Gadgetory

all of this PAX East 2016 coverage is brought to you by cyberpower who make the fain book that we recently overclocked past 4 gigahertz so there's as I understand it a server wipe coming the correct in fact well we we do them periodically once a quarter sir jack chua Lee one happening you know right now the immediate moment there's a wipe but the one that's happening right now is the second to last the one that's going to happen at the end of July is the last one and so after the end of July when this final white happens that means from that day forward your character and your possessions and your homes and everything about them will evolve persistently forever now that still doesn't mean the games done in fact we we don't think the terms the old terms of alpha and beta and launched necessarily mean much to us because in some ways that's the launch right the reality it begins that moment but we're not releasing the full episode one story until close down into here probably a December and then of course then the features aren't you know we're going to be adding features forever and released a new content forever so we're not going to have a time there's not gonna be a moment where go the game's done congratulations let's drink some champagne and you know we're finished start working on the next one we just don't perceive that ever happening anymore yeah that's that's an interesting point with the industry right now where I don't know how much of this can be attributed to the Kickstarter backer model versus how much is just the industry evolving but it seems like a lot of games now have taken as an example dota or counter-strike they start with a lower population they grow over time I don't think that used to always be the case it seemed yeah well what's interesting is you know look at I think the best example is eve online so Eve when it came out I we know was not an instant success and now it's one of the biggest you know online games out there and so that I think is the the best model of how to take the kernel of something that's fun and has a core market and improve it over time bringing more people over time and and grow it into a property right and you know one of the one of the tragedies of a lot of the big publishers these days is they they there they feel like you know I have to come out of the gate and beat Wow and the only way to do that is to over-invest what Wow has spent basically in their lifetime to beat to beat all the art and all the features and all the content they've created and so they'll go spend you know half a billion or a billion dollars on a big you know MMO and then guess what it doesn't beat the world's warcraft because it's basically a reskinned world of warcraft and you know players you know aren't going to switch for that and so they give up on MMOs they just say like well this is way too expensive way too risky takes way too long emos are dead i'm out and and of course it is true that they were on the wrong strategy but but if you tried to do like you know what we experience with tabularasa with ncsoft ncsoft first game was a mega-hit and and their lineage game in korea was bigger than wow and bigger than ever quest and bigger than all the stuff in the US and so tabula rasa which launched modestly in the United States but still profitable United States we were very happy going like all right we better we've got a foot in the door let's start building and we'll start stealing you know market for anybody else and ncsoft was already like that's you know compared compared to lineage in Korea it's already an it so they were didn't have the patience or interest to to try to see one grow and and so big publishers I think will struggle with MMOs and so that's why I'm excited not about what we're doing but I actually think that you Neela quit grab McQuaid's doing Marc Jacobs doing chris Roberts is doing Warren to be doing pantheon you know these are all people who know how to make good games they know how to do a really good gameplay I'm excited about all of those i'm confident they will you know be strong contenders but they will start modestly with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people and some or all of them i believe will get the opportunity to grow into millions right yeah yeah it does seem like the the new model especially for mmos with shroud of the avatar what's your who you see as your core market who's the core player well the you know so so I'm lucky enough to have had you know 30 years of creating games called altima that have its own core market and so that really is my core market is the people who have have experienced my earlier work now that being said the the challenge for me and our team is to make a game that is accessible enough to bring in youngsters who frankly are too young to have experienced a lot of our earlier work you know I have a posters of all the games we've ever made on the wall and near it i have posted notes with the birth dates of all my employees and about a third of my employees were born before i published my first game at cala bassa but another third of them weren't born until like after Ultima 6 you know as I'm going like these are a bunch of me until after Ultima Online and so it's like okay I you have to really completely reset your expectations ago there's you know the majority of gamers could not have experienced all that right and so the risk for us is to make the game so deeper in which can be interpreted so complicated that people don't get a chance to really special people are accustomed to playing first-person shooters or these very visual rich but it's simple from ways you can interact with the world mechanical standpoint simple games how can you really take this newest generation into the deeper gaming which has happened for every generation so that's solved that's been solved in the past but that's probably our biggest challenges because I try to i like to make very deep experiences very diverse experiences but it means you have to handhold people into them in a way that they're both find compelling fun early and are not overwhelmed with the complexity right and then that's the plays into the sort of the consequence recovery reward system as well we're especially if you look at the new around I was personally I played everquest or if you die you have to do a corpse run mmm and that was a big deal and the sort of death penalty for gains has lightened lightened considerably how do you how do you look at how do you work with that for shroud of the avatar well we have we you do have to go get resurrected in ours it's not as bad as the old EverQuest corpse runs but we actually are a little bit more you know you turn into a ghost and you have to go find a resurrection ankh and then you become corporeal again and but it's real it's Ritz it exists but it's fairly light but but and we think that for the beginning character sort of needs to be that light but we're tying with you know as you pick the more advanced a character you become and especially the more kind of pvp oriented you become you really want those penalties be high yeah and I think it actually makes the geeks you know at that point you're an experienced player you know the game mechanics you're not gonna be thrown by it and that that risk reward the risk part of the risk reward is something you embrace because it makes you more scared and so so yeah so we're we're looking at cranking up the death penalties and even for episode 2 we're thinking of crank of them you know you know this is so far just talk this is not this is not a decision but you know part of you something dime at least mash nating on is the you know should it be permadeath at some in some cases is that a consequence that we should allow people to engage right that would be interesting even as an opt-in or something yeah so in our case there's a there's a there's a plot reason why that might turn out to be important so we will leave that for you to discover