08/09/2015 Town Hall Meeting

08/09/2015 Town Hall Meeting

Thank you to Aurarice for transcribing this meeting.

(0:00) Q: Are there any plans to increase dungeon difficulty in order to promote more grouping while leveling combat skills?

A: Yes! We’re still trying to figure out the difficulty curve. Dungeons are supposed to, more or less, a three man experience. One of the big problems we’re having is that equipment is wildly imbalanced – the higher level you get, the more difficult it is to balance the content. So, you know, normal alpha problems. The plan is to make most dungeons a group experience.

There are a few dungeons, like the Goblin dungeon, we’re trying to make either solo or duo and experimenting with that because people want to solo a fair amount of the time. But we’re trying to make those less rewarding. I think right now the Goblin Dungeon is too rewarding so we’re tweaking that now.

(2:01) Q: PvP. Tell us your thoughts on that and basically the short form version.

A: Basically, it’s not a PvP centric-game. There’s a lot of those, and they’re fun, but this is a different experience. PvP is not really the goal of the game. Frankly, we just don’t have the kind of resources to make balancing for PvP good. The game is so wide open and there’s so many skills, and there’s so many ways you can build your character, it’s already a very difficult challenge to make PvE fun, interesting, challenging, and compelling. Doing PvP well is really going to hamper the PvE experience, and I don’t want to do that.

In the short term (Through launch), we’ll adapt after we want. Initially, we’re basically looking at: Yes, there’s PvP. No, it’s not very important. Arenas, dueling, etc. If we have enough people to really have an exciting and large PvP experience, we can always set up a PvP world and have a dark-type anything goes kind of experience or any kind of rules people want to explore there.

(4:50) Q: Just a followup question on the dungeons, what sort of range of group sizes are you aiming for?

A: We had originally been planning on 3-man groups being our target. That’s probably still going to be the case for most content through leveling up because it’s a lot easier to get 3-man groups together and working. 6-man is currently our plan for large, sort of epic dungeons. We kind of have one in game right now that’s a bigger, more elaborate experience. As the game gets closer to the level cap, it becomes more a 6-man and maybe larger experience. We’re seeing how the alpha and beta testers enjoy the different sizes, and we’ll scale from there. So 3-man for most, and 6-man for the epic stuff.

(6:42) Q: I was just curious about the Steam integration and any updates to that. Maybe when we might see an ETA.

A: I don’t have an exact ETA. We’re basically looking at a month after the Kickstarter ends.

(7:27) Q: Are there any plans of having randomly appearing bosses or special events that happen randomly in the open world?

A: Yeah, if you’ve found the Druids, they already mention that there are occasional world-shattering nightmare monsters that come from different places and have to be stopped by the druids (And really anybody that doesn’t want to be murdered by giant nightmare monsters.) So there’s a fair amount of those sorts of thing that will show up. We’ll also do live events and hopefully a fair number of story-driven events. I haven’t really planned those out too terribly yet, but we have the tools and the system to do them, so we expect to do them a bunch.

And to add to that, if you’re talking about bosses, there’s certainly a lot of game systems that can result in bosses. (E.g. Eltibule – you can dig up treasures, and you can occasionally dig up a giant boss monster.) At higher levels those could be a serious problem that could act as a call-to-arms.

(9:33) Q: My question is: Any questions to redesign werewolves? (Skills, art, choice to decide to walk on hind legs or all fours, etc)

A: We do have a bunch of skill changes planned. Things like their howling system or metabolism system are going to be revised a bunch. I’m not sure what kind of art we’re looking at, but I doubt we’ll have a two-legged werewolf to launch.

Q2: So if I put like a hundred extra dollars on my kickstarter you can’t… ;)

A2: Well, I mean, I hope to make the actual model of the wolf look better. I don’t think we want to do a bipedal werewolf because the mechanics of the game are more oriented to running in packs. We’re trying to make werewolf packs more powerful than solo, and you don’t have use of your hands. Being more wolf-like conveys to that idea. That doesn’t mean we won’t have bipeds – I’m guessing that would be kind of an expansion kind of thing where you can unlock a more lone-wolf sort of “mode”.

(11:17) Q: Are we going to improve the graphic system smoothing forward through development?

