MMORPG.com: Going from the past to the future, Durus wants to know where do you see the game in five years?
Gaffer: Well, hopefully I'll be so busy sitting in a hot tub filled with money and bathing with supermodels that I'll be distracted and kind of not be into it anymore and sitting there in my epic campus. However, in all likelihood, I think really what we ought to do is double down on what we've already done, which is make sure the game gets better month over month. Have the fans help lead us in what that direction is. One of the hard parts of the MMO business is often your fans end up playing the game more than you do. If you're putting in 100-hour weeks in the office and your fans are putting in 100-hour weeks playing the game, guess who ends up knowing more about it? So if you're going to have all of this and have a vision and say 'look, you don't like this, but trust me, this is gonna be cool if we do it anyway', that's a tricky balance. So, I can't tell you where this is going to take us, hopefully hot tubs full of money, but that's my personal preference.
MMORPG.com: Ender from WildStar Roleplay (http://www.wildstar-roleplay.com) wanted to know whether you plan on keeping all armor types available to all classes in costumes?
Gaffer: Yes but, that's really something Joe Pie [Joe Piepiora, Social Systems Lead] or our itemization guys dictate more than I do. I like as many options as possible. I think it's important to figure out what role we want to have in the long term for costumes in PVP, because that's where it matters the most. I look like I'm this, but I'm really that. If they don't apply in PVP, it actually saves you a lot of potential balance issues. Also some strategy issues, but that's stuff that Joe Pie really has to determine.
MMORPG.com: Zap-Robo of WildStar Central (http://www.wildstar-central.com) wanted to know the following: WildStar's bringing back large community co-op with the 20-man/40-man content. How else did you want to see the game promoting community-building with guilds and circles?
Gaffer: Where I think we need to get better is small groups. Playing with your friends should be trivial and fun, because that's what Paths are all about. In some areas, we tuned up quests so they were really good for that, and some were not, they were too punitive, especially when you've got a lot of short quests, it's too easy to get on slightly different quest tracks. The more that we can do that makes it fun and easy to play with your friends, the better. That's why we're giving out friend passes at launch in the boxes. They're not free trials, they're friend passes. We want you playing with your buddies, it's more fun when you play with your friends and we should make it easy. It's something I think we've done okay at, we've done better than many games. But we can do better yet, and we need figure out with our particular brand of content, making sure that it continues to get better. It's also doing large-scale stuff. One of the fun things about MMOs is big social systems for things that haven't been done before.
When I was on Asheron's Call, I did a system called the Allegiance system. Before, you'd log into UO [Ultima Online], you'd get ganked and someone would take your short sword and seven gold pieces, and that was your newbie experience. AC made it so that new players were something that you nutured, they were a resource for you, so that the more newbies you befriended, the more you helped them, the more XP you got. In City of Heroes, we did the Sidekick system. It seems that more games have done it since, like it was a fun way to play with your friends no matter your level gap. The great thing about MMOs is that you can experiment with social systems like that, so we've done circles and we've done guilds and we've done housing, and there's more social stuff to be done with housing yet. It's building on that kind of stuff, what can we do that's new and fun? Great thing about MMOs, no other games can play with those kinds of system. There's not enough people, there's not enough persistence.
MMORPG.com: From MMORPG's very own Chief Sarcan: When are we getting fishing, and what other possible hobbies might we see post launch?
Gaffer: So fishing... we probably won't reveal our schedule very much, because we do like to have it done before we actually promise it. Fishing has moved around, you know. We have preplanning around our first sixteen updates, actually, have preproduction work done on it. Sounds cool, except the part where we have to be reactive. Half our team's going to be devoted to improving stuff inside the existing game, and half the team's going to be working on stuff that takes a large pipeline of things to actually do as you go along. Because if you don't plan out a raid months in advance, it ain't gonna happen. You need concept artists to make the concepts, then the guys to make the assets to place, you need the level designers to place the assets, you need the designers to place the encounters and design the encounters. Then you need to say 'oh crap that sucks'.
The first guild in there is like 'you guys are freaking idiots, go redo it' and then you go redo it. And so if you don't start that process six months in advance, eight months in advance, you're never gonna have a damned thing. All these games are all 'oh, we're going to patch in our elder game'. No they ain't. It's gonna take a long time unless they're well on the path on that. But despite that preplanning phase, we're reactive, so we need the fans to kind of tell us 'oh, hey, we want more of X, Y, or Z'. Half of that's going to be dictated on what the fans want. So with fishing, that's a long answer to fishing, but the main trick with fishing is we didn't want to implement fishing with all of these little schools of fish, hook in and it's cool. But no, we did it explosive [I mean, Chua, of course they're going to throw dynamite in the river... - Jean]
That's exactly right! And guns and different weapons and the fishing cannon I think was the last thing we showed them at the Arkship awhile back. They exist, but combat underwater with telegraphs is not fun yet. That's why we've done so little placement in there is because when it's too deep and your telegraph is way below you, we need to do a better system of 3D telegraphs to be able to do that. It's not trivial, targeting in 3D. So either we change our plans with fishing, or we get that, and we'd like to get that, because that means space combat or low-gravity combat becomes more fun.
It means flying combat can become more fun, and it would make fishing possible, and make underwater combat work. And then we'd maybe could consider making an underwater zone or two for underwater content. We don't do a ton of that content because it's a pain in the ass to move up, down, left, right. EverQuest had that whole underwater dungeon and it's cool because it's new and then it's a pain in the ass and nobody plays it. And we sort of know that second order of 'yeah, it would be neat and we can do it'. We're masters of taking an interesting system and doing more in different areas and mixing it and doing 'oh, here's a low-gravity zone', 'ooh, now here's a low-gravity with a minefield', or 'oh, here's one now, that stuff can impact things'. We haven't done that much with underwater as much because we want telegraphs to be really fun underwater first.
And there you have it, the Gaffer's answers to questions from the WildStar community. Do check out the links we've listed from leading WildStar fansites and let us know what you think!