Carbine's Jeremy Gaffney shares his opinions on PvP and class design.

Were there any classes that you considered, but wouldn’t work with the telegraph system?

In the original configuration, some classes were more AoE and some classes were single target focused, with some options. But that didn’t really work, because what happened is it’s generally more efficient to use AoE skills to pull a large bunch of monsters, and it’s more fun in that regard.

I think single target ‘go hit a bar full of 8 to 10 abilities’ has been done enough before that it’s pretty tough to make it interesting. And having the monster mix of having maybe a one-on-one puzzle that’s doable, we do a ton of them. But it’s easier and, I think, more fun to have three, four or five monsters, and then the AoE spells start dominating rapidly.

And so we intentionally shifted a while ago, from some of the classes being single target and some being mostly AoE; and that actually helped a bunch. Previously it felt gimped. Well, you felt overpowered when you were fighting a single boss, because you could do all this directed damage on it, and then you felt underpowered against a horde of monsters, and one was more common than the other.

Making those changes was a big deal, and that was a year since announcement, and that’s been in for at least a year.

Then the tricky part becomes making sure you differentiate your classes enough. There’s a natural habit toward homogenization because, when you have a limited action set, people are choosing which spells they want. So if you’re providing lots of options for every class, people are going to all choose the optimal options. It doesn’t matter if one class has five different AoE spells and another has one, if you only fit one on your bar then everyone starts feeling alike.

If you watch the patch notes come out from the beta, we try to avoid that kind of homogenization. We’re doing a big pass right now which will land in CBT 5, I think, where we’re further making sure we have the classes differentiated. Without feeling like they’re gimped, because when you can’t do stuff you want, that’s key too.

I think WoW did a good job on this. WoW’s formula was to give everybody a unique ability really early on, that no-one else has, that’s gameplay-affecting. The paladin has a bubble, the mage has a blink or a freeze. Make sure you have one distinguishing thing early on, then build a lot of stuff around that, so it defines you early on. When you get a fair amount of crossover at the higher levels, you’ve been through long enough that the homogenization isn’t as painful as it would have been at low level. You’ve had time to form your class identity. But they struggle with it too, that’s why they change up the classes massively every six months.

How about with pets and pet classes?

We do have pet stuff mixed in, but it’s tricky, because so often pets are annoying. Look at how often escorts have sucked [laughs]. Only in the last year have we had a couple of good games where you’re escorting people through it. Bioshock Infinite, The Last of Us, all that kind of stuff.

Making pets that don’t get in trouble more than they help you is non-trivial. And often they get abilities that are tuned to kill monsters rapidly, in PvP pets are often gimped because there’s so much crowd control, so much other stuff that doesn’t work on players but works on the pets. Balancing pets in PvP – who’s done that really well? That’s very hard to do right.

On that, will PvE skills work differently in PvP?

One of the advantages of a limited action set is it gives us the freedom to say this is a PvE only or PvP only ability. Logic applies too; taunts generally don’t work in PvP. You can do something similar, where you can say ‘Hey, I’m going to cast a buff on you, or a debuff that says you do extra damage to me, but less damage to everyone else.’ You can do that kind of trick to give an effective taunt, but one of the benefits is that not every skill has to work in every place, which gives us more skill diversity.

Another reason to go limited action set is because, when you add dodging and strafing and jumping into combat, it takes so much of your control scheme. How much can you really fat-finger or mouse-dial without having a twenty button mouse or something? I think it’s a net win in terms of individual skill diversity, and it probably means you want to have a set of skills for PvE and a set for PvP.

Currently each class only uses a single weapon. Is that something you’re looking to change in the future?

We made it specific; Warhammer Online did the same sort of thing. Some of the reasons are visual; we can do better animations if we know which weapon you’re holding. If you have the Warrior whirlwind, making that good with a dagger, axe and gun is not easy to the point of impossible. That’s why you see so many games have generic cast animations. You do this, it doesn’t matter if it’s a staff or a dagger you’re holding. That’s cool, but it’s also less compelling on the console experience, where you get hard-coded animations for that kind of stuff.

The sweet spot that we try to hit is trying to have very visual variation, plus the gameplay variation, but the downside is that it puts burdens on you from a design standpoint. Normally, if a weapon drops, you can use it if you’re a warrior 100% of the time. If you’re a cleric, 20% of the time.

If it’s only one weapon per class, you can only use it one eighth of the time, depending on the number of classes. And so it burdens you to have some sort of identification system so that you find an unidentified weapon, you identify it and, miraculously, it’s mostly for your class. Or tune the drop systems so that the drops are more for you. But all those are immersion breaking too, so hitting those sweet spots is non-trivial.

We probably won’t go to multiple weapons per class in the future; it’d be a huge rebalance, and also we’d need to do every class animation with every kind of weapon, for every kind of race. That’s hard to the point of massively expensive. That’s why you see games that have all-human shapes, like Elder Scrolls. Why’s everyone human-shaped? It’s because you can do the same animations on all the races, versus EverQuest where it’s giant ogre or little hobbit.

At the cost of having a lot more armor sets and more animations, you can have more racial diversity. Most games recently have not had much racial diversity in terms of skeletons, versus us who do unique animations per race. That feels good, it feels very different race-to-race, but you have to pay that price somewhere, and weapon variance is one area where you pay that price.

We cracked the armor thing; we have a set of things that re-jigs all the armor for all the other races relatively inexpensively, and so that makes sure that we still have a high amount of armor variance, even with big racial differentiation.

We know there’s a dye system for clothing. Is anything similar planned for weapons, to change colors or add particle effects?

