounds or other larger scale PvPs we’ll have the community help us with that perspective.

VideoGamer.com: What have you heard from the community during the development of the game that you’ve thought was useful and you’ve taken on board?

DE: We’ve actually had a very vocal community. We actually started our community website two years ago. So we were really early in development. So as this stuff leaked out and we started work iterating with these guys, and we had these guys that have been around for so long, they know what we’ve been through and the steps that we’ve taken to get to this point, which is cool. As we get in there and play with it they’re now some of our biggest fans. I’ll go off to some other website and I’ll hear people talk back and forth, and I know when I see somebody that’s been in our forums for a long time because they’re in there selling the game.

VideoGamer.com: Doing the work for you!

DE: Yeah, exactly. My work is done! We’re doing pre-alpha friends and family testing right now, which is cool because we’re trying to stress the servers, bringing several hundred people in each week trying to get higher and higher test. But as we go into closed beta in the next couple of months where we open up a little more of the servers, let people play with the gameplay and gather that feedback. When we were at Comic Con we actually had a lot of the press play the game and put their hands on it. It was interesting to me to have that perspective. I’m used to the different issues that I’ve been playing it so much, but seeing somebody outside, it’s like OK, I’ve got my top 10 list. Here’s the first thing I’m going to fix – getting that feedback has been awesome.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for part two of our mammoth Stargate Worlds interview with Dan Elggren!