WildStar Interview
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TTH: So there's class experience and path experience. So you have two different ways of leveling up?
Jeremy Gaffey: Effectively, yes.
TTH: Gotcha. Now what do the scientist and the settler do?
Jeremy Gaffey: Ah, here's what they do. We unlocked the soldier and the explorer for this hands-on, the pre-alpha stage. We locked the other two for a very simple reason, which is that we're lazy bastards and didn't want to polish them up for public consumption. You can bump into content for them that's sprinkled about for them as well if you look for it. What settlers do is all social stuff.
There are combat achievements, soldier's beating stuff up. For the settler, it's about building and forming relationships so it's a different kind of achievement. It's part socializer and part achiever. I'll summarize that by putting that in a simpler form. What they do: social quests for social rewards. You may find an item that will allow you to buff up other players. If you can buff five other players inside of a certain time challenge, we'll give you a permanent reward that will give you a permanent thing that'll allow you to throw mini-buffs all over the place. You see things broken around town; you fix them up and actually improve quest areas of the game, the towns and that kind of stuff. You improve the economy; new vendors start appearing, new shops start appearing. Things start decaying and breaking after other players made them. You can fix them up and gain some settler experience and start building up the social areas. It's all about interacting with other players. If there aren't other players around you can get a bunch of quests building up your relationships with people in town, such as the NPCs and that kind of thing.
We have a cool tech that we don't show in the newbie area, but we can change our terrain, we can change the lighting, spawns, structures, all that stuff at runtime. This is neat for us as developers because we get to tell better stories through it, and some of that is to let players have some impact upon the world and actually change stuff. That's something we can do, and we do that in a bunch of ways.
Scientists, what are they about? They're a collector, another part of the achievement play style. Completionists. If you're an achievement whore, and you've got to do every single achievement; if you play Grand Theft Auto and you have to achieve one hundred percent, you have to find every single collectible item, this is the play style based around that. So what you do is look for interesting things in the environment. You have a scanner so you can scan things. Maybe you're finding creatures as you're doing a story quest and you realize some of the creatures are mutated. As a scientist, you can tell that there's something different about them. You scan them and the more you scan a given thing, the more you unlock information about it. You get more powerful; you get better at taking them on. We see interesting things in the environment. See green glowing rocks in the area? If you scan enough of those, you realize that they're a heat source. It's going to heal people nearby if you activate it. You use your scanner to start activating them around the zone. Now there are little buff areas in the world that you can make for yourself and your friends. You unlock them. That's what scientists are all about.
There's a second part of that which is they dig into more of the story. Because a lot of people that play games who want more story, more lore. So these guys are unlocking things, they're unlocking more and more bits of lore about the background. You're in a battleground full ancient robots. You start scanning the robots and you start finding interesting things that they can do. Also, you can start digging into the why. What happened here? What was this battle all about? What caused this? Is this related to the mystery of why the Eldin disappeared? You can dig more into that as a scientist. It's kind of a combination of two play styles: collecting and story.