A: (Citan): Yes. The major parts of the funding from the kickstarter are going towards improving graphics. That will definitely be a huge part of what we’re doing the next year and a half.

(Silvonis): We definitely will be improving the graphics, but we’ll also be optimizing. At the early state we’re in, it’s to be expected for people to bring it up. However, Project Gorgon isn’t all about graphics.

(Citan): There’s essentially no art in the game that’s definitely locked down. We definitely plan to do another pass on character models. I’m not sure if it’ll be a 100% redo, but we’ve found quite a few flaws we need to fix. Along with a lot of terrain art and that sort of thing. We’re trying to figure out ways to make transitions more elegant rather than blue-swirly-portal on the ground.

(13:11) Q: Do you have any skills that you plan on adding that have the Project Gorgon twist?

A: Yeah? There’s around 10 or 12 more combat skills in the pipeline. I’m just going to step back and say the ship goal is a milestone and we expect to continue working on it after that. So I can’t say for sure how many of the almost dozen more combat skills will make it in before that, but they’ll get in. We’ve got Weather Controlling, various Animal Forms, Dark Geologist, Demonologist, Vampires… I don’t think we’ll be hurting for skill choices.

(14:56) Q: Will there be any chance that we will see stealth any time soon?

A: (Citan): That’s a really good question and I don’t really know the answer. I would like to do stealth. We have a few very simple mechanics that are “stealthy” - like if you’re a deer, than other deer don’t run from you and animals don’t care about you. There’s an underlying idea that there are ways to avoid detection and I would definitely like to explore that more. I don’t have a skill planned out yet, so I’m still poking at that.

(Silvonis): I would just like to add that we’re big on player feedbacks. If there’s an interest or something like that, we consider everybody’s comments. We’ve already made dozens of changes based on player feedback.

(Citan): The Gorgon engine that we’re using is really optimized for adding these sorts of mechanics, so I expect there will be a very large number of mechanics like that. I don’t have all of them 100% planned out because we really do like to iterate on them and see peoples’ opinions on them.

(17:15) Q: Is there any chance to see additional storage for characters on top of what’s already available?

A: Yeah there’ll be more storage. Basically it goes by major cities. We’ve hit the storage that’s going to happen in Serbule, but there are four more major towns and several more minor towns planned so there’ll be four-times or more storage in the final game.

(18:04) Q: So, a lot of games nowadays come out and they have a bunch of glitches that can be exploitable. Is there any chance that you could potentially create a test server in order to implement the changes beforehand and have a small group of people extensively test that so when it rolls out to the live server there won’t be any issues?

A: We’ve used a test server before. During the Kickstarter, we’re using the hardware to make sure there’s not any hardware limitations. We had to normally use a test server to test things that are more elaborate in terms of combat mechanics.

Right now my main goal is to really understand how higher level combat mechanics work so I’ve been iterating that on the test server. As we get further down the road and have more players involved, it’ll become more important to test a lot more stuff on the test server. Right now, it’s usually more efficient to throw up a build and if someone says “Hey it doesn’t work” or some other edge case, then I can turn around and update it as opposed to spending an extra week on the test server.

(19:52) Q: When we report bugs (Account Status on the right side), does that also send our System Specs in case that could be an issue?

A: Yes, but they’re not shown on my console yet. They will be, but right this second it’s probably a good idea to mention your Operating System.

(20:42) Q: Will cooking be improved in the future and with effects? Will there be new foods? (Eg. Cupcakes, cakes, etc.)

A: I think right now I have three and possibly a few more subskills of cooking. For example, fire mages can unlock a special kind of flame cooking. There’s also baking and cheesemaking. I expect there will be a very large number of recipes. In terms of their mechanics, I’m not sure what they’ll be, but we’ll just keep iterating on them so that they’ll be more compelling and useful. My goal at the higher level is that players pretty much have to eat and drink routinely so that players who choose not to eat or drink will be noticeably underpowered. People who want to be chefs will have a target audience so people will want to buy their food.

(22:30) Q: Will there be raiding? (Think WoW-esque)

A: We don’t actually have any planned right now and that’s because when we started developing this three years ago, the audience that we gathered at the time didn’t sound very excited about it. But we’ve basically kept the mechanics open so that as we get closer to beta, we can make a decision about what kind of content will be at the higher level. I’m certainly not against doing raids, and we have some interesting tools in our toolkit to make raiding an experience that’s pretty interesting. But right at this very second, probably not more than 6 or 9 people expected at the high level. But we’ll see what people are excited about.

