Over the weekend at PAX East, we at MMORPG.com managed to snag an interview with one of the busiest people on the show floor, Carbine Studios' head honcho Jeremy Gaffney, aka the Gaffer. Given that a number of WildStar's biggest fans were unable to attend the convention, I thought it would be cool to reach out to them and other fans who were present to gather up some questions for the Gaffer, to truly make it more of a community interview rather than a standard press interview. As expected, the WildStar community inundated me with things they wanted to know, and I regret we didn't have time to cover everything they asked.
We started off with one of my questions, something I'd been wondering since we all found out that the game would be segregated into North American and European regions due to legal reasons, the same sort of reasons why players can't transfer across servers from EU to NA servers in other games such as World of Warcraft or Star Wars: the Old Republic.
MMORPG.com: WildStar has made a point of marketing to as many playstyles as possible, the raiders, the sandbox folks, the PVPers, and even the roleplayers. Considering the strong ties between the EU roleplayers and the NA ones and the known restrictions on playing on servers based on where a copy of the game was purchased, the community pretty much chose to coordinate their purchases amongst themselves so they could roll on the same servers in the same region. So, if the majority of the EU roleplayers are going to be rocking NA accounts, how does that affect the business plan for the EU servers?
Gaffer: That's a good question. What we want to do is let people play the way they want to play. There's an issue playing across from North America to Europe no matter what, because you're going to have to be on one server or the other, so technically that means you're putting up with extra lag. You know what, the speed of light is something that we've attempted to fix, but we can't. We play pretty well, the feedback from Europe has been 'hey, things are pretty good.' They're playing pretty decent on the beta, but they really want their own servers because it would help a lot for PVP and that kind of stuff, because you want every edge you can have, and so that gives them a wrinkle no matter what. But anything we can do from a business standpoint that will make our players happy, we obviously want to do it. Not just because we try not to be jerks, it's also up on our wall plaque under the 'no bullshit' line. But also, it makes business sense too. And so, anything that we can legally do to help out, we're willing to do, but it's non-trivial. We're worried about, we want to make sure we're betaing in Europe pre-launch, but we need to make sure that localization is good, we don't want it to be crappy localization if we can avoid it, and so you need time to make sure that's right. Then you also get an issue too and now people have to abandon characters that they spent a long time playing in the US beta and so we'd love to give people have access to their characters, but that is technically challenging too, so what can we do around that? It's very non-trivial.
I wish I had an easy answer for that, but I don't. The short form on it, today our policy on that is: hey what we can do is say we do listen, there's multiple times I think we've done some pretty big stuff by listening to the community. If people have good ideas that we can practically pull off, that make legal sense, you know, we damned well ought to embrace it because we don't want to piss our players off. That's not even good business, nor is it being a good partner. Especially for our beta players, they've been our partners! People have been giving us their gaming time instead of playing launched games that are presumably more fun and polished since they've launched, and so we owe them. We couldn't have made the game literally without people in there, both with the data they give us and the feedback they give us, so whatever we can do to help them, we'll do our best.
MMORPG.com: Our very own Gareth Harmer wanted to know about the possibility of a CarbiCon, and so I asked: Given we've seen other large games doing their own cons (Blizzcon, SOE Live, etc.), if the game is a huge success (by an appropriate definition of huge), would something like a Carbine Con or a full-on public Arkship two or three-day event be something that Carbine would consider running in a couple of years or so?
Gaffer: Yeah, even closer than a couple of years, what we'd like to do is, Arkships have always been fun events where some of our best and most devoted fans have come. We show them stuff that's under works, often under NDA, we're like 'hey, here's something we're working on for a year from now'. We try to do them as often as we can, so we'll definitely do that. I think what really dictates that is the scale of launch, no matter what, the small ones can and should go on. As many of them as can happen worldwide is good. You wouldn't want to have them travel over from Europe to here and vice versa, and so I'd rather do a series of small ones rather than one ginormous one. But with scale, maybe we'll do both.
MMORPG.com: Speaking of the community, you've seen fans out there such as Anhrez or Sarcan making things like knitting a hat here, making little badges there, all of these real-life crafting things. (Gaffer interjection: Which is awesome, by the way.) Where is the line drawn between fans making a few items for their friends or giveaways and someone turning it into a showcase for their Etsy store or going on some full-on production scale here?
