Starwars Galaxies Exclusive With Christopher Field

Welcome to the MMORPGFocus.com exclusive interview with Christopher Field, the Producer on Star Wars Galaxies.

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Transcript:

MMORPGFocus.com Team: This is MMORPGFOCUS covering Star Wars Galaxies at Sony’s Fan Faire 2009.


Christopher Field: Hi, I’m Christopher Field. I’m the producer on Star Wars Galaxies and I was going to show a demo for our new system coming out this year called Star Wars Chronicles. It’s our player generated content system. Players will actually be able to go in game and bring up a quest builder. And this quest builder is filled with all kinds of relics that players will be able to loot in game. Relics can be things like “go to a location” or “destroy something” or “perform a pvp action”…


MMORPGFocus.com Team: Looks like crafting…


Christopher: Yeah, exactly. Crafting, entertaining, destroying, looting, killing… but you’re going to be able to customize your quest. So I can title my quest: “Awesome Quest”. I can give it a description: “Off on an awesome quest for Darth Vader”. So then I want to populate my quest with stuff for players to do. The first thing I can say, Hey, I want a message from Darth Vader.


Christopher opens up a task to create a Comm. Message from Darth Vader.


Christopher: And Darth Vader is going to say “The Nightsisters are bothering me. Go eliminate three of them to teach them a lesson.” So I put that in. I need to go get some Nightsisters so I’m going to perform a “Kill Nightsister Protector.”


Christopher opens up a new task “Kill Nighsister Protector”, sets the value to three and types in a description.


Christopher: So I’m creating just a very simple quest. Right now we’re playing with the idea to allow 12 separate tasks per player generated quest. In this case I just have the two. Let’s say that I’m a crafter and I want people to be really inspired by my quest. While the quest system will auto generate some loot and experience points based on the variety of tasks and the challenge of the tasks that are in there, you’ll also be able to put your own loot in there. So if you’re a crafter and want to give your quest a little bit of an edge over somebody else’s quest, maybe you can craft the Big Gun of Awesome and you want to put that in as a reward. So you’ll have the ability to do that.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: That’s really cool. Are you concerned at all about balancing issues? In other words, will there be limits? It looks like there might be a possibility for a player to exploit the system by making a simple quest that their guild members can complete that maybe has a reward that’s not in line with the difficulty of the quest created. How do you guys handle that?


Christopher: As a quest creator, they are going to be able to create a very simple quest and they can put their own reward in there if they want to give a very unbalanced reward. If they want to take the time to actually go find in game a very high end reward or if they want to craft a very high end reward and they want to sacrifice that to a “Hey, go kill 10 kreetels quest…”


MMORPGFocus.com Team: So it’s not generated… in other words the player supplies it…


Christopher: It’s both.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: But the player has to have earned it first.


Christopher: Yes, if they want to provide a really awesome award for a really simplistic quest, they’re going to have to provide that. All quests will also, in addition to that, auto generate rewards. However, if you create a very simple task or if you’ve created a very simple quest that only has one task and that task isn’t very complicated, it’s going to give you a sort of bottom-tier of loot. You’re going to need to create a full quest with twelve steps in it. All of those tasks are going to need to be very different and very high level and very challenging to be pulling from the top tier loot pool.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: Ah, okay. So there is a balancing mechanism in place. Is there any quality control mechanism in place? In other words, do you have a mechanism in place to prevent a player from just spamming the system or creating a bunch of quests that maybe a few players would fine value in?


Christopher: Well yes. The quests are all going to have various search criteria and things like that. And one of the things you’ll see if I create this quest.


Christopher clicks the “Create Quest” button on his quest he was making earlier.


Christopher: So boom, I create this quest and it’s in my inventory. It creates “A Chronicle Holocron.” I actually burn this to an item that I can put on the Bazaar or trade it to a friend or something like that. And I can activate this quest.


Christopher clicks the “Activate Quest” button from the item.


Christopher: So I activated it. I get my comm. from Darth Vader. He says “The Nightsisters are bothering me. Go eliminate three of them to teach them a lesson.” You know, I get that comm. from Darth Vader. That information goes to my quest journal: Darth Vader sent me a message. The next step in that quest is it tells me I need to go eliminate three Nightsisters. In my quest helper up here, you see I’ve got my Awesome Quest: Eliminate three Nightsisters 0/3. So I’m going to take out some Nightsisters over here. And at the end of the quest, you will see the answer to your question that you had.


Christopher goes to fight some Nightsisters and explains that since this is just the demo, it completed the quest for him when he attacked a Nightsister.


Christopher: Now the quest completes and I get to rate the quest. This gets attached to the quest’s creator and affects their rating over time. So if I’m looking for a particular quest, I want to look for highly rated quests. Or maybe I want to look for quests by a particular chronicle master or a very high-rated chronicle master.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: Do you think there’s a chance that a year from now you’ve got one or two people who are just leading the pack. I mean, they’ve just created such great quests. Would Sony Online Entertainment contact those people and offer them a job?


