Vendetta Online Interview

My name is John Bergman, I'm the Managing Director of Guild Software, Inc. Myself and the three other members of the company (Andy Sloane, Ray Ratelis and Waylon Brinck) co-founded the company a few years ago. Vendetta Online is our first product and the first game for any of us. Among other things, I oversee the development as a whole, the prioritization of tasks, try and keep us on schedule and handle all the business interaction. I'm also responsible for most of the core game design, I wrote the back story (which, as of this writing, has not yet been released to the public) and I try to keep the evolution of the game in context with the story continuity. At one point I was pretty involved with graphics and sound as well, but less so of late (too much on my plate). Guild Software being a tiny company of four people, everyone tends to do everything to some extent. Our game is very much a group effort, and pretty much every aspect reflects input and ideas from the team as a whole.

We have a variety of backgrounds. Prior to this, I helped architect and build a major national ISP, the success of which allowed us to start this company. Ray and Andy both wrote plugins for big graphics packages, which have been used for effects in movies and TV. Waylon's a classically trained artist (as well as a pixel-era graphics guy). We've all been together and developing our own original real-time graphics projects since the days when it was hip to write in pure assembly and filled polygons were considered pretty amazing (our teenage years). When the opportunity came along to try and make a go of this professionally, we took it, and here we are.

We don't really have anything like that, per se. We moved away from the more standard D&D advancement concept, towards more of a hybridized system that should lend itself better to the fact that our game uses an entirely twitch-based combat model. There is no "dice rolling" in combat; it's all based on player skill, which makes the standard RPG progression model a little problematic to apply.

A character is a character is a character, in our universe, without classes or other standard concepts. There are some starting benefits, such as the faction you chose to align yourself with (character's starting nation). Each nation has different pros and cons related to the culture and history of that particular group, and how they fit into the political landscape of the galaxy. These benefits are not fixed; however, a player's can faction alignments can change. The progression of the character is up to the gameplay style of the user, and the choices they make. Your role in the universe is intended to be what you make of it, not pre-set when you choose a class at character creation.

Color is about the extent of external variation, at present. We intend to add special skins that are made available based on special character progression patterns (mission trees), faction affiliation and the like. But this will likely be a post-release addon.

It's also noteworthy that with our player-skill driven combat system, our testing userbase has often considered the skills of the pilot to be more important than how fancy or rare of a ship you have. The people who are especially good pilots tend to be known more by name, and are often respected (or feared) regardless of what they happen to be flying.

There is a very limited amount of crafting that's specific to bringing components to a special NPC, and having him assemble a new piece of equipment for you. Beyond this, there's no real crafting system in place.

We would like to implement something, more in the form of player-created stations and "factories" which could be configured to research, manufacture and sell items of various types. However, this will have to be a post-release addon.

The universe is large, but the points of interest are fairly well established. We expect people to congregate at the major metropolitan hubs and along the known trade routes. Newbie zones are near the settled planets and other important locales. As one ventures further and further from civilization, the universe becomes a more dangerous place. If people want to go off on their own, or with a few friends, that should be possible. It also should be possible for them to continually find hotspots of PvP combat and other types of relatively "instant action".

We also intend to expand the universe even further, with our "Exploration" addon. This would permit people to truly brave the unknown, even further from the safety of civilization. The extensibility of our universe architecture is practically unlimited, which opens up some interesting possibilities. Lone explorers might be the first to brave these areas, but others would be lured by the presence of natural resources (for the Mining expansion) or territory to which they might lay claim.

We're not concerned by the demise of E&B, and we see it as a good thing for us. Given the size of our team, we have very low overhead compared to the requirements of an EA project. We're a small, minimally-funded, grass-roots operation, and we don't need 100,000 users to break even. The space combat fan base has always been somewhat of a "niche", and we hope to be the ones who fill this niche in the online community. Our company's small scale is a liability in terms of the amount of raw content we can produce, but it's an asset in terms of the type of developers we are. We're focused exclusively on Vendetta Online, it's what we want to do and we expect to continue doing this for several years. No publisher is going to suddenly fire us, or move us to another project, or tell us we can't add the So-And-So feature, the game is our show to run. We aren't affected by stock performance, or whether the other five teams are behind on their games. We just want to do one thing, and do it well: We want to make Vendetta Online a really fun game, and keep making it better and more complex as time goes on. We also want player input, and we actually listen (as our longtime testers will agree).

We're also working on some cool promotions for the E&B userbase, so hopefully we can offer them a new home.