Gaffer: It's complex. Most interesting things I guess are complex, because you've got to protect your IP. What you don't want to have happen is, if there's enough, if somebody's making money off of it, you know, we're not completely evil moneygrubbing bastards. We try to be fairly good moneygrubbing bastards. There's a little Protostar in there. Protostar can occasionally be a little self-referential. But, what we don't want to have happen is have such a culture come up where you have not gone out there and said 'hey, look, make sure this is ours,' and now companies trying to come up and wholesale selling your stuff for profit and all that.
You need to do the right things legally, make sure the game doesn't get into the hands of, you know, evil people who are not us. But we want to support all the good people who are not us. And so that's a line to walk. My preference is, if people aren't making money off it, then I'm going to support that as much as possible. People who are making money off it, but it's for a legitimate craft that they're doing, come talk to us. If we can work out a deal with it so that it's legit, like licensing, maybe we can do the right things in terms of doing what the lawyers need in terms of IP protection. We don't want to min-max every dollar we can squeeze out in terms of 'oh now it's time to bring out the full-body Protostar suit' or whatever, we don't want to be that company anyway. So we like fans doing that out of love, but the danger part is when love turns into money.
MMORPG.com: Currently, it's not hard to find the devs in-game on certain accounts, which is unusual for a game of this size and prominence. Most other games have their employees adhere to strict 'play incognito' rules of course to avoid the appearance of favoritism or guilds getting under the table perks. The rapport that Carbine has generated with the fans is almost unprecedented amongst AAA games. When the game goes live, will the CRBs go into hiding like pretty much everyone else has their employees do or will players be able to find the same level of open interaction in the game?
Gaffer: I've been talking to David [Bass, Community Manager] about this. There's a balance to walk there. What you want to do there is you want to be as open as possible. I think we're in a new era now. Another company that's doing it well is Riot. As soon as you go into League of Legends and you're playing against a dev, and it's all 'ahh! I'm playing against a dev!' There's a lack of persistence there where you don't have those worries where oh, okay if one guild is succeeding and they're doing world-firsts and there's a Carbine dev in there, and you've got to wonder, are we feeding them information? Are we giving them extra benefits or 'here, go do this technique'. And so, we don't want people to have to worry about that, you know what I mean? There's the limit. We want to make sure that Carbine is in there playing the game, but we also don't want people to have to stress about it. So, the policy is if we catch any of our devs doing that kind of stuff, guess what? They can go do that at one of our competitors.
We're at the level of they get in there and play because it's good to be in there, but a lot of it is people can choose. They can play under a CRB account, do they want to play under a private account and just not tell anyone about it, so they can just have fun and not worry. I mean, your XP per hour does drop dramatically when CRB is in front of your name. People tend to have a few questions or want to show you the bug that's been pissing them off. [Or if you're on a PVP server, kick your ass. - Jean] Yes, it's likely to be a giant red flag saying 'gank me', especially if it's CRB_Pappy, then it's like 'oh, free XP!' (laughter) [The fact that he got his butt kicked by Scooter, come on! - Jean]
It's better than Lynch, man. Lynch got his butt kicked by a thirteen-year-old yesterday. And the thirteen-year-old came up to him and said 'I'm going to do a stun, then I'm going to go behind you and do this tactic, do this tactic, and this tactic, follow up with this, then my cooldown will be on this, and then I'm going to kill you with this'. And then he did that. I've never seen a more clean way of calling your shot into the stands as Babe Ruth than doing that to, say, the Lead Combat Designer. Jen might have been able to hold her own on that as the Lead PVP Designer. Class designers are difficult to get in their own classes, but if you can get them to play someone else's class, then they turn into mortals.
MMORPG.com: What's one system or feature that you want to see in the game that isn't, it's so far out there it's not even on a wall of crazy?