(23:46) Q: How flexible would it be on the Archduke as far as having vendors and being able to charge tax?

A: (Citan): I hadn’t considered taxes. Basically the idea that you could give descriptions, names, and personalities for NPC’s is absolutely part of the bundle. In fact, if you wanted to do a dosier of all the people in town and hand that over that’d be cool. Sometimes I enjoy not having to invent hundreds and hundreds of NPC’s. As far as making money from them, we can talk about what would be the most reasonable way to do that that isn’t super cheesy but still worthwhile.

(Silvonis): On that Archduke level, we are willing to discuss specific requests as long as they’re not game breaking. Some very specific requests can come from that, but the main thing that can come from that is that they’ve gotta be fair and not gamebreaking.

(Citan): Fair is sort of relative. In one of our earlier Kickstarters, we offered you the ability to smite other people which kind of freaked people out immediately. But when they played the game for awhile, they realized it wouldn’t be gamebreaking at all because if you have a limited number of people you can smite per week, and smiting gives people Death EXP from a new kind of a death, people might actually be lining up to ask you to smite them just because of the way game mechanics work. It’s often possible to make things that seem a little abusive seem fun.

The whole point of the Archduke thing from my point of view as a developer is it’s kind of an opportunity to get other peoples’ ideas and kind of run with them and work with them. Right now, it’s kind of an echo chamber. There’s not as much collaboration. It’s a fun time for me to get ideas and kind of collaborate. I’m talking several back-and-forths and making things happen that way.

(27:22) Q: If when we report a bug, does it include our coordinates?

A: Yes.

(27:33) Q: What’s most helpful for you in the bug reports that can fix the bugs? What information would you like to see to fix the bugs?

A: (Citan) If you find something that’s weird in the world, getting as close as possible to it and then reporting it is great because I will actually teleport to the coordinates on my test machine and see what’s going on there. That’s definitely a major thing – be as close as possible. Sometimes people will leave the area and the coordinates end up being someplace completely unrelated, so that can throw me off a little bit.

(Silvonis): We have to ask you guys – please don’t use the stuck feature to abuse the system. It records every time you do it, and we go through those. I’ve had to tell several people to stop doing that.

(29:09) Q: Are there any plans to change the report system – will there be the possibility of people adding on to the same report ticket?

A: We’re actually planning to do an integration with a third party bug tool. One of the problems is that it’s just time consuming to make sure the bugs don’t have sensitive information with them. Yes, it’s a little more complicated than we expected, but yea we will have a system for where you can come and see the reported stuff.

(30:40) Q: Will there be a hide button for the helm slot and will there be satchels (separate inventories) for seeds, meat, wood, etc.?

A: The helm slot thing we’ll figure that out. I don’t know if it’ll just be a GUI option or if we’ll come up with an ingame mechanic. The inventory system in the game right now is the alpha inventory system, and I’m expecting to add a bunch more features to it including separate bags that are essentially like WoW backpacks/bags so you’ll be able to organize your stuff as you see fit.

(31:48) Q: Are there going to be any major changes to the crafting skills as far as the modifiers? Are there going to be any significant changes to the crafting skills?

A: During Alpha, every single number in the game is not permanent. We will definitely change the stats on every piece of equipment that gets generated probably 3 or 4 more times in the next 18 months. So yes, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll see your stats go up, you’ll see your stats go down. It’s a rollercoaster - that’s development. We’re still trying to figure out what’s going to be fun in terms of different kinds of armor (Eg. Plate v. Cloth) and from there we’ll extrapolate appropriate stat mechanics. We do expect to have more differences and more craftable stuff.

(33:49) Q: How’s housing going to work? What’s your vision?

A: We have a pretty conservative plan. Players will be able to buy apartments, which are sort of instanced indoor areas that they will be able to configure as they see fit. Guilds will have a bit more complicated system and they’ll have guild halls that are physical large buildings that people can meet in. (If the guild wants to let non-guild members enter.) The non-instanced part of the guild hall has stalls so that guild vendors can set up shops and other services as they see fit, and there’s also a back part of the guild that has a lounge and storage.

