Carbine's Jeremy Gaffney talks with members of the WildStar UK community

What’s the biggest change that you’ve made based on feedback?

Probably a lot of it’s been to do with the paths. For instance, Explorer used to be like ‘Go find the top of this mountain,’ or ‘Dig this river, and search it from stem to stern.’ It turns out that explorers were like ‘No, forget that!’ [laughs] They want to wander round and bump into things, because it’s the explorer mentality. So in retrospect it’s like ‘Duh’, but in practice we have this mentality that we should direct you to the things. That’s true across all the paths. We try to have team members of that play style work on a path, but none were quite as fundamental as the explorer.

How long do you want it to take to complete a raid? Do you want people to grind through it for a couple of months?

What we’re looking at doing right now is this: Our secret sauce to raiding is making sure that there are dynamic elements within the raid; there’re environmental hazards that change, the bosses change, the bodyguards change. As many things that can affect gameplay in an interesting way as possible change on a weekly basis. And we do all this on a random seed that changes each week.

What that means is that the elitists in general hate randomization; randomization helps newbies. No newbie’s going to win a chess match, but a newbie can win a poker match because the random element can come up. Even if you’re an idiot, the cards can fall your way.

And so, the way that we’ve done randomization is to make sure that everyone is on an even playing field each week, but the playing field is different. And then we have people compete with each other.

We’d like the raids to take a week basically to get through. In terms of the first time having a crack at a raid, they’ll take a while. But once you’re into the raiding cycle, it’s every week getting a new thing to compete against. And then we give out rewards for doing the best.

And that way, if it’s a very hard configuration this week, maybe only a few guilds on the planet crack it. If we’re rewarding people for not only how they crack the raid but how well they compete against each other, it means if it’s a very easy configuration all the newbie guilds are stoked. And the higher level guilds still have to compete because they can finish it trivially, but can you do it in a speedrun? And whoever wins the speedrun gets a legendary item, so you’re still trying to do it better than everybody else.

Is that better than static raids?

I don’t mean to argue with it. Obviously it’s been successful for World of Warcraft, having fairly static raids for quite a bit. But that’s why they move to do those every couple of months, because you need to be feeding in new content before it becomes unreplayable.

And learning the synchronized swim dance; the first groups that interact with that and figure it out, I think that’s a fun element. But only a few guilds on the planet actually get the opportunity to do that, and then everyone else goes to WoWWiki or Wowhead and figures it out; OK we’ll do this synchronized swim, and is our gear good enough to do it.

I think it’s more compelling if there’s exploration on a weekly basis. But sometimes people rebel in funny ways. People like the synchronized swim, obviously, because they’re doing it.

What kind of time commitment do you think people are going to be looking at? Will you be able to dip into both raiding and PvP, and all the other elder game stuff? Or will people have to specialize?

The way that we’ve been designing it is with the assumption that some people – we’ll call them ‘kids’ – have very large playtimes, and then some people – we’ll call them ‘those with jobs’ – have commensurately less. 

We’ve all aged; I was 20 when I started Turbine. People get older; they have kids, that kind of stuff. And so what we’re trying to do is make some stuff you can do in bite size chunks, and some things that are worth the long commitment. We don’t think the long commitment era is dead; there’s a new crop of kids coming in too, and they’re being slurped up by games like League of Legends and other non MMOs right now.

Because what’s the MMO that’s catered to the new player crowd in quite a while? On the other hand what’s the MMO that’s catered to the elder game crowd, and do the hardcore stuff at the top level? None.

Most of the time you rush your game out because there’s some guy with a check book, sitting behind you going ‘Hey, now’s a great time to ship, and I know you haven’t really done that raiding stuff. Why don’t you cram that in a month or two after launch?’ Guess what; that does not work.

What about the one percenters?

Well, if the one percenters aren’t up there, and they’re reporting back to the other 99% saying that it’s awesome, everyone’s going to level. If they’re saying ‘this thing sucks,’ why would you play a game where it’s going to suck in a month? You’ll go and invest your time where you’re not just having fun now, but you can have fun later.

How important is the journey to endgame, so that people don’t quit before reaching it?

Here’s the formula we’re trying for that. We think that there’re two things you need to do: one is the elder game, and the other is the levelling game, and both need approximately equal attention. Everyone’s going through that levelling game, so it’d better be awesome. The newbie zones need to be awesome because that’s what everybody sees, and if they don’t get through the newbie zone then they don’t get a chance to be bored at a higher level. So it’s got to be compelling along that way.

Part of the reason we put so much effort into combat, and having the monster variants that we do, is because [of this]. We have a raid differentiation between monsters – if you look at level 3, its raid technique would be casting a huge damage spell, so you’d better be able to move or dodge or interrupt, or deal with the puzzle it’s presenting you in some fashion.