Gaffer: Here's one thing I would like. I would probably argue about this because I don't think our raid teams would like it. I don't care how people do it, I just think it would be fun and I think it addresses a need. I would like to have Million Newbie Weekends, where we take the raids and the hardcore content and we bump up the caps on them and so we say 'this weekend, 40-man raid? Eh. Attunement pre-reqs? Nope, don't exist this weekend! 300-person cap, just go in there.' One of the tricks with newbies and casuals is that they may never actually see that raiding content. In vanilla WoW, I played up to 50 with my Rogue at launch, or 60, I forget, and no one needed Rogues because DPS for Rogue wasn't as good as Mage at the time, and nobody needed me in raids. I never got to see the raiding stuff. I had to make a whole other character and go up and eventually do a few in the Burning Crusade timeframe.
And so, giving people an experience, I personally think it would be hysterical watching 300 n00bs flailing around trying to zerg whatever the first boss is. And they'd die in droves, it takes so much coordination in raids, they probably wouldn't even be able to beat it, raids are harder actually with more people, but they'd get in and get to experience it. And they get to see a shot of it, and god forbid they actually manage to zerg rush a mob and they get one drop and then like one of these n00bs here is going to roll against 300 other people to see if they get that deep purple that dropped. I think personally that would be awesome. It's possible that the hardcore will be 'dammit, want these newbies in our stuff at all', it's possible our raiding team will be like 'no', or there may be technical reasons, but honestly, it's something I'd love to add at some point for a special occasion. Not all the time, but every now and again, just be like 'okay, try it out!' And it's a good teaser, it's the aspirational stuff, it makes people get hardcore enough to try themselves because they've seen 'oh my god, it's cool!'
MMORPG.com: Everyone always asks which faction, Exile or Dominion, but I'm going to turn that question around a little bit. When you play the game, which race is your favorite and can you tell us why?
Gaffer: Actually, I choose my faction based on race, because my favorite races are Chua and Granok, because Chua are just so full of personality. Their questlines are always so amusing, and I just like psychopathic hamsters looking to blow everything up. It just appeals to me innately. The Granok's one of the first races we added to the game and so I've been a fan of them from old school. I actually don't usually stress about Exile or Dominion, you want to choose a race, in my mind, often more than the faction might appeal. I think new players coming into the game, you don't know enough about Exile or Dominion to make a choice, you'll choose your race based probably on what it looks like. I don't think people read enough of the text. I think we need to do a better job with Paths, explaining what they are, they're kind of a new system. We probably need more than a little blurb leading you into what's such an important choice for you. [Because you can't change it later. - Jean] Right, or make it so you can change it later, but if your path is about what kind of player you are, is it valid if you've leveled up to level 5 as an Explorer and then switch over, is that exploitable in the endgame? Is it something that is relatively easy to level up with and then do whatever you think is best for your guild or raid that you're doing? It seems less cool to me, but 'less cool' is a tough thing to design around.
MMORPG.com: Now it's time for that question... when the patch went in that altered the female characters, there was a massive outcry. Many fans (to be fair, mostly guys) were upset at the reduction, while a number of lady gamers applauded the decision. Where did that decision come from within Carbine? Was it simply an artistic decision or was there some component of the famous 'the devs are listening' that prompted a look at the issue?
Gaffer: So, here's my take on it, and it's only my take, because everyone has their own set of opinions, and I have a different view on it than many. Where that decision Came from is, I was part of it, I talked to [Matt] Mocarski, who's our art director, I talked to the designers. We talked to the technical side, because some of that would have been nice to be able to do body sliders, because at the end of the day, our game is not really about... I mean, we're about psychopathic hamsters running around in Chua balls, we're not really about 'let's over-sexualize everything'. We're not really about... but we're also not staying away from it, play it however the hell you want to play it.
So, sliders would have been the best answer. Unfortunately, they were technically impossible, and I posted that. Literally later that day, Mocarski comes over and says 'hey, you know that thing I told you was impossible? I think I just figured it out...' I'm like 'Dammit! I could have used this information about four hours ago.' So, it's me, it's talking to Mocarski, it's talking to David as part of the community team to sort of gauge what the community reaction was because you have to be a little careful. You want to be reactive, you don't want to be overreactive. It's tough because if you change something every time any group doesn't like something, you'll shave off all ends of your game. You can't be a game with no rough edges, you end up being nothing. My guesstimate on it is this: We had a series of changes not too far before, we'd never really heard feedback like that before, it very much surprised me when I heard it.