(35:36) Q: What would have to happen to have open world housing?

A: It’s just out of our budget right now. The world needs to be a lot larger in order to accommodate a lot of houses. There’s a lot of tech involved, so right now we don’t have the room to support more than a few hundred houses, and if we added the room to support the houses than we’d need a lot more players. It’s really a matter of money, funding, and time. If you want to send me a million dollars, I will get it done. In the meantime, we’re basically keep it conservative. If the game is a runaway hit, we can approach this with expansions and make it happen.

(36:55) Q: Will there be any benefits to having a house?

A: You can store your stuff there and you’ll have a way to teleport to your home. There’s also a bed there that you can sleep in and use various crafting surfaces. One of the weirder mechanics we’ve been talking about is that there’s a favor level that’s above the favor level in the game right now. Right now you can get your NPC’s up to Soul Mates and above that is Married. The idea behind that is that certain NPC’s you can marry, and they will appear in your instanced apartment and have their own entire set of mechanics and basically live in your house.

(38:12) Q: Will housing be an in-game feature or will it be something affordable for a new player? A:

(Citan): Somewhere in the middle. Think early WoW where you had to save up pretty hard to get a mount – you’re not expected to have to grind months and months but you don’t expect to get it in the first few weeks either.

(Silvonis): Housing’s still one of the things that we have a ways to go on. It’s certainly a subject that brings excitement to the players, so we definitely want to encourage feedback. Specifically on the forums, if you want to talk housing that’d be great. Just remember we have to work within a budget here, so just remember that when you’re giving suggestions.

(40:25) Q: Will there be a quest/rework to allow for better tanking? (Holding agro better, maybe a shield rework?)

A: I’m not sure that a rework is completely necessary. There will be stat changes to make Shield a more tanky skill. We have another skill called the Dickweed skill that is a subtype of Combat Psychology which is focused on getting monsters’ attention and making them hate you a lot. I’m not sure if we’ll move that into the game or move it into currently existing skills, but we’ll make sure that tanking will be viable.

(42:26) Q: I was actually wondering how camps will be handled? (Pretty much Killstealing)

A: (Citan): I don’t expect to have a Play Nice policy. I think it’s kind of antiquated. I think the problem is more of a mechanics problem. I’m not sure where you’re being KS’d from, but we should probably be able to solve that in mechanics. As you know, the bosses in the game are group lootable so everyone gets their own copy of loot from the boss so there’s nothing to steal there. There might be ways that people could abuse solo monster stealing, but I don’t know if the play nice policy would really be enforceable there. On the other hand, if someone’s just being an asshole, we’ll just ban them. We have the right to make that happen. If the players are just abusing constantly, than that’d be sort of a play nice policy. Or ban the asshole policy.

(Silvonis): We do have logs of everything that happens in the game, and intentionally griefing people will not be acceptable. We do see it, and we do address it if it does happen.

(44:45) Q: Would you be releasing an API if we could create add-ons or interface upgrades/modifiers?

A: Unfortunately I don’t have that on the schedule at the moment. What we’re kind of hoping is that someone will solve this for us in the Unity Assets store and we’ll be able to integrate some sort of modifiable pack for GUI’s. The answer is probably not but we’ll keep our eyes open.

(46:24) Q: Can players have their own NPC’s to sell their stuff?

A: We do plan to do that, actually. If you go to the back of Serbule there’s that weird indoor area that’s where we were going to prototype stalls that players can buy. There’ll be an area that players can rent and have an NPC shopkeeper who will be randomly assigned to them and they can give instructions and inventory to. We also have mechanics to make shops memorable. (Ex. Inscribing)

(48:20) Q: How would we accommodate the rush of players coming in from Steam? (Eg. Dungeons getting cramped)

A: Basically I need to sit down and look at the data we’ve been gathering and see where the big bottleneck points are. It’s hard to know how many people will show up at a given moment at the Steam Early Access. A few more hundred players we can definitely accommodate. If we have a runaway success, we just start up more servers (“shards”). Before we launch on steam, I’m hoping we’ll have a better understanding of where the problems are and to address them with some wider content.

(49:57) Q: What are your thoughts on emergent gameplay and will there be any tools for player driven content?

