Transcribed - MMORPG.com Rob (@grakulen) interviewing Chris

Intentions are to change 2 more broad things before the end of open beta, finish act 3 – huge boss fight coming, areas needed to add hopefully done by August or September of this year. A large list of stability issues to address and fix.
- Entering a patch schedule, a patch a week. Adding a new skill , new micro transactions and new uniques in addition to all the new content being added.
- 109 events, race ladder that start the day after this interview
- Race season – what to expect – Between a few hours and a week. Party and solo races. Turbo monsters go faster than normal. Blood Magic races will be tested. Awards for how well you do in the race. Accumulate for special prizes that can only be obtained in the races. There may be future races that cost to enter. These races are all free to play, first season and subsequent seasons will be free for quite some time as far as Chris is concerned.

We are making this game because we love action RPGs, before we started this project we have been playing a ton of Titan Quest, D2, Dungeon Siege. The reason we are making this is it’s the type we love. It’s really cool to be compared to these.
- Players are exiled to a small island on Oriath. Players have to work out by themselves why they are there, finding items. The place is really dark and gritty work very hard to get their own power. Them against the environment, against the players, they soon start to find the gear magic, rare and skill gems. Finding clues as to why they are there. There are a lot of finding clues and figuring out why they are there. You learn why people are being exiled there, 3 act story ark.

Like to think we can do an Act a year but will depend on necessary support from the users to scale up the team. Act 3 which isn’t even finished yet has taken 18 months,, very proud of it and they are still working on finishing it. He does think, with decent support from the community an act a year is doable for an finishing them in a year each.
- Client is a free download, free to play and there are micro-transactions to purchase. Nothing even remotely pay to win – pet, cosmetic – Is that your whole philosophy not add convenience by being pay to win? That is right – we are gamers, we made the game we want to play and don’t want to play a game that people can buy their way into power. The closet thing we have to selling anything with functionality is stash storage space but because players get 4 free tabs when they create an account, and many players like to make 10 accounts to store items on – they are merely a convenience to have them all In one place and doesn’t offer any immediate game play advantage when you are actually playing. It is really important to us that all players are on a fair playing field, especially considering the game has pvp content.

The first one is a set of PVP options that you can find in game by talking to Gruest in Act 2 and He supports 1v1, 3v3, and various different level brackets and this is something that we introduced during the Closed Beta Open Beta. We intend to sit here and say, ok how can we make PVP more interesting, how can we add modes that add depth to it and what can we do in terms of tournament support with prizes for PVP. And that is something we are certainly going to be looking into this year. Probably in the near future to have pvp have more actual support. The other mode that we have is Cut Throat mode, which is league type and we run these relatively rarely at the moment until we can get that people have a lot of fun with but we haven’t really invigorated and supported fully yet in the balance sorted out but in that mode it is basically full PVP you can kill people and take all their items. It’s an optional opt in thing, that you have to make new characters to play in so players that do not want that to happen, do not have to play in it. You can invade people’s instances and if you can chase them down and kill them, you get their stuff. It’s a lot of fun to play, because you get a lot of dilemma’s – if you find an amazing sword for example and have the choice whether you want to use the sword to protect yourself or put it in your stash where it is safe thinking that way that you are not risking it if you do get killed by someone. Apart from skill gems and flasks, we’d love to have those to drop but it’s really tough to get skill gems and flasks if they have just been killed so we let players keep those particular things so they can get right back into it with other items they find on the ground. Cut throat is not turned on as something that you can play at-will at any time but it is something that we run tests for occasionally. I think we have run somewhere in the region of 8 – 10 cutthroat events in the past but we would love to have it be a full time thing once we have solved the obvious issues of player griefing

We have sold a few of the 1000.00 packages in Open Beta and that is about the rate that we want to be selling those at because they require quite a lot of commitment from the developers to make and they have custom art, custom designed and we try to implement new game play features with them. You know, if you want a sword that turns an enemy into stone when it hits them and that’s something we can certainly discuss doing but during the Closed Beta we actually had included this reward into the package for anyone who pledged 1000.00 of support for us. This worked really, really well at selling those 1000.00 packs . We sold a total of 250 of them at that level, so we are still working through the back log of these 250 unique items that we have to make for our players and at this stage we are expecting to get about 3 of them done per week for the rest of the year. This is roughly the rate the players finish communicating their designs of them to us, so we’ve got a little bit of a backlog but we will get through it.

