The Repopulation Interview and Screenshots
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QJ: It's good to see it's not strictly science fiction but also to has different genres to help with everything else about the game. So how long have you guys been working on Repopulation?And while we're at it, there are seven new screenshots from the game over in our image gallery.
J.C: We started serious development in the summer of 2008 using the Torque Game Engine Advanced and later porting that to Torque 3D when it became available. We got pretty far into development with Torque, and had test servers running for about 8 months, but we did have some concerns about scalability. Feature wise though we were pretty close to complete, and targeting an early 2011 release date.
Something odd happened though in 2010, with both Bigworld and Hero Engine suddenly becoming available to indies. At that point the asking price for an indie license of Hero Engine was $5000 + 15% royalties, and we felt that we had to jump on it. Even though we realized it was surely going to set us back 18 months or more, we just couldn't pass up on the opportunity. We have been using Hero Engine since July of 2010, which forced us to rewrite previous code.
We are happy that made the move though, many of our game systems improved the second time around. For example, the Torque version of our player controlled cities used a pre-built layout. You could take control of them and upgrade some RTS style controls of that point to spawn guards, grant bonuses, etc, but you could not visually see any of the changes.
Housing was all instanced through apartment buildings inside of them. The Hero Engine version allows you to place houses in any pre-designated area that is unclaimed or that is owned by your Nation. You'll see immediate feedback as you place a building. We've also added many new structure types and housing is seamless.
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QJ: What do you think modern MMO's are doing right or wrong right now?
JC: I love Public Quests. I think Mythic had a great idea with them, and in the future I think we're going to see more and more great things done with them. I don't think enough games are taking advantage of them to enforce player teamwork and bonds. It's a great way to get players to work together without forced grouping. We have big plans for our Engagement System, which is similar to a randomly occurring, mutating form of Public Quest.
I do think we can learn some things from some of the earlier titles though. It's easy for us to look back early titles and remember all the things they did right without dwelling on the negatives. That's all readily apparent if you log back in to one of the older games after years away. Some of the fixes for those problems also inadvertently eliminated some positive factors though.
In earlier games for example there was a larger overlap in levels for each zone. If you look at a region like the Rathe Mountains in Everquest, you could have people anywhere from level 10-50 in that zone. Modern world design usually breaks the world up into zones that have a much stricter level range and a more rigid form of progression. As a result of that though you seldomly come across players who are not in your level range. You only run into them in the city. Contrast that to the games of yesteryear. If you were a Troll in Everquest, you probably knew just about every other troll on your server. Why? Because you were all coming back to Grobb occasionally.
Because you all hunted in similar areas and had something in common. Without instancing you'd run across certain players quite often and become familiar with them even without speaking. This built a sense of community that simply isn't there in modern games. Even soloers in Everquest, knew the other players and vice versa. Sometimes you had higher end content killing lower level players in some of those zones due to an overlap, bu that only helped strengthen player bonds. Players would come clear out those spawns, and get a sense of revenge. It unified them under a goal, and it turned those who cleared out a spawn of Hill Giants in the Commonlands into Heroes to the low levels who they had been terrorizing. The low levels maybe even looked forward to the day that they would be able to do the same.
I'm also not a huge fan of the lack of challenge in modern MMOs. Don't get me wrong, I think that the post-WoW MMO market is an improvement from what it was before. But at the same time, we continue to see titles move further and further into the brainless zone. A question mark over the head or quest journals, it's hard to argue that those weren't good additions in most cases. But do we have to have a map marker to every single NPC in a quest or do the descriptions always have to be so exact that we just auto-accept and run to the mob marker? Some games now have an auto-path button that walks you straight to an NPC. Do we really need to spoil everything? What happened to the mystique? When I started EQ'Lizer (spoiler database for Everquest) we were Public Enemy #1. People felt like spoilers were ruining the game. But nowadays companies spoil their own games on the official sites? That still baffles me.
I personally think the time around the release of Everquest's Epic quests was one of the most enjoyable periods in the game as thousands of players worked hard to figure them out. When they added Epic Quests to Everquest 2 it just wasn't the same feel. At that point there was no great mystery, instead it was just a matter of executing the script and if you got stuck looking it up on Zam.