We changed the starting outfit, we changed the camera angle of character creation, a few other things I'm blanking on. We made those changes over a patch or two before, but it all added up that there was too much skin on the newbie outfit, you couldn't change your newbie outfit. We don't mind having outfits with skin on them, but it shouldn't be the outfit when you don't have a choice. That's dumb. If we gave you five options, and one of them has skin on it, then sweet, go nuts. It's not fair of us though to be like 'hey, here, take a body suit with this', and the camera angles kind of changed to be this top-down thing that was probably more boob-focused than we really thought about one way or the other. It added up to something that didn't feel was really our intent, so the changes that we made are actually fairly subtle, it's just putting her in a more neutral outfit, the other outfit still exists, it's just an option now, but it's not forced on you. It's making sure that the whole thing doesn't feel like... the goal of the thing shouldn't be a form of sexuality that you may or may not want.
And the real answer on that is sliders. The fact that they were able to solve the technical issue of it is, rigid stuff like armor and breathing stuff, you want your chest to breathe, you want your stomach to breathe, you want all that. That combination of rigid and breathing and then being able to map that across all the races is technically difficult. Clipping is a wonderful thing, and then doing all body types with all armors with all hair styles with all emotes? Nobody ever gets that 100% right. We do a pretty good job of that. We're not perfect either, I'm sure you've put your sword through your midsection if you put your mind to it.
MMORPG.com: Fan Tiberio had a question similar to one you've answered before about servers, but he was specifically asking about Oceanic servers. Are there going to be any?
Gaffer: We're not planning for them for launch. I've got to admit, we'd love to. There is a healthy Australian gaming community, and New Zealand, and the real question there is the same one everyone faces and Australians are sick of hearing about it, and is there enough critical mass to not just be able to have the server cost but also the support costs, because you'd like that to be local too. Back at Origin, there was an outcry for Oceanic servers for a long time, but the supporting of it is hard. What you don't want to do is go there and then pull out, because then you've pissed off people even more. It's non-non-non-trivial. We'll take a look at the sales data and see what it looks like out of those territories and see what we can do that's close or can we combine with Asia as we move into Asia. That's a good opportunity because at least you're in the same timezones, and so you're providing support and all of that stuff. There's more opportunities for that in the future, but apologies to Australian players, and bless those who've played at ridiculous, it's ridonkulus lag to the data center in Dallas they've been putting up with. It'll get a little better in Europe, but it's not as good as it needs to be.
Source: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/632/feature/8420/page/2
We started off with one of my questions, something I'd been wondering since we all found out that the game would be segregated into North American and European regions due to legal reasons, the same sort of reasons why players can't transfer across servers from EU to NA servers in other games such as World of Warcraft or Star Wars: the Old Republic.
MMORPG.com: WildStar has made a point of marketing to as many playstyles as possible, the raiders, the sandbox folks, the PVPers, and even the roleplayers. Considering the strong ties between the EU roleplayers and the NA ones and the known restrictions on playing on servers based on where a copy of the game was purchased, the community pretty much chose to coordinate their purchases amongst themselves so they could roll on the same servers in the same region. So, if the majority of the EU roleplayers are going to be rocking NA accounts, how does that affect the business plan for the EU servers?
Gaffer: That's a good question. What we want to do is let people play the way they want to play. There's an issue playing across from North America to Europe no matter what, because you're going to have to be on one server or the other, so technically that means you're putting up with extra lag. You know what, the speed of light is something that we've attempted to fix, but we can't. We play pretty well, the feedback from Europe has been 'hey, things are pretty good.' They're playing pretty decent on the beta, but they really want their own servers because it would help a lot for PVP and that kind of stuff, because you want every edge you can have, and so that gives them a wrinkle no matter what. But anything we can do from a business standpoint that will make our players happy, we obviously want to do it. Not just because we try not to be jerks, it's also up on our wall plaque under the 'no bullshit' line. But also, it makes business sense too. And so, anything that we can legally do to help out, we're willing to do, but it's non-trivial. We're worried about, we want to make sure we're betaing in Europe pre-launch, but we need to make sure that localization is good, we don't want it to be crappy localization if we can avoid it, and so you need time to make sure that's right. Then you also get an issue too and now people have to abandon characters that they spent a long time playing in the US beta and so we'd love to give people have access to their characters, but that is technically challenging too, so what can we do around that? It's very non-trivial.