We do that in every combat. From the videos and stuff, keep an eye on the number of monsters you see repeated across a zone. It’s not like ‘here’re the wolves, here’re the wolves again, here’s a slightly tougher wolf.’ There’s a huge amount of creature variance, and it’s not just for visual variance, it’s to make sure you’re not bored combat to combat. You learn a trick in an area, to go defeat these monsters. Now, if you do see it later, you’re doing it in an area where there’s honey all over the ground because it’s near a giant beehive. The bees harvest the honey, then they build a nest, and that makes them more powerful. But you get stuck in the honey, so dodging around in that area is very different than before.

Where there’s loftite and you can super-jump is very different than in space, where you have slow floaty movement, which makes dodging harder and easier depending on what you’re doing. That variance is straight up there for making sure you’re not getting bored during the levelling path.

And then there’s quest variance: having a large number of individually simple quests that add up to a complex goal. ‘Hey, I’m in the loftite area, so I’m scanning the loftite as a Scientist, which makes it stronger, so I can super-jump even higher, which means I can get to some of the hidden content places other people can’t, while fighting creatures in that area, while there’s a minefield in that area and there’s a challenge to defuse the mines.’ Each of those things is simple, but there’s so much in an area that feels different than the area next to it, a different part of the map with ten other simple things to do, and maybe the overlap is two of those ten things.

That is compelling, on a moment to moment basis, to get you through the levelling content. The tricky part has been hitting the right density of all that, so that it’s complex enough to not be like other MMOs, where you’re like ‘boring, done it all,’ and not be so overwhelming so that noobs are like ‘I can’t work out what to do, how about I camp. [laughs] I shall go play Diablo and click on monsters.’

And hitting that sweet spot is not trivial, partly because if you make it simple enough for newbies then everyone else says ‘Oh, this feels like WoW,’ and they drop out in 3 seconds. It’s certainly non-trivial, and it’s certainly something we’ll iterate on a few more times, because we’ve iterated back and forth on it 5 or 6 times already.

Is that variance something you want to bring into the PvP side as well, through things like opening battlegrounds at particular levels?

Yes we are, but simultaneously we do less of that in PvP, because players provide their own variation. When experimenting with that, you want per match variation where some things are different each match. But you also want lengthy variation for players that learn the tricks. If the battlefield is consistent for a week, you learn the battlefield and then you have a benefit from having spent that learning time, so it feels like a good time investment. If we were massively random every time and shifted on a per match basis, by the time you’ve learned it the match is over. Or you never solve the puzzle – you got destroyed and you don’t know why, because the other group figured it out and you didn’t. It’s tougher to be satisfying with those random elements, if they’re shifting very often.

So we’ll mix that up a bit, and we’ll find a sweet spot probably where there’s a great level of that. But my suspicion is that we’ll have a lot fewer random elements in PvP, because de_dust2 [the CounterStrike map]; no random elements, no idea how many times people have played it, but it’s still popular. Or League of Legends; how much of a struggle would it be to do a second map that’s as compelling as the one that everyone flocks to.

What are your ethics on hardmodes in raids?

We’re going to make them all hard to start. Here’s a thing though: I think something is lost if you have easy mode in a raid, where there’s something about having it so hard that you just have to be the best to get there. And over time I suspect we’ll loosen up on that, but at launch I’d rather be too hard than too easy.

The levelling game is there to be accessible. We want it to be where, if you’re an expert player, you can combine everything at once and you can get engaged. If you’re in Deradune and you’re trying to impress the huntresses who are wandering around by killing monsters near them, scanning the irradiated ones to discover what’s happening, luring monsters into each other so you get a big pack of them attacking each other to knock them down quickly, to get the speed bonuses to start a challenge, to kill more fast.

That’s engaging enough – I don’t get bored doing that, even though I helped design three quarters of it. So the difficulty along the way is provided by that, but in the end it ought to be hard, frankly. There are enough easy games out there – people can play the easy games if they want to.

Solo, we’ll make things more doable. Something like 65% of people play massively single player games, where you don’t group barely at all, or only occasionally when the developer forces you to. That’s a huge chunk of the Western market; much less so in Korea because everyone plays in the PC Bangs near each other, or in southern China where there tend to be more social groups, but in the west a lot of people play solo.

And so the solo elder games will be not trivial, difficult but hopefully not impossible. Raiding and that kind of stuff, we’ll make plenty impossible. It’s going to take a lot to earn a Warplot, and going to do all that Warplot stuff is going to be hard. And it should be.

You can find part 2 of this interview here, and the final part here! In the meantime, I’d like to thank Jeremy for giving up his time to talk to us, the NCsoft Europe Community Team for organizing it, and the fantastic UK community members who made it.

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Senior Contributing Editor

Follow me on Twitter @Gazimoff