Getting Started

We believe that top-tier MMO games (like our project “Blackstar”) need to have awesome player-versus-player gameplay to achieve a rich and fulfilling overall experience. So, from the very beginning we set out to ensure that we would have a strong PVP foundation and that we would be play-testing (and adjusting) PVP as soon as it was possible for us to do so. Fortunately, the end result of these efforts saw us making meaningful changes to our PVP rules, player abilities, weapons, area scale, movement rates and overall game balance … on a daily basis. Our PVP solution began with a Conflict Zone map.

This was a very simplistic line-drawing that showed the player entry points, grave-yards, the game objectives (in this case a “flag” and a “goal”), and some idea of environmental obstacles (exploding space fuel tanks are a cool idea, BTW). The game objective is: fly down to a research base, hop out of your spacecraft, a team member grabs the “flag,” returns to space and flies through the “goal” to score points for his/her team. The battle mixes starships and character avatars in a single zone – and encourages teams to coordinate their starship and avatar combat strategies in order to win the game. Reaching the aforementioned goals is what matters in this particular game type; not kills.

We iterated on the paper version of the map until we had something that made sense and then we started building a very simple ‘grayworld’ version of the area to test in-game. More on that next from Lead Artist Jason Decker…

Data probes, interviews and iterations…

In terms of fun-factor, the first draft of the map was considered an “okay” play experience. It suffered due to problems with movement speeds, area scale, and weapon / ability balance. To get the movement speeds and area scale right, the Artists and Designers iterated very quickly on the ‘grayworld’ environment (reorganizing the layout, moving hallways, adjusting everything that made sense) as well as the movement characteristics (acceleration, top speeds, ‘boost’ speed) for characters and starships.

Once we all agreed that running and flying through the game area was truly fun – this took a very short period of ‘grayworld’ iteration, thankfully, – we started pushing the combat fun-factor with cool, balanced abilities, new weapons, and better character stat balance. But, along with these traditional tactics we incorporated several important, new design tools: extensive data probes, regular statistics review meetings, and formal play-tester interviews.

We brought in QA Professionals, Customer Service and executive staff from our Publisher at the time (NC Soft) to watch them play the game. It was awesome! We watched them play the game, took notes on the obvious issues and judged the success of our design ideas.

We also focused on the suite of data-probes we imbedded throughout the game engine to record statistical data on player performance (shot count, accuracy, death count, kills, use of class abilities, points scored, time in starship versus time as character avatar, and much more). These data probes showed us exact numbers in many of the areas we feel are crucial for good game-balance and high fun-factor. We also interviewed the players after each session and asked them their opinion of how they performed in these key areas. Our aim was and is to have a mechanism that allows us to weigh player opinion, player performance statistics, and our creative desires in a single design context so that we can build the best possible gameplay solutions.

This system of testing, data-mining, interviewing and iterating provided a lot of clarity and a great foundation to evolve the gameplay to our liking. For instance, we wanted people to have more fun fighting on-foot (they spent a lot of time in their starships, comparatively). After evaluating several play-sessions, we decided to add certain specific ability effects and environment features that made it much more attractive for teams to develop “ground game” tactics. In subsequent play-tests, we saw more players fighting on the ground and reporting more overall fun.

So, in our opinion, having a speedy ‘gray-world’ method for producing the proper game map in terms of scale, movement interest and balance, an exhaustive data-mining system, and a cycle of continuous, formal play-testing makes for a really compelling, extremely fun game!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 11:23 am and is filed under Developer Blogs . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.