)
I wish I had an easy answer for that, but I don't. The short form on it, today our policy on that is: hey what we can do is say we do listen, there's multiple times I think we've done some pretty big stuff by listening to the community. If people have good ideas that we can practically pull off, that make legal sense, you know, we damned well ought to embrace it because we don't want to piss our players off. That's not even good business, nor is it being a good partner. Especially for our beta players, they've been our partners! People have been giving us their gaming time instead of playing launched games that are presumably more fun and polished since they've launched, and so we owe them. We couldn't have made the game literally without people in there, both with the data they give us and the feedback they give us, so whatever we can do to help them, we'll do our best.
MMORPG.com: Our very own Gareth Harmer wanted to know about the possibility of a CarbiCon, and so I asked: Given we've seen other large games doing their own cons (Blizzcon, SOE Live, etc.), if the game is a huge success (by an appropriate definition of huge), would something like a Carbine Con or a full-on public Arkship two or three-day event be something that Carbine would consider running in a couple of years or so?
Gaffer: Yeah, even closer than a couple of years, what we'd like to do is, Arkships have always been fun events where some of our best and most devoted fans have come. We show them stuff that's under works, often under NDA, we're like 'hey, here's something we're working on for a year from now'. We try to do them as often as we can, so we'll definitely do that. I think what really dictates that is the scale of launch, no matter what, the small ones can and should go on. As many of them as can happen worldwide is good. You wouldn't want to have them travel over from Europe to here and vice versa, and so I'd rather do a series of small ones rather than one ginormous one. But with scale, maybe we'll do both.
MMORPG.com: Speaking of the community, you've seen fans out there such as Anhrez or Sarcan making things like knitting a hat here, making little badges there, all of these real-life crafting things. (Gaffer interjection: Which is awesome, by the way.) Where is the line drawn between fans making a few items for their friends or giveaways and someone turning it into a showcase for their Etsy store or going on some full-on production scale here?
Gaffer: It's complex. Most interesting things I guess are complex, because you've got to protect your IP. What you don't want to have happen is, if there's enough, if somebody's making money off of it, you know, we're not completely evil moneygrubbing bastards. We try to be fairly good moneygrubbing bastards. There's a little Protostar in there. Protostar can occasionally be a little self-referential. But, what we don't want to have happen is have such a culture come up where you have not gone out there and said 'hey, look, make sure this is ours,' and now companies trying to come up and wholesale selling your stuff for profit and all that.
)
You need to do the right things legally, make sure the game doesn't get into the hands of, you know, evil people who are not us. But we want to support all the good people who are not us. And so that's a line to walk. My preference is, if people aren't making money off it, then I'm going to support that as much as possible. People who are making money off it, but it's for a legitimate craft that they're doing, come talk to us. If we can work out a deal with it so that it's legit, like licensing, maybe we can do the right things in terms of doing what the lawyers need in terms of IP protection. We don't want to min-max every dollar we can squeeze out in terms of 'oh now it's time to bring out the full-body Protostar suit' or whatever, we don't want to be that company anyway. So we like fans doing that out of love, but the danger part is when love turns into money.
MMORPG.com: Currently, it's not hard to find the devs in-game on certain accounts, which is unusual for a game of this size and prominence. Most other games have their employees adhere to strict 'play incognito' rules of course to avoid the appearance of favoritism or guilds getting under the table perks. The rapport that Carbine has generated with the fans is almost unprecedented amongst AAA games. When the game goes live, will the CRBs go into hiding like pretty much everyone else has their employees do or will players be able to find the same level of open interaction in the game?
Gaffer: I've been talking to David [Bass, Community Manager] about this. There's a balance to walk there. What you want to do there is you want to be as open as possible. I think we're in a new era now. Another company that's doing it well is Riot. As soon as you go into League of Legends and you're playing against a dev, and it's all 'ahh! I'm playing against a dev!' There's a lack of persistence there where you don't have those worries where oh, okay if one guild is succeeding and they're doing world-firsts and there's a Carbine dev in there, and you've got to wonder, are we feeding them information? Are we giving them extra benefits or 'here, go do this technique'. And so, we don't want people to have to worry about that, you know what I mean? There's the limit. We want to make sure that Carbine is in there playing the game, but we also don't want people to have to stress about it. So, the policy is if we catch any of our devs doing that kind of stuff, guess what? They can go do that at one of our competitors.