So this comes from a background of playing a lot of Diablo 2 online and also from seeing similar things happening in Guild Wars when we tried that out and in both games the trade economies didn’t actually use the gold that was present in the game. In Diablo 2, you’d see people trading high runes or stone of jordans, or in some cases some duplicated boots and in Guild Wars we’d see people unable to put enough gold in the trade window because there was a 100k cap so they would trade gobs of ectoplasm and various other non-gold barter items. We soon realized that once we had stripped out all the annoying things that people don’t like spending gold on like repair costs and buying potions and stuff, there wasn’t actually any reason to have gold in the game at all. And that is where it came down to having items to barter and once we realized that we needed to provide items that were fun to barter with – we decided that it would be a good idea for them to be inherently useful in themselves in modifying your other gear so that they were basically an economic sink and that way we don’t accumulate piles of items that aren’t useful. This worked really well, we see about 50% of the items getting used as soon as they drop, which is really good for keeping the economy in play.

With any online game, as soon as you launch, players try to compromise each other’s accounts. There are a lot of ways that they can do this. By 5 or 6 distinct ways we are seeing and when we launched Open beta we didn’t any mechanism where if your password was known to another player, to prevent that guy logging into your account because we assumed players would take care of their passwords. And this was a very naïve assumption to make, so although the players attackers aren’t getting the passwords form us, there are lots of relatively easy ways that players can lose their passwords to each other so we have a patch that we are going to deploy, literally after this interview first thing we do after we are done talking about the game is deploy that patch. So that is within an hour or so. That patch will make it so that you can’t log into people’s account from different locations. We’ve tried to communicate clearly to players’ things they can do to keep their passwords safe but it is clear there are a lot of things that are very difficult to get people to follow. For example they can have a computer that is completely secure, no malware on it, they don’t click phishing links, they do everything they can to keep it safe but the fact that they used their password on some other game 3 years ago that has since been compromised will mean that it is on a list of email addresses that is gradually getting checked by people with a lot of IPs.

That’s right; I mean we can see a lot of different ways users are doing this. For start there is a lot of hack software that is being distributed that clearly has key loggers in it. We can see, a guy will write into Customer Support and say my map hack isn’t working properly, it only works in these areas, and can you help? We write back saying, you need to remove this and get rid of it now! And change your password. 4 hours later, they write in and complain all their items are gone. We see this clear case that almost everyone who has used hack software has lost all their items within a day. Then we get people who, upon investigating with them really closely, tell me about this password, where did you use it previously, where have you used it, have you clicked on any links. We find out that they have used it on say, LinkedIn for example, who had a password compromise a while ago.

It is our problem if it is causing users to lose their items and not enjoy playing the game. What steps have you taken, or are you going to take with this patch to help combat that? There are 2 specific things that the patch changes, the first one is that if you have saved your log in details on your machine by ticking the save password box that information is only now available to work from the IP address you saved It on, previously we did save it on the machine as it describes, people with enough access to your machine if you had a back door or a Trojan installed on it, they were able to go and fish that file out and take it getting access to your account, now that won’t work. But the much bigger change is that even if someone has your proper password there is literally nothing they can do to access your machine from a remote location because when they log in with your password it will lock the account. We detect that they are connecting from another location and send an unlock code to the registered email address. Now this does require that you actually have an email address set up, we let people play without verifying the address but if they want to use these security features it is really important that they verify the email address by clicking on the link they were sent. So in other words if you run map hacks make sure that you verify your email address so you can get your password protected. Well we are anticipating on banning all the people that run map hacks as soon as we get the ability to completely say for sure that we know they are running it. At the moment we are pretty sure which users are but they have a bit of a grace period to get rid of that software, so this is one of the warning they are getting. We cannot tolerate any kind of external hack programs like that. Ok, so don’t try to cheat the system you are going to get caught.

