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Asherons Call: Blast from the Past - Redmond does Role-playing
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Asheron's Call is Microsoft's entry into the increasingly crowded online RPG arena . Still in development, the game should be ready for prime time sometime during the first half of 1998. It will be available only on Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone; pricing is yet to be determined. Our earlier preview included comments from Jon Grande (Product Planner, Microsoft Internet Gaming Zone) and Jeremy Gaffney (Chief Technology Officer for Turbine Entertainment, the company developing the game). The following is the complete text of Grande and Gaffney's responses to questions posed by Computer Games Online Editor Robert Mayer.
General Questions
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CGS+: What distinguishes Asheron's Call from the other "big names" in online RPGs? In particular, what do you offer that, say, Ultima Online doesn't? Sony's EverQuest? 3DO's Meridian 59?
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Jon Grande: One of the biggest differences with Asheron's Call is that all of the players will be playing in the same universe. We are not going to have multiple instances of the game - everyone will be playing in the same, continuous environment. In addition, we are focusing on building systems that enable interesting social interaction between people - that "focus" is really apparent in the design of all of the major systems within the game (especially the magic system, the allegiance system, etc).
Take our magic system: We allow people to research new spells, by attempting to combine different magical gestures, components, and syllables from their other spells. This adds replay in allowing you to explore and discover new things that no one else knows. This works great in a standalone game, but we add a social element to it to add depth to the game: in an offline game, if you found a new spell, the first thing you'd do is go post on the web - "I found a new spell! Check this out!" Rapidly, you'd find lists of every spell, and the game would devolve to just as if the spell lists had been printed in the manual. We aim for an atmosphere more like medieval fantasy by adding a wrinkle: In Asheron's Call, spells get weaker the more people who know them, or conversely, if you're the first person to discover a spell, it's very powerful! The more people you give your spell to (or who steal it by checking out your gestures and syllables when you aren't looking) the weaker the spell gets, so you need to think very hard before trading spells... you might get a new spell, but weaken your old one! This adds a richness to the social interaction that a more bland system would miss, now with crafty mages hoarding spells and killing off competitors, sneaky mages stealing spells, good-willed mages opening schools to give spells away, etc. Of course there are limits; spells have a threshold beyond which they can't drop, so the spells that player characters are given as they go up in level are still useful, for instance...but regardless, the point is that clever social gameplay like our magic system (and allegiance system, and player quest system, and...) is what I'm most proud of in our game.
Jeremy Gaffney: We have a lot of richness to the game...anyone who has seen a demo might expect us to talk about the full 3D, robust physics, customizable 3D characters, smooth transition between indoors and outdoors, etc, and those are valid differentiators. However, as great as the tech is, the gameplay is where it counts. I'd say some of our major strengths are in the area that gives us the most long term value: we concentrate on making the game a uniquely social experience.
Will combat (melee, ranged, spell casting) be a click-fest, with victory going to the fastest mouse, or will it make use of character stats and equipment too? How?
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Jon Grande: Combat relies strongly on the physics model that we're building into Asheron's Call. When you are going into battle, you'll need to consider how long it will take to swing a heavy two handed sword, how long it will take to re-string your bow, etc. We'll also take into account the level of fatigue that your character is under, his or her encumbrance (how much they are carrying), as well as several other factors.
Jeremy Gaffney: No click-fest here...we went through a lot of effort to avoid the "click over and over again until the enemy is dead" phenomenon. Combat is based on several aspects: strategic, such as equipping the right weapons and armor for your fight, developing skills appropriately; and tactical, guessing what your opponent is going to do and countering appropriately. You have to decide how to attack based on a number of issues: First of all, various attacks leave various other parts of your body unprotected - if you attack the same way over and over, your opponent will detect your weakness and attack to your undefended area. So, you might leave your lower half lightly armored for speed, and then stick to attacks that protect that lower area...but that might restrict what areas you can attack well, meaning you can't attack your opponent's unprotected head!
Next, you can choose the power of your attack, being able to strike more powerfully (and overcoming armor better) at the cost of the speed of your attack.
All of this built into a system that is a) really easy to use and intuitive and b) very latency friendly. We found that many games gave front-line-fighters the short end of the stick in terms of options - mages had all sorts of neat spells, but fighters just did click-click-click- drink a potion - click-click-click. We went through a lot of effort to make fighters fun too...but if you want to ignore the aspects above, there's a mode where it'll make the choices for you, and you can click away.
How many characters will players be able create and run on one account?
Jon Grande: We haven't settled on a final number yet, but at this point we're thinking about something in the 10-20 character range. We fully realize that a part of the appeal of role-playing is the chance to play different characters, so we are building that ability into the game from the very beginning.
Pricing? Hourly? Monthly? Boxed version in stores?