We're at the level of they get in there and play because it's good to be in there, but a lot of it is people can choose. They can play under a CRB account, do they want to play under a private account and just not tell anyone about it, so they can just have fun and not worry. I mean, your XP per hour does drop dramatically when CRB is in front of your name. People tend to have a few questions or want to show you the bug that's been pissing them off. [Or if you're on a PVP server, kick your ass. - Jean] Yes, it's likely to be a giant red flag saying 'gank me', especially if it's CRB_Pappy, then it's like 'oh, free XP!' (laughter) [The fact that he got his butt kicked by Scooter, come on! - Jean]
It's better than Lynch, man. Lynch got his butt kicked by a thirteen-year-old yesterday. And the thirteen-year-old came up to him and said 'I'm going to do a stun, then I'm going to go behind you and do this tactic, do this tactic, and this tactic, follow up with this, then my cooldown will be on this, and then I'm going to kill you with this'. And then he did that. I've never seen a more clean way of calling your shot into the stands as Babe Ruth than doing that to, say, the Lead Combat Designer. Jen might have been able to hold her own on that as the Lead PVP Designer. Class designers are difficult to get in their own classes, but if you can get them to play someone else's class, then they turn into mortals.
MMORPG.com: What's one system or feature that you want to see in the game that isn't, it's so far out there it's not even on a wall of crazy?
Gaffer: Here's one thing I would like. I would probably argue about this because I don't think our raid teams would like it. I don't care how people do it, I just think it would be fun and I think it addresses a need. I would like to have Million Newbie Weekends, where we take the raids and the hardcore content and we bump up the caps on them and so we say 'this weekend, 40-man raid? Eh. Attunement pre-reqs? Nope, don't exist this weekend! 300-person cap, just go in there.' One of the tricks with newbies and casuals is that they may never actually see that raiding content. In vanilla WoW, I played up to 50 with my Rogue at launch, or 60, I forget, and no one needed Rogues because DPS for Rogue wasn't as good as Mage at the time, and nobody needed me in raids. I never got to see the raiding stuff. I had to make a whole other character and go up and eventually do a few in the Burning Crusade timeframe.
And so, giving people an experience, I personally think it would be hysterical watching 300 n00bs flailing around trying to zerg whatever the first boss is. And they'd die in droves, it takes so much coordination in raids, they probably wouldn't even be able to beat it, raids are harder actually with more people, but they'd get in and get to experience it. And they get to see a shot of it, and god forbid they actually manage to zerg rush a mob and they get one drop and then like one of these n00bs here is going to roll against 300 other people to see if they get that deep purple that dropped. I think personally that would be awesome. It's possible that the hardcore will be 'dammit, want these newbies in our stuff at all', it's possible our raiding team will be like 'no', or there may be technical reasons, but honestly, it's something I'd love to add at some point for a special occasion. Not all the time, but every now and again, just be like 'okay, try it out!' And it's a good teaser, it's the aspirational stuff, it makes people get hardcore enough to try themselves because they've seen 'oh my god, it's cool!'
)
MMORPG.com: Everyone always asks which faction, Exile or Dominion, but I'm going to turn that question around a little bit. When you play the game, which race is your favorite and can you tell us why?
Gaffer: Actually, I choose my faction based on race, because my favorite races are Chua and Granok, because Chua are just so full of personality. Their questlines are always so amusing, and I just like psychopathic hamsters looking to blow everything up. It just appeals to me innately. The Granok's one of the first races we added to the game and so I've been a fan of them from old school. I actually don't usually stress about Exile or Dominion, you want to choose a race, in my mind, often more than the faction might appeal. I think new players coming into the game, you don't know enough about Exile or Dominion to make a choice, you'll choose your race based probably on what it looks like. I don't think people read enough of the text. I think we need to do a better job with Paths, explaining what they are, they're kind of a new system. We probably need more than a little blurb leading you into what's such an important choice for you. [Because you can't change it later. - Jean] Right, or make it so you can change it later, but if your path is about what kind of player you are, is it valid if you've leveled up to level 5 as an Explorer and then switch over, is that exploitable in the endgame? Is it something that is relatively easy to level up with and then do whatever you think is best for your guild or raid that you're doing? It seems less cool to me, but 'less cool' is a tough thing to design around.