Well we have discussed that late in the year that we will be transitioning to full release, which involves a lot of new content and throughout between now and then we will be releasing a lot of new patches that have new skills, new features, new unique items, new micro transactions. The big security patch coming today and I am pretty sure that covers the schedule for this year. Obviously there is a ton of stuff being added in these patches, we are hoping to improve the trade system dramatically and add new game modes to improve PVP a lot.

So it didn’t originally start as a circle, it actually started with a little – at the center branching out in different directions, you would have your strength segment of the pie, you would have your intelligence one and the idea was that you could splash into other classes and I am using the term splash from Magic the Gathering, where you take something that is off class and the intention was that although there was a clear focus on what was best for your character you could be versatile and go and get something obscure if you wanted to. This stems from a desire to have a lot of game character customization. We do expect that most players will choose to do a relatively simple obvious build with less powerful things there to start location but more and more people are finding weird, complex combinations from across the tree and eventually we branched it out so everyone has their own start location and this really helped a lot with class identity.

The first thing we knew about the design of the skills of the game was that we wanted them to be itemized because we believe that an Action RPG is like this, it is all about items, if the thing that you are finding can’t be gotten on items and it can’t be trading or have interesting re-rolling performed on it and upgrades, so we knew it was important that we had skills and items right back at the beginning they were actually based into the items, so that you find a sword that had the cleave skill built onto it. This ran into a lot of problems, so we eventually came up with the idea of augmenting the skills onto the item using gems and sockets. That was really cool because you can upgrade them, trade them and different recipes you can do to change them and this of course lead to the support gem system and at that point we realized that the game Final Fantasy 7 had a very similar system where you can socket material next to each other and modify their properties and that lead to us making a lot of interesting support gem ideas inspired by the type of thing that they used in their system. Now we have situations where people are changing the skills much that we don’t even recognize them any more based on weird support gem combinations.

The short answer here is that we don’t know for sure yet, we can’t give you a definite answer but one thing I know is I don’t want to outdate everyone’s work by slapping a new Act 4 at the end of the game as a higher level area. Consider, right now people are grinding really hard to gain levels and it is starting to take them weeks to get a level. They are re-rolling items and working very hard to upgrade a few % worth of damage out of an item and if we come along and say Ok guys, level cap is higher and the items are all better now, your items are all worthless. That is just undoing months’ worth of work. So it is important that all future content slots in so that the content people are doing now isn’t worthless. Maybe there will be a few areas that are slightly higher but It doesn’t mean that all of the current places they are playing are just going to be trivial low-level content.

We are discussing the production of a Mac Client with an external company that specializes in ports like that. There are some interesting advantages there because if they port the engine to open GL it will mean that we also have the ability to support Linux client s and potentially new platforms like the PS4 with is a --- based architecture like you can see. So are you hinting you might wind up on PS4? It’s one of those things that is possible but we have no firm plans. We only heard about the console yesterday, you know. We are planning to a Mac client eventually, it does run on the Mac using various emulation software, it’s just we’d like to support It natively.

Combat text is a frequently requested feature, and it’s very interesting because a lot of users expect it because they play game like World of War craft and D3 where there is combat text. When we designed our game, we had seen that combat text was used in other online RPGs but we kind of didn’t like it, we felt it cluttered the screen and was somewhat unnecessary. I mean, we have our systems so when you do damage to a monster the size of the impact in terms of the blood or fire dictate how much damage you did and when you get a critical strike, it doesn’t say crit but your screen shakes and you get larger effects. This was done on purpose so that it represents what is happening on the screen without us having to spam it with words. We thought that this would be good enough, we like it. I’ve played with combat text on in Path of Exile and I don’t like it personally and the other developers all agree. The problem is the players really want it and we don’t want to disappoint out players, especially if they are paying customers. So we have to take the feedback on bard and we are defiantly experimenting with a variety of options but I can’t make any promises about it being added soon. I would rather keep true to the way we designed the game than to implement something really spammy that is actually worse for the game.