We haven’t done much of that so far. I know you can customize your weapon to an extent, such as stats and all of that, but I don’t know how much we’ve announced about the dye systems. We generally don’t talk too much about stuff that’s in the plans but isn’t in the game yet. I’ve seen it work on an internal test, but we haven’t done anything publicly yet.

Do you have plans for race-specific bonuses?

There’re two key spots where we want high variance. You want high variance right at the beginning, because you want to feel different about your race, and you want variation at the high end so you’re not identical to every other level 85 whatever.

There’s a downside to the way WoW did it, I would argue, and that is you have the least information ever when choosing your class and race. And it’s a permanent choice, well, semi-permanent now. And you can argue the same thing about Path; we let you choose a path at character creation, but we may push that into the game at some point so you can make an informed choice on it, especially since it’s a new thing.

But the flaw in WoW is that - take Gnomes; they’re awesome in PvP because they have a crowd control breaker which, in PvP, is critical. Or you can be a Troll, and Trolls have +5 to throwing, which is fundamentally useless. And so if you were like ‘I want to be awesome at PvP, I’ll choose a Troll, they seem like they’re all monstrous and I bet they’re great in combat.’ No, they suck at PvP. It balances over time – vanilla WoW through six years or so.

You’d fundamentally gimp yourself by rolling a Troll warrior – who’d have thought Gnome Warrior was a strong choice to make – and so you’d play through 20 levels, figure this out and go ‘Crap, I have to go remake a new frikkin thing,’ and you were misled on the choice.

Our answer for that is to have some racial diversity in skills and stuff early on. But at the upper level – we haven’t really revealed a ton of the Elder Game advancement systems – but in Elder game advancement, what your racial choice has done is affected the cost of everything. And so, if there’s something you associate with a lithe and agile race, like an Aurin or a Gnome, those are cheaper for Aurin. So if you want to get extra dodges or extra speed boost, it’s cheaper if you’re an Aurin.

You can still get it as a Granok because we don’t want you to fundamentally gimp yourself, but it’s a crap-ton more work. You have to earn a lot more to be able to unlock the speed boost as a Granok. And you can’t choose everything. So we influence the cost, but you’re not permanently gimping yourself. If you want that CC breaker, maybe there are two of them. Maybe there’s one if you’re a big, hulking race and you can tough your way through stuff, and maybe there’s one for an agile race. Or maybe you can try to unlock both, but the first one’s really easy for you and the second one’s really hard, but now you have two CC breakers in PvP.

It’s much more balanced than saying ‘Hey, you made a stupid choice, how dare you not spend half an hour on the web figuring out the optimal PvP race.’

It feels like a better balance, because that way you can choose what you want to look like; and it’ll impact things but you’ll never permanently gimp yourself. That’s good, because why permanently gimp you for making the wrong choice at the first screen you ever saw? It’s like ‘Haha, screw you!’ [laughs].

So are you trying to avoid having WildStar on one screen and a wiki on the other?

There are ways to avoid that. Our argument is that strategy guides are good. If you make a design and someone makes a walkthrough for it, that’s probably not that solid a design. If you make a design and somebody makes a strategy guide for it, then that means you made a good design. It’s probably not universal, but it’s pretty close. That’s why the appeal of sandbox games is that you need a strategy guide for it. Your average theme park game where everything is locked in place all the time, you need a walkthrough.

What’s more compelling? Which is going to make you think more as a player? Is it the one where you have to go and do some research on the web and then go to attack this in your own personal style, or is it the one where you do the synchronized swim for fifty levels?

I don’t think people necessarily know this, but that’s why, when people clamour for sandbox, they’re partly saying ‘Please don’t make me memorize everything on the web, and have an OK time after making all this work. Or I’m going to stagger through doing the sub-optimal thing and feel like I’m losing all the time, because I haven’t done the research.’ That’s kind of a horrible quandary to put people in.

And so the more things that we have to incent you to actually think, like your guild cannot memorize the pattern to go through a raid, so you have to – god forbid – communicate, learn and figure out this week’s combo, or you’re going to get punished by not earning the best thing in the game.

What’s to stop humans becoming the default choice?

There’s a usual pattern on this, I think, across all the games you’re seeing. If you look at World of Warcraft, on launch day 60% chose human as their first race. Something like 70% chose Alliance. Why? Alliance has more attractive races.

What you want to play, and what the people you’re playing with want to play, brings another disparity. If your girlfriend wants to play an elf then guess what, you’re going to be playing an Alliance race. Within your friend group, if the first couple of people have chosen the same race, then your whole guild moves over to the same faction. So there’s a very natural incentive for faction imbalance because of that.

And particularly on humans because, when you’re in the game for the first time, you can choose something confusing and new where you don’t know what the crap it is, which is what I do, but it turns out only 20% feel the same way. The reason we have humans on both sides is to avoid that factional disparity, but there will be others.

We can have big race, and cute race, and agile-looking race, and fighter-looking race – we tend to have those on both sides - so that, if you were choosing based just on look, there’s an option for you in each faction.

The best system is actually three-faction, because it’s naturally more balancing if you do PvP. You look at Dark Age of Camelot, that’s great, balanced PvP, because if one faction starts winning the other two gang up against it. That’s very compelling. Why doesn’t every game do it, why don’t we do it? Because Dark Age is content starved; making three paths of content meant that each individual path felt less compelling.

And so everything is cost-benefit. People always have ‘here’s my favorite solution’, but everything has a cost, everything has a benefit. It’s about choosing the sweet-spot of things that combine around all that.

If you missed part one of the interview, you can catch it here! And read on for the final part of this interview, which covers an update on beta, social tools and add-ons. 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