MMORPG.com: Now it's time for that question... when the patch went in that altered the female characters, there was a massive outcry. Many fans (to be fair, mostly guys) were upset at the reduction, while a number of lady gamers applauded the decision. Where did that decision come from within Carbine? Was it simply an artistic decision or was there some component of the famous 'the devs are listening' that prompted a look at the issue?
Gaffer: So, here's my take on it, and it's only my take, because everyone has their own set of opinions, and I have a different view on it than many. Where that decision Came from is, I was part of it, I talked to [Matt] Mocarski, who's our art director, I talked to the designers. We talked to the technical side, because some of that would have been nice to be able to do body sliders, because at the end of the day, our game is not really about... I mean, we're about psychopathic hamsters running around in Chua balls, we're not really about 'let's over-sexualize everything'. We're not really about... but we're also not staying away from it, play it however the hell you want to play it.
So, sliders would have been the best answer. Unfortunately, they were technically impossible, and I posted that. Literally later that day, Mocarski comes over and says 'hey, you know that thing I told you was impossible? I think I just figured it out...' I'm like 'Dammit! I could have used this information about four hours ago.' So, it's me, it's talking to Mocarski, it's talking to David as part of the community team to sort of gauge what the community reaction was because you have to be a little careful. You want to be reactive, you don't want to be overreactive. It's tough because if you change something every time any group doesn't like something, you'll shave off all ends of your game. You can't be a game with no rough edges, you end up being nothing. My guesstimate on it is this: We had a series of changes not too far before, we'd never really heard feedback like that before, it very much surprised me when I heard it.
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We changed the starting outfit, we changed the camera angle of character creation, a few other things I'm blanking on. We made those changes over a patch or two before, but it all added up that there was too much skin on the newbie outfit, you couldn't change your newbie outfit. We don't mind having outfits with skin on them, but it shouldn't be the outfit when you don't have a choice. That's dumb. If we gave you five options, and one of them has skin on it, then sweet, go nuts. It's not fair of us though to be like 'hey, here, take a body suit with this', and the camera angles kind of changed to be this top-down thing that was probably more boob-focused than we really thought about one way or the other. It added up to something that didn't feel was really our intent, so the changes that we made are actually fairly subtle, it's just putting her in a more neutral outfit, the other outfit still exists, it's just an option now, but it's not forced on you. It's making sure that the whole thing doesn't feel like... the goal of the thing shouldn't be a form of sexuality that you may or may not want.
And the real answer on that is sliders. The fact that they were able to solve the technical issue of it is, rigid stuff like armor and breathing stuff, you want your chest to breathe, you want your stomach to breathe, you want all that. That combination of rigid and breathing and then being able to map that across all the races is technically difficult. Clipping is a wonderful thing, and then doing all body types with all armors with all hair styles with all emotes? Nobody ever gets that 100% right. We do a pretty good job of that. We're not perfect either, I'm sure you've put your sword through your midsection if you put your mind to it.
MMORPG.com: Fan Tiberio had a question similar to one you've answered before about servers, but he was specifically asking about Oceanic servers. Are there going to be any?
Gaffer: We're not planning for them for launch. I've got to admit, we'd love to. There is a healthy Australian gaming community, and New Zealand, and the real question there is the same one everyone faces and Australians are sick of hearing about it, and is there enough critical mass to not just be able to have the server cost but also the support costs, because you'd like that to be local too. Back at Origin, there was an outcry for Oceanic servers for a long time, but the supporting of it is hard. What you don't want to do is go there and then pull out, because then you've pissed off people even more. It's non-non-non-trivial. We'll take a look at the sales data and see what it looks like out of those territories and see what we can do that's close or can we combine with Asia as we move into Asia. That's a good opportunity because at least you're in the same timezones, and so you're providing support and all of that stuff. There's more opportunities for that in the future, but apologies to Australian players, and bless those who've played at ridiculous, it's ridonkulus lag to the data center in Dallas they've been putting up with. It'll get a little better in Europe, but it's not as good as it needs to be.
Source: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/632/feature/8420/page/2
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