Jon Grande: Asheron's Call will follow the pricing model that the Zone is establishing with Fighter Ace, the Zone's first premium game. There will be both a daily and a monthly pricing option for Asheron's Call. We have not decided on the specific price points yet, nor have we decided whether or not to publish a retail or boxed version.
How do you plan to handle player killing?
Jon Grande: We've put a lot of thought into the handling of player killing in the game, especially given the time that we, the product team, have spent playing the competitors' games. We're currently looking at a model where players decide whether they want to participate in player killing or not. There are definite benefits and consequences to choosing to engage in player killing. We're focusing on setting up a system that let's those players who want to engage in player killing do so, without negatively affecting the experience for those that do not.
Jeremy Gaffney: You can go on a quest that lets you become a player-killer, which will allow you to attack and kill and loot other people who want to be player-killers. Newbies and people who don't want to get involved in player killing don't have to, and we expect a healthy player killing base because of some of the benefits that come with the high-risk occupation of player killing. Non-player killing characters can still get involved with player killing by becoming bounty hunters, and also getting involved in guild wars. We've been surprised by all the PK problems other online games have seen...after all, there have been really solid answers to the PK problem on MUDs for years! So we've put a bunch of extra thought to the PK problem (and improved on some MUD solutions) to make sure that we have a bit more positive playing experience for people.
Will there be any sort of "live" game masters who intervene? If so, in what cases will they do so?
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Jon Grande: Most of the "rules" for Asheron's Call are built into the game logic, so there won't need to be much enforcement from "real" people. We will however have a sizable team of "Game Ops" working within the game universe to deal with disciplinary issues, evolving the story, and working to keep the experience new and fresh for users of all ability levels.
Jeremy Gaffney: Game masters will run quests that keep the storyline moving, and have powers to administer the game on-the-fly. We try to have as much of the game as possible not need GM intervention, and are providing incentives to experienced players to help others through the Allegiance System...basically we give you benefits for training and protecting new players!
How will you balance out the need for new characters to "get into the action" with the need to keep the game challenging for a long time?
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Jon Grande: The basic approach is to evolve the way the user plays the game as they gain more skill and experience. We're really trying to make sure that new players are a valuable commodity for experienced players - and I mean that in the sense that they can provide more "value" to an experienced player than just the number of gold pieces that they are carrying. New players will be able to do things that experienced players can't, and vice versa.
Jeremy Gaffney: We allow players to have a wide array of options for how they want to play their characters beyond dungeon-crawling...characters that get bored with adventuring can get involved with guilds, the politics/allegiance system, magical research, etc. Even for dungeon-crawlers, there's always something new to find at the higher levels, due to our open-ended skill system and magic-item system, which allows for extremely rare items in billions of combinations. You can never have the "best item ever," only the "best item ever seen so far" - there's a lot of depth there. There are monsters that are very difficult to kill, even with a group of very high-powered characters, requiring clever strategies and group tactics.
All this aside, we also have a rich set of quests, meaning that newbies won't be dumped into a town with nothing to do. You might be directed to get some material components for an alchemist in town, save an old woman in town from the creatures infesting her attic or choose to follow dozens of other small but meaningful quests. You will be able to do interesting things and get into combat right from the beginning, however...we don't believe in menial labor being necessary for character development.
Is the game world dynamic - i.e, will it change, grow, evolve? Will it have a dynamic economy, ecosystem, etc?
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Jon Grande: The game world will evolve as players make decisions that advance the story. We aren't, however, building a "closed" system like Ultima Online. We realize that we will need to be actively engaged in adding content and evolving the story as the game progresses.
Jeremy Gaffney: Many systems are automated, and we have a content team constantly adding new things - new spells, dungeons, monsters, quests, etc. We try to have as many things be player-run as possible; players can make new quests for players, etc... we're doing some neat things in this area.
Will there be any built-in storylines for players to discover and interact with? Will these be dynamic, and change as time goes on, or will they be static quests that remain the same?
Jon Grande: We're working on not only building the back story for the game (we currently have the equivalent of about 4,000 years of back story for players to discover) we're also working on the "future-history" for the game. As a community, the players in the game will encounter challenges that they'll either need to band together to defeat, or face the consequences of long-term changes to the game. A good example is an invasion by an enemy army. If the players don't band together to defeat the enemy, they may be faced with the prospect of living within an "occupied" nation. There will be a host of "meta-game" issues and challenges like this that the community within Asheron's Call will need to decide how to address.
Jeremy Gaffney: There will be a dynamic storyline. Many of the static quests will relate to it, and there will be more dynamic admin-run quests on a regular basis.
Will players be able to customize their characters (look, colors, clothes, etc.)?
Jon Grande: With the character generation tools that we already have completed, I think it's possible for users create in excess of 1 million totally unique personas. Jeremy can give a better estimate as the exact number of unique combinations, but the point is that we think it's critical that you be able to visually tell the difference between people.
