Nosgoth: Interview with a Game Dev
Ted: Since you mentioned moving out of Early Access, I want to move on to questions regarding new players. I started playing again about a week ago, but when I tried to play in the beginner mode (sub level 15) I would sit in the queue for an hour and never find a match. I was forced to jump into the general queue, and my results varied wildly. Oftentimes, I’d be going up against a team with vastly more experience. What do you have planned to ease new players into the game?
Jacob: With MMR, you have an aggregate score of a player’s overall skill based on wins, losses, kills, objectives, etc. It’s a general evaluation of a lot of stats, and it isn’t always perfect. Ideally, players would be placed every game with players of equal skill and an even chance of winning or losing. In practice, factors like server ping and communication make MMR matchmaking an imperfect system. We don’t just match players of equal skill, but players that they will have the best time with, which means being able to play without lag and speaking the same language. That means that sometimes, especially at non-peak hours, you’ll be paired with someone outside of your normal MMR range. We expect that coming out of Early Access will bring in the amount of players needed to allow for more more balanced matches.
A lot of this was happening to me. I’m not the big guy.
Ted: I certainly find the game fun, but as a new player I’m definitely overwhelmed by all the content. I know there’s an exploration aspect in finding out what all the weapons/classes/abilities do, but I wasn’t even sure at first how to purchase them. After I played a bit I figured it out, but it almost prevented me from getting into the game. Do you have any plans for practice matches against bots to learn the maps? How about a shop tutorial?
Bill: Funny enough, we were just talking about this before the call. There are a lot of areas we have to focus on with limited resources—expanding the game for our longtime players, bug fixing to maintain a live game, getting to a state where we’re ready to come out of Early Access, and a never ending backlog of other features. Along with all that, we have to consider the first time user experience. We can’t promise anything since it’s all still in discussion, but we are certainly aware of all the things we could add. It’s just a matter of fitting it into the hours in a day. What I will say is that live games are constantly evolving. The launch is just the start. Players are going to be key and figuring out our priorities.
Ted: From what I’ve read on the forums and heard from friends, higher level players really like this game. The Leagues were well received, allowing for a higher level of cooperative play. How do you balance making money with player focused game design?
Bill: Free-to-play is a tricky situation. We know players respond very poorly to overt money grabs, and that’s what we’ve been trying to avoid. From day one, the guys at Psyonix were adamant that they didn’t want to make anything pay-to-win. Realistically, any attempt to monetize will be met with resentment. But we are a business, and have worked hard to monetize as painlessly a possible. We want to find a balance between allowing players to support the game if they want without forcing them to do that. All of the core content you can get by just playing the game. Higher level gear can be dropped at the end of matches or crafted, and all of that is free. If you want to get there faster or have more exotic visual options, you can pay for that, but it’s not like you can’t play and win if you don’t.
I honestly don’t care if it gives me speed and takes damage or whatever, because I look faaaabulous.
Ted: Some of the advanced gear that I got had modifications, with a pro and a con. With modifiers like this, it’s always possible that you’ll inadvertently make something overpowered. How do you make sure this doesn’t happen?
Jacob: So what we do right now is assign positives and negatives at random. Higher level items will have up to two positives and two negatives. Something the players can do if they aren’t happy with their modifiers is use the forge. With earned gold and crafting materials, they can re-roll those stats into something else. As far as those numbers, the +5% speed or -10% ammunition, those aren’t random. This system has been one of our biggest challenges with balancing. As developers, we have to address these problems quickly to make sure that the game stays healthy.
Ted: So in regards to all of these changes, what would you say to old players that quit? How would you entice them to return?
Jacob: Well, obviously, so they can play the new Beastmaster class! More seriously, we’ve fixed a lot of bugs and balanced significantly approaching release. We’ve recently been talking to a lot of the professionally rated ESL teams about how to improve. So for those that left because it was imbalanced or too hard, there have been substantial meaningful improvements. The back end system has also improved in parallel—Player registration, matchmaking, anything that isn’t part of the core gameplay itself. The systems are in place, and once we get out of Early Access and increase the player base you’ll really see those shine. We have twice the maps and character classes than we did when we started, and we’ve got some new game modes that will be going live with release.
Ted: New game modes? Do tell!
Bill: The first mode we’re introducing is “Capture the Body.” A Nosgoth take on Capture the Flag, the vampire team has to drag a corpse from one side of the map to a shrine before it explodes. It swaps the typical dynamic, with the vampires getting hammered as the humans hunt them down. It gets bloody fast. We’ve also got “Flashpoint,” where humans try to capture and hold certain parts of the map. It’s a bit similar to Team Deathmatch, but the humans can’t chose where they engage as much. It makes the maps play differently.
“Ugh the one time I make a joke about Dumah, and he’s right behind me. Now I’ve got corpse duty for a week. Way to go, Ralph, you’re really making your mother proud.”
Ted: I want to move away from the gameplay for a bit and get into the lore. It’s been a bit of a sore spot for fans since Nosgoth was first announced. With the Legacy of Kain franchise, you have a massive canon and history of rich single player games. Yet Nosgoth is exclusively multiplayer. How do you plan on telling a story in the Legacy of Kain vein, and how does the lore influence your development process?
Bill: We aren’t blind to the controversy surrounding Nosgoth. It doesn’t have a traditional narrative with cutscenes and exposition. That just wouldn’t work in a multiplayer game. We tell Nosgoth’s story through the world. In Legacy of Kain, the vampire clans evolved based on the ecology and psychology of their leaders. Take clan Zephonim for example. Their leader Zephon was devious, untrustworthy, jealous, and a master of psychological warfare. That turned into the Deceiver, masters of illusions that mess with their enemy’s brain. On the other hand, sometimes we needed to fill a gameplay role. For something tanky and more brutal that could lead the team and initiate combat, Clan Turelim fit perfectly. Maps are also more than just arenas, but areas that were discussed and hinted at in the lore. The Crucible map is actually based on a level that was scrapped in the first Soul Reaver game. Symbol of military might and industry, it’s loaded with clan Turelim iconography. If you look at the Razielim map The Fane, you can see the places where the clan would lounge around while feeding on captives and getting high. The banners, statues, and murals are all based on existing iconography and lore in the Legacy of Kain world. It’s not a traditional Legacy of Kain game, but a tremendous amount of detail has been put in for fans who are looking.
Ted: So where does this fit into the Legacy of Kain world? There’s a distinction between a game that’s telling a piece of a story, and one that just takes place in a world.
Bill: This is a franchise that covers literally thousands of years and multiple timestreams. What we wanted to do with Nosgoth was realize a period that hadn’t yet been explored. At the end of Soul Reaver, Kain casts Raziel into the abyss and uses the Chronoplast to advance hundreds of years into the future. This takes place in the period that Kain was absent. Without his iron rule, the vampire clans he have begun to compete for power. This allows the humans to rise up and try to retake the world. We know they eventually lose, but it’s about looking into the world at this point in time. The vampires haven’t devolved into their final bestial state, retaining much of their human characteristics. Humanity is making its last stand. Only one of them can survive.
Categorized:Editorials Horror Gaming News