A: We don’t want to do instance that won’t fit the world, so you won’t be able to make your own dungeons. But we do want you to be able to make your own content – what that means is that you could be able to add stuff to the existing world. Eg. Adding quests to existing NPCs.

We do hope to have player generated quests and content of that kind. We’ll be rolling it out as we can, and be prototyping some of it in early beta.

(51:23) Q: Will there be more jumping-type puzzles added to future content?

A: Each of the dungeons we have now are different in that they have different things they are trying to test. I don’t know if people have been real excited about jump puzzles so far, but we’ll do a few more tests and see what people say. It’s a pretty wishy washy answer, but I just want to make fun content and we’ll have to see what people think is fun.

(52:43) Q: Will there be any twists on the standard MMO features like having a barber or a way to change your looks?

A: Definitely. I will also probably do a one-time reset mode for people in Alpha so they can re-tailor themselves once they have more faces and hairstyles to pick from.

(53:40) Q: Followup to the griefing question earlier, I’m ok with getting kill stealing to a certain degree and I like the idea of having to compete for it, but at the same time it could dissuade newer players from doing certain things. Would there be a chance of having separate channels?

A: We have that kind of setup so we could run another copy of Serbule, but the vendors wouldn’t quite set up. The various kinds of permanence we have that aren’t in other games kind of cause some wrinkles in that. We do have that possibility, though. That’s one of the tools in our toolkits to handle surprise influxes of population.

(55:30) Q: TL;DR Powerleveling – Detrimental or nah?

A: It is allowed, and it is sort of a game where I think it’s fine. It’s not really that broken to be able to powerlevel to a certain point. One of the problems right now is that you can get to level 50 pretty easily. The final game goes to level 125, so it’s not a very high level. It’s not that big a deal to me that you can jump there. It becomes a big deal if newbies are powerleveling to the endgame so that’s something we can think about more. I don’t really want to deal with that. Powerleveling everyone to the midgame is fine if they wanna do that. If you guys really hate powerleveling, it’s really a matter of what the userbase ends up liking. (Mention that on the forums if you don’t like it!)

(57:53) Q: Right now all we’re able to tame are rats and cats. Will there be a limit to certain breeds or kinds of animals we can tame? Also, will we be able to have more than just one pet out at a time?

A: Not all animals in the world will be tamable. Lots of animals are mod-marked as sentient. I’m not sure if you’ll be able to tame certain monsters, such as bears, which have skills that are fine for fighting players but broken for fighting other monsters. The animal handling class is designed around one animal, so you won’t be able to have multiple animals out.

(59:25) Q: Is there any chance you could make Mr. Squeaky non-sentient so that I may tame him?

A: I can’t lobotomize Mr. Squeaky, sorry.

(59:50) Q: Would we be able to see the ability to have players create their own music or paint their own paintings?

A: Someone pointed me to a sort of textual language that a few games use for player driven music and it’s not like there’s a library we can just plug in to make that happen so that’s a fairly elaborate thing. I’d like to eventually allow you to write your own music and have some endgame jam session music. I’m still exploring what it would mean to let you do your own painting. We’ve been prototyping a mechanism for a painting skill that lets you take screenshots in game and turn them into pictures, but it’s kind of boring. It might be fun to let you upload little images, but then there’s the issue of uploading inappropriate content. I’d like to do some more things to let players be creative, though.

(1:03:02) Q: Guild/Friendlist ETA?

A: (Silvonis): Working on it. Will have improvements on the Friendlist. As for ETA, we’re looking for sometime after the Kickstarter ends. Sometime around the Steam Integration, 2-5 weeks. The guild features were part of the reason we did the Kickstarter, so you will see those relatively soon. Definitely keep the suggestions coming. We already have some ideas that we’d like to do.

(1:05:12) Q: All the skills seem to be much interconnected. Will this dependency tree ever be toned down so that certain groups of skills can be received without having to get a bunch of unrelated skills?

A: I don’t think the skill tree is that complicated at the moment, so I don’t think so. I think 150 is my goal of additional skills, a lot of them being crafting and utility skills and they do kind of clump in interconnected groups. I don’t know if they’ll be less complicated than they are now, but you will have to learn several different skills to learn other skills. That’s just the kind of game it is.

(1:09:29) Q: Will there be a dancing skill?

A: Yes! Just haven’t gotten to it yet.