Stargate Worlds Explored
Cheyenne Mountain tells us just about all there is to know about their upcoming MMOG.
by Charles Onyett
January 18, 2008 - It's a powerful idea for a game, especially an MMO - an entire fictional universe built around the concept of shimmering circular portals that can lead anywhere. After 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1, there's certainly no lack of material for Cheyenne Mountain to work with when converting the fiction to the MMO space. We got a chance to speak with studio head Dan Elggren, creative director Chris Klug, and art director Howard Lyon about how their game is set up, how it'll play, and how it deals with the story, personality, and races of the Stargate mythos.
IGN: The concept of a Stargate MMO seems to be pretty good since you can basically use the Stargate to gate out to wherever. How is that being incorporated into the game?
Chris Klug:: Because we want to try to craft the player's experience, initially you'll get gate addresses you can use and over time you'll accumulate a bunch of gate addresses. Once you do that obviously you can travel to whatever world you have the gate address for but we're using them sort of as carrots to entice the player to move forward and get gate addresses to worlds they want to go to.
IGN: So a gate address would be something like a quest reward then.
Chris Klug:: Yeah sometimes it's a quest reward, sometimes it's just given to you when you get the quest assigned to you, it varies. Some of them are given -- again it sort of depends on the situation.
IGN: Could you just give a very general overview of where the game is set and how it relates to the TV show, or TV shows?
Chris Klug:: It's set in the same universe at coincidental places in the timeline. You'll meet characters from the show in the game, you'll be able to talk to them, they'll give you missions, you'll be able to play characters on either side -- the good guys and the bad guys.
IGN: Could you go over the process of how you start a game, how you create a character, what choices you have, and where you start out?
Chris Klug:: In an overview sense, you choose whether you want to be on the side that Stargate Command is on or you want to be on the side the Goa'uld are on. We have a basic set of archetypes on each side. You can play a soldier, commando, scientist or archeologist; there are humans on both sides. In addition you can play an Asgard and a Jaffa on the Stargate Command side and on the Goa'uld side you can play a Goa'uld and also a Jaffa.
IGN: Then where would you start out?
Chris Klug:: Each archetype starts out in their own location. For instance the bad guy humans start out in a world called the Castle. Each archetype gets set up in a short solo experience that defines who they are. We do this for a couple reasons. One, we want to carefully craft the opening few minutes of the game so we can handhold the players a little bit. Secondarily, we can't assume that the players of the game know the Stargate universe the way that a hardcore fan would so we're taking that time to introduce them to, for instance, what it would be like to be an Asgard or what it would be like to be a Goa'uld. If a casual gamer comes to the game, we're not expecting them to watch 10 seasons of DVDs.
IGN: No, that would be a steep system requirement.
Kevin Balentine (Senior Marketing Manager): But we could pre-package that. [laughs]
IGN: So race is basically tied to archetype.
Chris Klug:: Right, a scientist is basically a human. A Goa'uld is a Goa'uld that has a certain set of abilities that tend toward science and not so much toward combat, but it is the abilities and the mix of abilities that you choose that truly defines what your character can do in the game. And what happens is as you level up, abilities become unlocked, you get to make choices as to what abilities you want, and you proceed down an ability tree that is not unlike the talent tree in World of Warcraft, but more robust and deep.
IGN: Why is it more robust and deep?
Chris Klug:: There are many more abilities. Instead of being adjuncts to your character class like in WoW, they are the things that you do every day. So what happens in WoW typically, as a Druid, you get a certain skill, you get a certain spell list, and in addition to that you get talents that modify that spell list. In Stargate Worlds what happens is that the abilities are the equivalent of the spell list or the attack types, and you are picking your way through areas of specialty in those ability trees that define your character.
IGN: The archetypes themselves are self-contained then? At no point in the game can you merge archetypes?
Chris Klug:: Correct.
IGN: How's PvP going to work?
Dan Elggren: With PvP we're looking at sort of a staggered launch. We're going to start it off with some servers that are going to go through and just have the [PvP] flag turned on. We're going to slowly bring in events, battlegrounds, and that sort of thing, but it'll be staggered as the game progresses and grows.
IGN: What can you tell us about the game's art style?
