TTH: So, first question (and the question that’s probably on everyone’s mind) – even though you’re not gonna talk dates today (sorry to disappoint anyone), can you just talk a little bit about where you’re at in the development process – you guys seem to be playing it pretty close to the vest, just taking your time on things, making sure things are going smoothly & perfectly before you jump, let everyone jump into beta. But maybe if you just talk a little bit about where you’re at in the development process?
JGE: Well, we’re somewhere between the beginning and the end. ((laughs…Khatie says “So mean…”)) Honestly speaking… where we are really is we have most of the core features finished; we’re still kind of heavy in production, working on content – all those kinds of things. But obviously as we go into testing, which we have been doing more recently, you know, issues come up and we address those & those reveal other problems that have to do with – some of them are easy some of them are hard & so we just keep working thru that until… we feel that the game is ready to do. So in essence, our primary goal hasn’t changed, which is: don’t release the game until its ready. I understand that people get restless because they want it to be ready sooner than, maybe, it will be. ((laughter)) I know I’m one of those people, but that’s kind of how it works.
TTH: So it’s pretty important to you to have the game pretty much ready before you let people into open beta and so forth.
JGE: Yeah, I mean it’s just one of those things where I feel like if you don’t do that you get punished very badly when you release & I don’t really want that.
TTH: Fair enough. Hermann, I think it was in the making of the Jumpgate video you released a little while back… you talked about the Han Solo appeal of the game. I was excited to see when you were doing the most recent press release, the different ship types, we could see that under the Cargo heading there was a little bit mention about smuggling in JGE. I was wondering if you could just talk about that side of the game. What will players be able to do besides dogfights and that sort of thing? (and fights with capital ships and hive ships etc.)
JGE: Right, so combat is certainly the sort of key, driving motivator as it is a space action game. But there are a lot of support rules that we’ve got sort of built out. On the one hand you have things like mining & manufacturing,… we engage, as everyone knows, in lots of speculation – the people here like in marketing & so on probably don’t like how open I am with speculating ((talking thru grin)) so that’s one of those things, right, where… you kind of feel like you want to be able to take stuff from “here” to “here” and feel like you’re doing stuff that you’re not supposed to do. The Jumpgate – any kind of sci-fi universe kind of gives you sort of a natural desire to do that. The original game had Hyperial -- we’re making Hyperial kind of more “piratey” in the game, & so there’s more opportunities to have missions that involve that kind of activity to give you a kind of flavor in the game. Now whether that becomes an official mechanic where I’m actually going & stealing something & moving it somewhere else for some profit, that actually gets into game design issues & so you have to be careful when you cross those kinds of boundries. That’s where those ideas sort of came from.
TTH: Ok. Looking forward to E3, & we know PvP is going to be the centerpiece of what you guys are doing with your E3 presence this year. That’s early next month. Can you just kind of paint in broad strokes how PvP will be applied in JGE? Will it be more like a sovereignty control of space kind of idea that we’ll see in a game like EVE or it more of a lobbing instance kind of multiplayer scenario combat kind of thing?
JGE: Right now it’s both. I’m surprised it was as much of a controversial issue as it was. Basically it really is, *really* fun. We just did like a two hour PvP test today for what we’re going to show at E3. It’s basically this really cool, like, interior map where you fly around and right now we have lights & heavies in there & they fly really differently & have different kinds of weapons & stuff; it’s really cool. And then you go to these focal points that you take over – you hold them and you get points & whoever gets to 100 pt.’s wins & so that’s kind of traditional instance & it reminds me a lot of the way that I felt when I was playing Descent. You know, you’re really in these tunnels maneuvering around & flight becomes an important part of the game, whereas when you’re in open space it’s harder to sort of compress people & make the flight important, & so that’s really brought flight back to the forefront. Tuning the dynamics of the different ships becomes very important. So those are a blast – we have a lot of fun playing that. Another instance map is the 3 Carrier Map, that I think we’ve talked about, right? Each side has this massive ship. You can take down the other person’s ship. I think today we got something like 150 bots in there & it was just crazy. You just see ships everywhere & they’re all fighting – it’s really awesome. So that’s that side… and then I’d say about a week ago we started doing testing on the sort of “public” PvP; you basically capture these points and they turn into stations ((installations?)) that your team now controls, and then you defend that point from other people who try to come and take it back. The scale of fighting is what I think is so cool. You have like these comparatively little ships & there are these huge installations that you’re kind of fighting over, & that reveals, then, on your map, so there’s this idea of conquest of space – that you take over the different sectors by controlling these installation points which was a really cool thing to do in the original game.
TTH: Very cool. Well, we look forward to seeing more of that at E3 next month. At this point, I’m going to go ahead & let you guys start typing in your questions. So Hermann, hearkening back to Auto Assault, and hopefully enough time has passed that we can talk about that game, hehe – there was a real kind of identity with your chassis in that game. You kind of felt an affinity for the vehicle that you had and kind of leveled up with, & you kept attaching bits to it as you leveled & it looked cooler & cooler and, you know, different paint schemes. How customize-able will the ships be in JGE? Are we gonna be able to… are we going to grow out of them fairly quickly? Or will we just kind of keep adding to it?