There is the ability to add new classes to the game in the future because we could easily come up with other ratios between strength/int/dex, come up with a back story. Come up with a whole bunch of new animations and models and slap them in but at this stage we have no firm plans of any specific class that we are working on. This is partly because adding things like new skills adds a whole bunch more to the game play than adding another class at this point. We’d rather do the low hanging fruit that adds a ton to the game at this stage.

The short answer is NO and the more complex answer is that even unmalicious 3rd party software would need to be checked to make sure that A- it doesn’t compromise the person’s machine and B- that is doesn’t have any hidden functionality with it that can actually be used for game play advantage. And while the scope of game play advantage may be very low in a game like this that has a robust client server model there is the ability to do stuff like display stuff on the map before you get to it and various other things that the client needs to know for production reasons. With regard to UI mods, we greatly prefer maintaining a game where the UI is consistant. Now I understand that players would love to move everything around but there is an advantage in having it in a consistant way between players, it’s partly that it means that players can’t spam their UI to get an advantage over all don’t have dynamic UI’s D1, D2, D3 - they don’t have UI addons , Titan Quest didn’t, none of the Dungeon series these count downs and stuff that other players can’t see and also that action RPGs historically did, it’s mostly online MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft that do and we’re not that type of game.

So you are very right that in D3 people will hit the level cap and they need more content, however people aren’t actually close to our level cap. They are at level 91 but that is very, very far away. The reason why we went with returns on the level is so that we get the system where you impactfully build a good character in a couple of days if you know what you are doing. I see people get to level 60 in a day because they are really pro at playing the game and that is cool. It lets you get to the end game content quickly if you would like to but it takes longer and longer to level up and while people are at 91 after a month, our schedule defiantly doesn’t have to be people hitting 100 fast at all. It’s going to be awhile before anyone hit 92 and even longer before 93, even longer again to 94. And while people will hit 100 eventually, we did want it to be an achieveable goal, it’s certainly a very long commitment from the individual player. The marginal gain you get from getting each additional level is actually very small, it’s just one passive skill point. You’re not able to equip any higher items because there aren’t any level 95 items, it’s just the additional passive skill point they get and a couple points of life.

It’s mostly trolling see, one of the things that recent ARPGs did is add a slot for pants, this is present in both Torchlight and D3 and it’s kind of - if you are wanting to add item slots to your Action RPG, having trousers is one of the ways to do it. Where as we looked at our items and said if we added more slots, we are going to get dilution of the item mods, where they are not going to be individually as impactful because instead of having say 60 or 70 mods effecting you, you might have 100 and that means they all have to be slightly smaller so that you don’t get power crazy. We made the conscious decision to not spam additional item slots onto the character yet. It’s something we can explore in the future, there is 10 years of lifetime in the game that we can add to these. So we haven’t added a pants slot, in addition there are no pants on some of the armors of the characters and this is because when we made the different versions of the characters in terms of their art, the lower armors are missing their pants and this is something we do plan to fix visually. It would be nice if there were pants on those items so the players like to ask when there are going to be pants. Partly as a troll thing and partly because they don’t like bare legs.

I cannot comment on that secret level or any secret items that may already be in the game that may lead to it perhaps. Or that could just be a troll answer. 

The next one is a caster one as well, part of this is because it is a lot easier to produce caster animations quickly.
We have quite a lot of those planned and now they wind up getting finished first. We do have skill micro transactions for other types of attacks coming. I mean there is an awesome looking Rain of Arrows one that I like and certain unannounced combat skill has an alternate look which is really very, very cool. It’s just the caster ones got finished first. This is partly because in their case, it’s just a thing flying through the air that you can change how it looks rather than something that actually has a custom animation that goes with it.

Sure, there are a lot of different levels here. For starters there are your currency items that are individually used to re-roll stuff or to improve your gear. Then there are the complex vendor recipes where you can put weird bits of items into the vendor window and get interesting things out and we are reviewing those a bit at the moment because in light of the good leveling and item collection strategies some of them are much better than others and it is causing players who understand what recipes to use get a distinct economic advantage over players that haven’t worked it out yet.

