Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of pax 2013 is brought to you by western digital Intel and steel series so I'm here with David bass the senior community manager for wildstar I mean tell me about how long you guys have been working on this game wilders probably been an active development maybe four or five years at this point the studio was founded seven years ago by a bunch of explicit developers and they kind of spent the first few years trying to figure out art style building an engine doing some kind of R&D and we really just started active Dylan just a couple of years ago on what what eventually became wildstar itself ok so what I mean okay you're the community manager so obviously an MMO is all about playing by yourself not connected online and really not interacting with anybody so you can tell me how are you trying to to break out of that as the MMO that really okay I'm messing with you guys so what are you doing differently so as an MMO where nobody plays together I don't actually do anything on the project no I'm kidding um I'm MMOs obviously community is the most important thing explains why he didn't have an actual business card hahaha where'd you get this t-shirt from oh I just stole it off a guy and then someone brought me over here was like hey you're gonna talk on camera but as an MMO I mean obviously community is one of the most important things if you don't have players you've got an empty world and so it's really important to us to make sure the community understands that we are a very responsive a really open studio we've been trying to be as transparent as we can be with the fans both people in beta and people outside of beta when something's not working in the game we tell people here's what's not working here's why it's not working and when beta testers come to us and say you know what this part of the game sucks instead of saying to them well you know that's kind of what we wanted to do so suck it up we actually will go back and look at it say okay they're not liking it clearly there's something wrong here so what is it what can we do to make it better and so will engage in that dialogue with the fans and we really enjoy being able to be responsive like that now you were saying a lot of the dev time was spent on refining the art style building an engine why would you bother to build an engine at this point when there's so many engines out there that are fantastic that can be licensed engines are amazing because they give you kind of like that base level to go in and do stuff but there's also a lot of limitations there you're stuck with I mean you can modify the code and work your way through it but by building your own engine it gives us so much flexibility to changeup stuff if if something's not working if a programmer can't do what they need to do if an artist is really limited by the something on the art side that is technical that I probably don't understand then the guys who are building our tools and building our engines they go in and change it and there's no problem they can do it really fast the tools that we have available is super cool we actually we might be showing a demo on the booth later this weekend of some of our tools but it lets our artist just go in and literally just paint on the world and so the art style that you've seen is really cool because we can translate that directly into the game the concept are that you see literally things in the game look like that concept art whereas in other games concept art kind of looks a little different because you can't directly port it to the engine but our engine was built with this art style in mind now i want to hear i'm gonna i'm gonna jump ahead to our plan i want to hear the pitch to someone who's a gamer they understand the concept of an MMO but they've never played one before why are they gonna buy wildstar why are they gonna play this so a lot of it but well I got just got really squeaky there so wild star is a MMO obviously but it's a sci-fi MMO which is something that people really haven't touched that much on and in addition to that we've got a very very unique personality with the game we have very strong characters strong personalities and we don't take ourselves too seriously and the game itself doesn't take itself too seriously that's not to say there's not a really interesting story in a really compelling mystery going on in the world but at the same time it's okay to hit for there to be humor not everything has to be a hundred percent serious world is ending figure this out oh god we're all going to die we can joke around a lot if you see any of our trailers that we got on the website both styles of animated trailers versus explaining game features we just kind of heard gamers playing games and I think it shows a lot of the stuff we do so with that said if it doesn't take itself seriously then I guess that leads us pretty well in to give me the hardcore pitch then how do you pitch this to the guys who are playing Wow since the first day so while we're not taking the story and like the actual personality stuff very seriously we are taking an end game really seriously because everybody knows in an MMO leveling contents all well and good but if you don't have an end game when you launch the game you're screwed there's just nothing you can do to keep those players around or to get them to come back and so we're really focusing on three aspects of the end game we got for the solo player for the person who just wants to level by themselves and then you know play around an end game they'll have their own story to push through that only starts once you hit the level cap we want to show the story of the planet Nexus the mystery surrounding it that stuff you'll only really dive into when you hit the end game as a solo player