Howard Lyon:: One of the great things about working in a video game environment and the Stargate canon is that it's pretty robust. Being able to go into a Stargate and into a different world gives us a huge amount of latitude in terms of what kind of worlds we'll be going into. We've definitely been inspired by the Stargate worlds but we're also not constrained budget-wise the way that some of the TV development has been. We're reaching out there a little bit more in terms of world and trying to make each world you go into a unique experience for the player. In the show, they definitely have a variety of worlds but a lot of them feel kind of like Vancouver.
IGN: Yeah, there are a lot of forests.
Howard Lyon:: In the game the player won't have that experience. They'll go to a huge variety of worlds. Some of them will be very alien worlds that have vast mineral deposits and ionized oceans and a huge variety from jungles to deserts to craters on moons. I think visually it'll be very satisfying because each time you go through a gate you know you're going to be in a unique environment and get a little bit of a new experience. I think it'll be satisfying for the players because they'll feel like they're in Stargate but not like they're in worlds that they've seen before.
IGN: Could you specifically describe any of the worlds or would that be giving away too much?
Howard Lyon:: We've released some concept art that I think shows a nice variety of the worlds. As far as a verbal description, the area that Chris mentioned earlier, the Castle, it at one point was a palace and has been converted into a prison. It's a big frozen wasteland. There are huge ice formations that jut up out of the landscape, the wind is blowing, the snow is blowing into your face. And you leave that world and go into a beautiful green world that looks more like it's set at the foothills of the Appalachians with trees and deciduous forests. From that world you go into a very alien world that doesn't look like anything you would find here on Earth with a completely different palette and landscape assets. So far with all the worlds that we've done, all of them have a very unique feel and we'll continue that through the rest of development.
IGN: How demanding is the graphics technology going to be? What sort of systems are people going to need to run it?
Dan Elggren: We definitely want to make sure a lot of people can play because the broader the audience, the better for us. So all the way up to some DX10 type of compliance all the way back down to some lower-end systems. We've been able to open up a lot of new doors even though we're on the Unreal 3 engine we'll definitely have a broader audience than the typical Gears of War or Unreal Tournament 3.
IGN: And Unreal Tournament didn't really sell at all, at least according to NPD data.
Dan Elggren: Yeah, we definitely don't want those numbers.
Howard Lyon:: One of the things we're doing with the art because it is an MMO is that we're painting the maps for the game with the assumption that there will be people out there that will see the maps without any of the bells and whistles of the Unreal engine turned on. On the very low-end it might be that people need to play with normal maps turned off or spec maps, maybe even some of the shadows turned off. We're keeping that in mind as we paint the textures, to make sure that the game still looks good even with all the fancy bells and whistles that you get with Unreal turned off. As Dan said the game will scale up to the point where people will have all those features turned on including post-processing and all the wonderful things that the Unreal engine affords. We're very conscious of it and we're confident that we'll be able to make the game run on a broad base of machines. If the player is up to date at all within the past few years they'll be able to run the game.
IGN: Moving on to something a little different, what about the social aspects of the game? You've got your crafting elements and your combat missions, what about when players are just standing around in some sort of neutral zone, is there anything they can engage in?
Chris Klug:: One of the big things we're doing is because two of the show's main characters have softer skills, scientist and archeologist, we've come up with a metaphor that lets them play that kind of activity through what we're calling a mini-game. A useful metaphor to describe this play activity is imagine that you were trying to get the warp engines back online and the way you did it was to play Bejeweled until you reached a certain score. That's the kind of activity we're talking about and the scientists and the archeologists specialize in these kinds of activities. These activities involve everything from lockpicking to hieroglyph translation to fixing technology, etc. These are also social experiences because the plan is that other players can watch while you attempt to do one of these mini-games. These classes could in theory level-up through the play of these activities.
IGN: What can you tell us about the game's development status right now?
Dan Elggren: We're doing a lot of internal play testing. The game's up, it's running, we've got it on the servers, we've got regular play sessions where the team just jumps on and plays the game and provides feedback. We're slowly opening the technical doors to larger external play testing. We're still keeping it close-knit, you know friends that we want to have play the game that we feel can give it the proper feedback. We'll pound on that for probably another few months and then go from there.
IGN: Is there a vague release window for final?
Dan Elggren: Yeah Q4.
IGN: The fourth quarter of this year, you mean?
Dan Elggren: Ooo, yeah, we've got to narrow that down don't we. Yeah that's the current target.
http://www.stargateworlds.com/
someone was bound to ask that question sooner or later