The short answer is yes generally that type of thing is going to occur. We don’t have anything ready to deploy there. We can get player names onto the map easier than we can get name plates onto the actual game field because those feel quite cluttery especially when you want to apply them to minion as well as to other things where you have a lot of entities, but yes, that is the type of thing we are looking at adding and improving.

It’s almost ready, we just have a few technical things to sort out. With micro transactions because people pay money for them, we really don’t want to release them in a half-finished state so when it is ready it will be awesome.

Yes Blood Slam is also almost ready as well.

We are not actively working on PVP balance this particular week but I would expect on within a time from hopefully, of 3 to 6 weeks. We do make changes regarding that but the key thing to consider is that we don’t actually expect PVP to be balanced in the sense that every single build will have an equal chance of winning in a match. Instead it is very much a, I guess, a bit like Magic the Gathering where the silver bullets will rarely (win?) against some builds. For example if you do a pure fire damage and lots of it then the guy who is over specced into Fire resist to the point where he has the cap almost to the 99%, he is probably going to beat you. And likewise, if you have an attack that really, really concentrates on chaos damage and someone is immune to chaos damage because of a keystone they picked, they are probably going to beat you as well. This, this is good though because it means you want to build a variety of key characters and pick ones that are appropriate for the meta game rather than all the fights being balanced away to the point where it is an equal chance of them winning.

We tried to investigate charms in the past but we found that a constrained ventory was not fun and wanted something that the players had room to pick up items and so having it so that the items go into the inventory really reduced the fun of being able to play properly. So we investigated other options of places people can put them and we also discovered If you are dealing with a system where you are going to get 20 or 30 of one particular small item that they become individually unimpactful. The gain from adding an extra large charm is not a very large gain so we are revisiting that design, taking it back to the drawing board, trying to find ways to make it more impactful and fun for players.

Yes, and that is exactly one of the things we could have in by the end of the year, maybe a lot sooner and that really depends on if we want to patch it up to make a really impactful, I know I am repeating impactful to much :P but if we want to roll it out with a large patch with a lot of guild stuff at once then we could do that but we prefer to get the features in when they are ready. One of the short term things we want to solve there is the guild chats, some users hate us using the word guild because it brings up connotations World of Warcraft, so I am going to call it a clan just to differentiate it. The ability to chat with your friends in a private channel and then eventually have storage that is shared with those friends will of course be very important.

It’s a little bit of both, it’s always good for players to learn play ----, but with melee there are problems it is a variety of things. So initially the first problem is there aren’t a great diversity of melee skills that work with a lot of different weapon types. You know the core users have no area of effect skill that is particularly good, so we have skills coming that will address that. In addition one of the melee classes the Duelist is just weaker than the other classes at the moment and we have changes coming to the passive skill tree area so that it is stronger and there are quite a lot of different facets to that so it’s not an immediate change but it is coming in the near future. The next issue is that sometimes melee combat feels bad because of various sync issues and we are working very hard to resolve that. It hopefully won’t be long before we can make some really big changes there and that will mean you feel much more connected to your combat when you are playing with a melee character.

It’s a larger problem than a vocal minority and we have put a lot of work in the past into good resyncing code and it is helping but it isn’t as good as it can be and this is partly a matter of, we have some good ideas for ways we can improve the situation, we just have to find time among the stability and security stuff to deal with that. And it is definitely on the short term agenda.

One of the things that can really help with build theory crafting is exposing a lot more of the data that goes on behind the scenes and an example is we currently have a table on the site of what the item mods are and how large they are and what values they effect . That’s really useful, people love getting that data, plugging it into spreadsheets and theory crafting. One thing we don’t show is what item types those mods can spawn on, for example life only goes up to 79 on rings and this isn’t described anywhere on the site, the players have to work it out on their own. oNce we clarify that kind of detail it will really help players being able to plan without having to learn specific bit of arcane knowledge that can change from patch to patch invisibly.

I don’t think we have actually necessarily achieved that yet.