Christopher: Haha, offer them a job? Who knows. We have discussed things that have not been announced but there have certainly been discussions as to what kind of things can be done for people who are really into the system and really doing a good job in creating great quests. Those are some announcements that would be coming in the future probably around the launch, or maybe even a little post-launch of its releasing


MMORPGFocus.com Team: There’s so many fans out there that would love a way into the industry and a lot of talented fans out there. I think World of Warcraft is a testimony to that. And I think this is a way to see who your really good players are and who are good quest designers.


Christopher: We’re really excited about the system because we’re sure that our community is a very passionate community. They’re very, very passionate about Star Wars and Star Wars Galaxies. We’re really looking forward to getting this system in their hands and seeing the really awesome quests that come out of it. We’re looking forward to playing them ourselves and seeing what they come up with. By no means does this mean that the Dev team is going to stop creating quests and collections and content. We’re absolutely going to continue supporting Star Wars Galaxies. It’s just a matter of we wanted to be able to give a system out there that allows players to use their creativity. Give them a lot of awesome, solable quests that involve iconic characters that they’ve grown up with.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: But in a lot of ways, it’s traditional to the role-playing genre. You know, if you go back to pen and paper games people made their own quests in a way. You had a dungeon master.


Christopher: Very, very much.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: So I’m placed in a long heritage in the genre so I think players will enjoy it. Let me ask you… there has been an announcement with BioWare that they’re bringing a Knights of the Old Republic Star Wars Online role-playing game. How do you guys feel about that and do you think it will compete with Star Wars Galaxies?


Christopher: You know, it’s not really our game to comment on. There are LucasArts folks here that would be happy to talk to you about that because it’s their game. It’s really a question that should be directed to them.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: Alright, I was just curious about that. Is there any other features you’d like to show us or anything else you’d like Star Wars Galaxies fans to know?


Christopher: All of our stuff comes from feedback from the fans. We really appreciate all the feedback from forums and surveys and GamePlay metrics and everything…


MMORPGFocus.com Team: Would you say that you’ve guys have learned a lot? There were some changes made to Star Wars Galaxies a while back that had some fans upset. Would you say that maybe that was a learning experience? I mean, I guess you can’t be more responsive to fans than letting them create their own content.


Christopher: Right. Of course, everything is a learning experience. Nothing is ever done to upset fans. Everything is always done with the best of intentions regardless of what the ultimate results are. Certainly, everything that we are doing now is 100% based on fan feedback. Both of our announcements at Fan Faire, the Star Wars Chronicles system and the Death Troopers quest line that will be based on the first Star Wars horror novel come out of the fact that fans are asking for more solable content, more content that involves iconic characters from the Star Wars universe, asking for stories that tie into either the films or the expanded universe and both of these announcements tie directly into those things. But yea, you can use iconic characters in [Star Wars Chronicles], you can create a massive amount of solable quests. You make the story what you want it to be. It’s totally up to you. Death Troopers based on a current novel that’s coming right out absolutely will involve Star Wars characters and takes place with actions inspired by events in a novel that will be out on the shelves concurrently with the game.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: That’s really exciting. Would you like to talk a little more in brief and then we’ll let you go because we know you’re busy about that new quest line tied in with the horror novel.


Christopher: Yeah , no problem. You know, at this point we just announced it, we haven’t gone into the exact details of it. That more will be coming at the Galactic Gathering today. But, yeah, Star Wars will see the release of its first horror novel called Death Troopers on October 13th of this year, 2009. And that novel involves basically the undead. Some people that have become very altered and become very disgusting and horrible and what ramifications does that have with the heroes and stuff in the universe. Star Wars Galaxies is going to be bringing that experience to our players in game.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: One last question and this is kind of a technology question. There have been a lot of improvements made to Vanguard, to the engine and the look of the graphics and the smoothness and how well they run. Has Star Wars Galaxies shared any of that technology? In other words, do you share, or is each game completely kept separate?


Christopher: We do not share anything with Vanguard or EQ2 for that matter so no we don’t have anything sharing there. Right now our focus is just to really get out really high quality updates as frequently as possible that are based on our fan feedback.


MMORPGFocus.com Team: Well it’s very exciting Chris. I appreciate you speaking with us. Again, this is MMORPGFocus and we just want to say thank you and we look forward to playing the game.


Christopher: Absolutely! Enjoy. Let us know what you think. Thank you!

[Aronian]

Don't be shy, reply!

We will get back to SoE with your concerns or ideas.

[Spartyice]

Thanks for the video. Great question about going after those who show great skill with the quest system. This is going to give all those great writers the chance to craft there own dialogue, I do not think that 12 tasks in the quest system will be enough and we are going to end up linking holocrons together to get longer quests.

Thanks again!