Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of Pax 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel and SteelSeries silver here with Steven Baker the lead sound designer on strife and we're gonna get into exactly what his unique contribution is to this game after we talk a little bit about the general stuff so you guys got to differentiate from other MOBAs how are you going to make it accessible for the newb and yet customizable enough for the experienced players well there's a lot of fresh design techniques that our designers did some of them include the gold sharing mechanic when you are in a lane with someone and you get a last hit you actually share that gold with your lane mate and that helps to really reduce player toxicity as well as allow you to collect gold even though you're not last hitting so tell me about the loadout system well that's gonna be basically pregame before you queue you're gonna be able to select your hero select your pet and select items that you like to play with okay so I'm a new player my whole thing is okay I you know some Pro that I like to watch uses this particular kit usually so I just set everything up before the game I don't have to go to the store and shop no not if you don't want to I mean it really depends on how the game is is going like you could have a loadout and you know think that you're gonna do really well but if it's not going your way you can't actually go back into the shop and reconfigure your loadout for maybe more armor magic armor stuff like that okay so if I'm a pro and I you know I feel like the whole loading out ahead of time is beneath me I can still go full custom Oh totally yeah okay that's awesome now let's talk about you start about crafting and pets our pets a purely aesthetic thing absolutely not they actually serve a great purpose in the game when you first start the game you get to select a pet and it's very it's like a baby basically and it has only a small amount of abilities but as you play the game you get commodities at the end of the game that include food you use the food to feed your pet and the pet evolves and actually develops its powers it grows stronger it unlocks new passives and and makes your active ability much stronger so basically you guys are trying to make anyone who bought a Tamagotchi ten years ago feel really stupid about it because they could just have played this game had that experience and they get a game for their money absolutely speaking of money you guys are aiming for what 15 Heroes 6 pets at launch now your monetization model we all know how League of Legends does it where you pay for the heroes iFit they're not on rotation how are you guys handling heroes and and pay pay to play so to speak well first off the game is free-to-play and the heroes are free to play so anytime that we design a hero it will be free to play the 15 heroes that you will be able to select from free to play you know the things that we monetize will include commodities for crafting and also your skins for your different heroes so I promise Steven we wouldn't talk about gameplay mechanics the whole time lead sound designer II wants to talk about sound if you guys have been watching me for any amount of time you'll know I do believe that sound is incredibly important one of my mantras is go buy a bloody sound card get some decent headphones not gaming headphones good headphones enjoy your games more it's incredibly important and the conductor which is your baby is going to make what I'm saying right now even more true tell me about this well the conductor is an adaptive music system that absent flows the music based on what's happening to your hero in the game right so you start the game you're in the laning phase not a lot of action is happening you're just worried about last hitting creeps and maybe harassing the hero a little bit so it's very low-key very easy to listen to you know but but as the game progresses say maybe you go into the jungle it's a little more tense you know because no one can see where you are and the music really signifies that and then maybe you're in a situation where there's a teamfight happening which the music goes huge there there's a lot of different layers that are happening at that time too to add excitement to the players experience so your goal here then is to get the players heart pumping without them really necessarily knowing get the adrenaline flowing at the right times without them even really even having to think about yeah it is a very unconscious subconscious kind of thing that's happening to music I think that's absolutely cool and I think that getting away from games being designed to be looked at while you have your music going in your ear in your ears and you're completely ignoring it I mean the immersiveness is incredibly exciting so thank you for taking the time to talk to us about this this is absolutely great and good luck my pleasure now we're here with Pulu who is the director of monetization for strife and I think you do a bunch of other stuff as well right yeah so I worked as a lead system designer for strife and I work with a game design team as well making awesome heroes hopefully all right so we're gonna have some great conversation with you because it's a free-to-play and as as a monetization strategy free-to-play is anything but mature if there's so much more to be experimented with what are you guys doing with strife to make it work for you I think you're seeing here a free to play games popping up all over the place and a lot of them are going with a cookie cutter kind of dual currency when you earn and one you get for free right or sorry when you purchase someone where you what you get for free for playing and what we've done with strife is rather than having that we've developed commodities and commodities or something that you earn still but each of them serves a specific function so this allows a lot of dynamics as far as what trade-offs you have when you earn food you can feed your pets and when you get or you can craft your items but when you get SSS you can either harmonize your items or you can make them better so there's a lot of trade offs that don't exist when you only have one earned currency that exists when you have this more higher level of commodity furniture okay now speaking of crafting items and all that I want to talk about okay it's not related at all forget the Segway but tell me about the eSports strategy for strike what are you guys doing to differentiate yourself from the other stuff that's out there for eSports we really wanted respond to the demands of what our community wants so we're still pre-beta people haven't gotten their hands on it the only people who played on Leyte are like our friends and our families and our co-workers so we