Jeremy Gaffney: Yes! You can change your facial components and choose your own eyes, nose, mouth, hairstyle, race, skin tone, scarring, hair shade/color, as well as having very distinctive clothing, different weapons, etc. There are more combinations than there are people in the REAL world. It looks great, too.
[b]Technical Questions
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Will you be supporting 3D accelerators? If so, how - Direct3D, chipset-specific support, or what?
Jon Grande: We will be providing basic support for 3D cards, but won't focusing on 3D support with the initial release.
[b]Will there be multiple servers? If yes, how many people per server? Can you move between servers? If no, how will you handle volume?
Jon Grande: As I mentioned earlier, Asheron's Call will be one continuous universe enabling thousands of people able to play together. Since the game is being written to run on WindowsNT and will be running across multiple servers, users will be able to travel throughout the game universe in one seamless experience. We're planning on being able to support thousands of users concurrently when the game launches and we can simply add new servers as we need additional capacity. The server architecture is being built to automatically scale the game universe to take advantage of all of the available hardware.
Jeremy Gaffney: We use a technology called "distributed dynamic load-balancing" which automatically splits the world up over multiple servers in an efficient way. So you don't even notice when you walk from one server to another. This is robust, too - servers can crash and the other servers can keep running, taking over the work of the downed server. This allows us to have vast numbers of people playing the game simultaneously, as well. More people coming online means more work for the servers, so we can buy a new server, add it to the server farm, and run our program without even bringing the game down. The world gets split up in a new way to compensate. Similarly, if a large group of players congregates in one area, the servers will re-distribute their load to compensate.
[b]What steps are being taken to deal with latency, packet loss, and other Internet issues? Will you be using straight TCP/IP, or UDP, or a combination?
Jeremy Gaffney: We use UDP. We handle all of the various difficulties thereof with our own proprietary protocol to handle data reliability. We have technology which handles the problem of large numbers of packets (or people!) in an area.... We call it the "Braveheart" problem - what happens when 400 screaming Scotsmen charge over a hill? Our network protocol handles such situations very well, and additionally adds protection from packet loss, and the latency resulting from packet loss. We're very proud of it.
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Will anything be stored on the client side, or will everything be server-side? Will players be able to do anything at all without being online (train, practice, configure, etc.)?
Jon Grande: We are not building any stand-alone game play into Asheron's Call; we are totally focused on building the game as a massively multi-player experience. We will be caching graphics on the client side, so that the "rendering" of the experience looks as good as possible. We are being very careful though to not "trust" the data that is on the client's machine. We're designing the game to ensure that all of the important data is coming directly from the server (player location, inventory, etc).
Jeremy Gaffney: We use a technique called "Client Autonomy" that allows many actions to be "guessed ahead" by the client so that it doesn't need to wait for the server in all cases, but the server has the final say...no client-side hacks will allow you to cheat! We dynamically download data to the client as it needs it, so you can have a pretty small hard drive footprint and still run the game very well. The crucial game data, however, will be entirely server-based, to prevent hackers from getting an edge.
[b]How do you plan to avoid the problems Origin has had with making UO work - overcrowding, crashes, technical performance, unbalanced economy, etc.?
Jon Grande: We're focusing equal amounts of attention on the technical architecture as we are on the "fun" aspects of playing the game. We're working hard to build an architecture that will scale to handling ideally tens of thousands of players in the game environment. We're also planning on keeping a substantial team of people working to add content to the game over time. That content will add new territories to play in, new creatures and new story lines that get revealed as the game world progresses.
Jeremy
Gaffney: We have more area to explore than Ultima...you can run from one end of our island to the other in about 14 hours. Or you could if you didn't have to deal with the monsters, travelers and other goodies on the way. We have many more dungeons and places to go adventure. We have many more towns to choose from. We're just bigger, is the short form, and we have systems to handle dungeon repopulation better than the "Stand around the rat-hole with seven others and we all jump on each rat as it comes out, wow, I actually hit it that time."
We've proven to be very robust so far, and our algorithms are fault-tolerant by design - bad data that crashes one server can't propagate to another, etc. We'll still see some bugs, I'm sure, but we are aided by the fact that one server can go down without affecting any of the others, at least minimizing the problems we'll see with crashes. Technically, we have a lot of tricks that we do (as mentioned above) to handle server slowdowns, and can throw more CPUs at slowdowns when needs be.
We didn't even attempt a closed economy, there's a tradeoff there which I think isn't a win for the end user - it's insanely tough to balance, and while it sounds cool, it doesn't give you as a user a lot of benefit because you never SEE the economy in action. To everyone but the guy who affected the market, the fluctuations in price are random. There is a depth to the world which is nice, but the problem needs more thought than anyone has yet given it. In any case, it's simple for us: We have a lot of ways for gold and objects to enter the world, and more ways for those objects to leave the world in exchange for status, stats, more expensive objects, etc. Gold and magic are therefore always valuable, and inflation can be tweaked by changing the two rates.
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