JGE: There are lots of different things you can do to modify your ship, and we’re actually, actively working on more ways to do that. The idea was… backing up a sec -- you were talking about Auto Assault, right -- it was the same kind of problem where you identify with a vehicle. People say that’s really hard to do because people don’t identify with vehicles necessarily… and so we try to, without making the crazy thing of making a 3D character that’s running around that implies even more dev time and more resources & so on. We’ve tried to create more of an identity in the game, but with regard to your ship, what we’ve done is: we decided it would be better to make it more like a collection aspect. In the original game you could only have one ship at a time, and that has lots of limits. So now, instead, you have a hanger & you can own a bunch of different ships from different categories. You can switch between them as you see fit – as you more or less unlock them. Now it becomes a game of collecting all the different kinds of ships. Now what we can do is, in terms of variety, we can make tons of heavy fighters & light fighters… scout vessels & bombers & things like that. Cargo ships, miners… & then we can give them different kinds of advantages, so, you could make one miner that has, maybe, a larger cargo space… maybe this one has heavier armor to defend itself while it’s out there mining in dangerous areas, and so we can really make tons and tons of ships that each have different personalities. If we want to we could also (and we’ve done some of this, right…) make very different ships for, say, you might get a reward for lots of missions with Solrain, & you can get this type of ship – it looks different than all the other ones, you know? As we’ve gone forward, we’ve realized that what’s really cool is when ships look radically different. You want a really different looking profile; you very different looking colors & everything else, as opposed to trying to make them look identifiable, which makes everything look the same. The customization is going to come largely from this collection aspect of getting lots of different ships. And then its up to the players to sort of configure the equipment, right? Which lasers & missiles & so on you want. One of the things that we’re sensitive about, and it’s something that I think is kind of a problem with a lot of MMO’s, is that it’s cool to see all the other equipment on you character, of course, but then you run into this weird problem where, like, the aesthetics may not be in line with the functionality. So you’re gonna use this awesome cape, let’s say, because the cape gives you the protection that you want? But you have this cape that you don’t like the way it looks. There are games that have solved that kind of problem, and so with more of a collection aspect maybe we can mitigate some of that.
TTH: Okay. Very cool. So, Ruben, do you have our first question? / Alright, so I’ve got a question from Scalding, who says that, “The economy will remain healthy because players will always be upgrading. This means that new equipment will need to come out across all levels, and furthermore all new equipment must be qualitatively better than previously available. How do you intend to do this by maintaining a game where skill is the deciding factor, rather than equipment?”
JGE: Well, I mean, it is the deciding factor, assuming that people have similar equipment. A lot of FPS’s are going down this road, right, where you basically have kind of like – you get progressively more powerful with your character, but it’s still a skill based game. That’s not, kind of, a new concept. As far as the economy goes, I’ve been reading a lot of stuff where people are like, “Well, if there’s no item destruction, how can you possibly have a balanced economy… “. You know, you have to take stuff out of the game somehow, that is true, however my point back is that the reason the real economy works is because new stuff gets poured into the top, not because stuff breaks. I don’t buy a new TV because my old TV broke; I buy a new TV because my friends all bought new TV’s and having a new TV is cooler than my old TV. Now, eventually my old TV does break. And so it turns out that the real economy works based on driving consumer demand by having new, cooler stuff come out. And it turns out MMO’s work really the same way, right? Even games like EVE that have item destruction, huge amounts of resources go into building that new, cool stuff that comes out with the next patch because that’s what everyone wants. Why do they want it? Because it’s new & more powerful. It’s kind of an inescapable thing that you have to keep pouring new stuff in, otherwise people are going to leave. And so I think it’s a perfectly valid thing. Now, you have to do things that prevent, you know, infinite recycling. That’s where the sort of Item Binding technology in MMO’s came from. You need to be able to say, “I have the Super Laser of Death” or whatever – I can’t just give that to all my buddies & it recycles infinitely. So you have to have… you can’t let people trade certain things. That’s how you create value around the item, right? That’s just kind of the way it works. It’s a bit artificial, but oh well.
TTH: Hehe, okay, DarkHorse asks, “Can you elaborate on the mining system? Are the nodes going to be easy to find or will it be more like an Easter egg hunt?