want to see what our community wants if they want to talk heavy system in which there's just one invitational tournament that's the you know the hub of all that then we'll respond to that or if they want sometimes more grassroots more regular automated tournaments that anyone can get access into and maybe the prizes aren't as high for each of them but everyone can participate then we respond to that as well so we want to see where our fire wants to do because at the end of the day we believe that you sports it's a service for the community bring everyone to gather around the game and to get really hyped up and it really amped and excited now the word everyone is interesting because you guys don't want to abandon the hardcores of course because the hardcore gamers are gonna be your biggest supporters but what have you done if you were to pick three things that have made this game more accessible and that are gonna help to draw in new players well they're theirs as the MOBA genre develops there's been a lot of issues brought forth so four years ago when we were development here as a new earth and right was developing League of Legends and whatnot they we were all focusing on scratching the surface making sure that John is gonna be fun it's going to be successful people are gonna play our games now that we kind of have the luxury of sitting back and saying okay Bobo are a good formula we can talk about more the in-depth issues the issue of toxicity and a lot of people have brought this up about the mobile community people are kind of asshole sometimes and um we it's we've really come back and put our fingers on that people are assholes to each other generally when they're on the same team and they disagree about how to win a game so intra team conflict has been a huge thing for us and what strife we've done several things to tackle that we've developed the game from the ground up from the game design to try to alleviate some of the tensions within your team as far as competing for last hits who's gonna play the support role that no one wants to play who's going to devote all their gold to buying the wards so there's no purchasable vision there's no supporting by sacrificing instead of sacrificing we allow our support players to still get items and enable their teammates and support that way instead so tell me about the way that gold gets split when you're either sharing a lane with someone or you're in your own lane and everyone else is all over the place in order to make people not beasts not behave selfishly yeah so every mobile veteran has probably gone through the argument of I need the last hits no I need the last hits and it comes down to this all or nothing whoever gets the last say it gets all the gold and so you're competing with your lane mate I assume baguettes last hit and stripe however you split the gold and how this works is if you're solo you get half of the gold bounty of a creep so say it creeps worth 70 gold you get 35 and the other half is split across your team evenly including yourself so you end up with 42 if you're with another Lane partner you each get half of the gold so you each get 35 so realistically if you're soloing you might get last of the last less of the last hits then when you have a part of helping you out as well so you actually want your teammate there but when they're there you're not fighting over it you're not taking something from then they're not taking something from you you're working together toward an end goal together I mean the way that I see this is this helps the casual players as well as the as the more competitive players because this does two things is number one is it makes it so that that that one player on a competitive team doesn't have to be the bitch who has no unless no items by the end of the game and it was basically just kind of running around doing everyone else's dirty work and it also means that for someone who's a more a much more casual player they're not necessarily gonna get left behind to the same extent I mean that's someone who only ever really played dota 1 as far as the MOBA genre goes I can tell you as someone who kind of played it casually and jumped in by you know 10 15 minutes into the game there was that one guy who was just gonna completely dominate the match and then there was me and every time I saw him he was gonna just totally kick my ass and what have you guys done to change that besides just the gold splitting so another thing we've done is that when you kill a player the gold you get rewarded with will be dependent on their relative effectiveness and power to you so gold per minute is a really important metric for us static it basically calculates how much gold have you been earning this game and if you kill someone with less moles per minute than you do you'll get less gold and on the on the flip side if they kill you and you have higher than them they get bonus gold so this really really incentivizes our top player go pick on someone their own size and leave the little guys alone a little bit and for us striped is a game that we don't want and we've all it all have this experience where you play a game with your friend you try to introduce them to to a game you're not really playing with them you're playing the same game as them but you gotta show them off in a corner it's like you learn the game while I go and win it on my own we really want striking experience where you're playing with your friends with your girlfriend with your pot with your kid not just shoving off show me them off in the corner by your words what not well that is incredibly exciting is there anything else that you'd like to add for the audience in terms of the innovation that you guys have put into this game yeah I think the last really cool part is that you get to pick your hero before the game starts so what this allows us to do is not only take the stress off of it a little bit it's like oh god I have 90 seconds now I gotta pick my hero everyone's gonna yell at me no you get you're gonna take your time pick your hero pick your gear set kick your crafted items pick your head do everything that you want to do to set up the experience that you have in mind and then the other thing that does is allows us to assign a hero specific Ehlo so if you have to hear that you're really good with cuz you played it 150 times we know that we will know your reckoned with that hero and we'll be able to sign you with teammates and opponents of an equipment incredible level so that you have a good game whereas if you're a really high level player but you're trying a new hero you might not be rated as high so you're not punished we're trying something completely new very cool thank you very much this has been absolutely fantastic and enjoy the rest of the show thank you