for the the hardcore guilds for the groups of people who want to do that group content will have raids and we're doing old-school 20 men and 40 man raids that are going to be really difficult it's okay for not everyone to play those raids raids are not supposed to be for everyone they're supposed to be hard there's supposed to give people a challenge and then for the PvP player we've got a system well we've got arenas and battlegrounds which are you know the normal instant subjective pvp arenas ranked you know rated small group fights we also a system called war plots we're not talking a lot about it yet it's going to be 40 verse 40 groups forming war parties where you actually build your own fortress you build it you customize it you can decide what paths you want to force the enemy to take you can actually go into a raid and capture a raid boss and bring them back to your war plot so that way the other team has to fight against him and then you drip bring your war plot to the fight the other team brings their warp lot and you guys just go crazy that sounds absolutely bazonkers so tell me about the combat because that's one of the things that I keep hearing a lot about I mean we've been asking people around what what are you excited about we've had some people say well I would star and we kind of go why and they say well it the combat is fascinating tell me about it the combat is a really fast paced it's an action combat game so you're going to have Telegraph's when you're using attacks you're going to have these you know decals on the ground that kind of show where your attacks land which means that if you can position people well you can hit as many enemies as you can fit in that Telegraph and the enemies all have the same types of attacks you're going to be need to need to dodge out of their attacks and position yourself and stun them and interrupt them and at the same time we're also making sure that like healers for example also have to deal with Telegraph's healers can do the normal extending in the back and targeting a guy and hit in their heel but they can also aim their heels if they want and so if the group lines themselves up you can heal everyone at once with a nice line attack you can drop a big circle around everyone and everybody knows where to stay and so we want to take some of the responsibility of the heel or off of them onto the DPS where if the DPS are not paying attention to where the healer is that's their problem it's not always the healers fault in the fight can you talk about the end tori system sure so the inventory we have a bag system got a basic inventory which is wow this is really full of crap right now sander bag system you can actually look here you got a bunch of different bags you'll learn bags as you play and you can also actually crafting materials go in a separate satchel so that way when you're collecting things out in the world with your mining if you're gathering seeds or whatever go go into separate satchel separate from your inventory because we got a lot of different things you can collect okay so can you can you show us some of the some of the character customization you can't show us the customization but you can at least cycle through a few random creations maybe talk about what we're looking at yeah so right now we're looking at the Dominion character creation so we've got four races on the dummy inside this is the makari female and we've got a Makar email to these are giant robots obviously and so the character customization that was terrible wave said the character customization is currently work in progress I wish I could zoom into the face but you can see that you can change the color of the hair the shape of the hair the her we got its facial hair but it's actually you know antennas and different like technology things under macari the chuo which we just announced is a small furry little race and they've got a bunch of different I types hair types they're kind of cute and they're actually genderless so you can click on this and it doesn't actually change anything we also have pink chu and blue chua there's the pink the Drakken are this crazy crazy horned fierce vicious race so they got all kinds of different horn types different hair they all look super fierce and super scary so I really really stoked to check it out tell us about the monetization model so we just announced our business model we're gonna be doing a subscription-based game you buy the boxing at 30 days free after that you can pay fifteen dollars a month to keep playing however we're also doing something called cred which is a actual in-game item that you can purchase with real money and that cred if you redeem it is redeemed for 30 more days of game time so what that means is that we're actually gonna have a marketing game where if I'm playing the game for a month and i'm earning tons and tons of gold and i got all this money left over I go on that market and spend my in-game gold to buy a month of game time so i can actually play the game for free if I'm playing the game enough that I love it and have all that money to spend while someone else who doesn't have that much time to spend but really wants to get some goals maybe they want to buy that new mount or whatever they can spend some money to buy cred and sell it to you on the market so way they get some extra gold you get a free month and now everybody's happy and the gold sellers don't get anything so there you have it guys it wasn't that long ago that the word on the street was Oh monthly subscriptions are dead but you guys have taken a bit of a unique spin on that and it sounds like it just might work I guess we'll find out won't we thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us David this has been absolutely great and uh good luck thanks man