JGE: Umm… it’s a little bit of both. I mean, it’s a scaling thing. So in the beginning, the common nodes are everywhere & you can just go & mine common nodes all day long, and then as you go up they get rarer and rarer. Then, of course, you want to do stuff, like put them in areas that are dangerous. You can be the safe miner & go mine the common stuff or you can try to go to more dangerous areas and, you know, mine the other kind of stuff. The mining system, the way we designed it, is very flexible. We can define arbitrary #’s of nodes that carry arbitrary %’s of things. We could say, “Oh, there’s new type of node & it has these 4 rare materials and they only drop, you know, 1% of the time” or whatever, and then you need 50 of them to build this one item. And so, that creates a high-end sort of manufacturing curve I think you need, to appease the sort of people who are *really* dedicated crafters so they feel like crafting, so they’re rewarded for their diligence. But at the same time you don’t want the person at the very beginning to have to spend six hours to build some basic gun. By controlling the rarity in a dynamic way like that, we’re able to sort of accommodate both of those people. I know people here already – Mike spent a couple of days mining already for some reason, hahaha, even though it’s an internal server & we wipe characters all the time.
TTH: Okay, I’ve got a question from Straker who asks, “Will we be able to craft modified versions of weaponry & shielding, for example: to give a weapon extra range, or lose some range for a damage boost?”
JGE: There’s nothing right now specifically planned around that. Again, this is where there’ll be five thousand comments on the message board… it’s how far to you go with an item in a skill-based game. You have to constantly balance that, and so the minute you get to things that are sort of unpredictable like that, you can potentially cross that barrier and turn the game too much into a new game. So right now, for example, if you craft/manufacture a gun, each gun that is manufactured is the same. Now, we have done some stuff to try to make manufacturing more interesting so that you can sort of, like, rarely get something that’s more powerful, like a Crit System for manufacturing, if you will, but those will also be the same, so there won’t be this thing of like, “Well *my* gun that I manufactured can shoot a little bit further than your gun, but yours can be a little bit more powerful than my gun…” – you know what you’re gonna get.
TTH: Okay, Science is asking, “What kind of restrictions will be placed on character names? Will they be allowed to use special characters such as underscores, spaces, Unicode symbols, & punctuation?”
JGE: Right now I think it’s just straight, regular characters. I think we’ve deliberately blocked all the random, special characters. You know, I mean, to me it’s sort of like, I hate that you wind up doing that stuff as a developer because I like people to be creative, but people wind up doing all kinds of stuff to try to break your system that way, so most games have gone to that method, at least in names. Maybe for things like the equivalent of guilds or whatever we could allow for all kinds of stuff, because it just doesn’t matter as much. Yes, including underscores.
TTH: Okay I’ve got a question from PhoenixGSU, “Previously it was stated that we could obtain custom paint schemes from certain missions & whatnot. Would it be possible to add our own emblems or insignia to our ships?”
JGE: Not right now, although, one of the things I want to do is, if anyone’s played, I think it was Forza 2 that started doing this, is let people paint pretty much whatever they want. That would be, for me, the perfect dream. It’s just one of those things where, like hehe, if people are upset because we keep saying the game’s coming out soon, adding a feature like that makes soon a lot longer, haha, and so it’s just one of those things that… I always felt like, in Auto Assault we let people do primary & secondary colors, and it was okay but it really wasn’t all that awesome, and so if we do a lot of ship customization, I’d rather make it go all the way and make it as cool as like a Forza type of system, as opposed to kind of saying, “Yeah you can paint your ship one of these 18 colors,” so that we can put “Ship Painting” on the side of the box, but it’s not really all that satisfying.
TTH: Okay, Sepomat asks about Wild Bill’s mapping & exploration thread
http://us.jumpgateevolution.com/foru...ead.php?t=1268 which I imagine a lot of people here have some familiarity with, “Will players be able to add new sectors to the game by their actions, if not at launch, maybe later, after release?”
JGE: Yeah, I mean, I think that stuff is really interesting – it depends on how you want to do it. There’s full player-made content, right, which is like, I make a sector and you can fly thru it which is really cool, but it’s a logistical nightmare, just from a development point of view. Now there’s other stuff, like well, this sector’s locked & once you do all these activities it opens it up, which I think is a really cool idea…
The downside of it that if your game has more than one shard, you immediately get into this weird problem of on this shard the area is open and on this one it isn’t, and so now you get all these people yelling at you that on this shard they can’t get to that stuff but those guys can, and that’s unfair, and you get these kinds of confusing problems, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe you say, well, that opens up – in order to open it up you need to do all of these other things & if people don’t cooperate & do that then too bad? I also suspect that whenever you do things like that, people do it a lot faster than developers think. I’m amazed at how often we’ll do stuff, & we’ll be like, “Oh yeah, we’re gonna put this thing in there and it’s going to take forever for people to do,” and then like 2 days later they’ve got it beat, you know? It’s just amazing… how good people are at exploiting the systems that you’ve created in ways that you didn’t intend.
TTH: Beebs ((Beach? Apologies to inquirer)) has a question, “Will there be a kind of consumables that boost your stats & power for a certain period of time?” (ITS GODDAMN BIBJE

)
JGE: It depends what you mean. There are things like, right now there are… people know what these things are, right, they’re the Flash Fires, & you can bind them to keys and you have them on your ship, you fire them & they give you a boost of speed which is different from the traveling boost – the traveling boost only works when you’re not in combat; you can’t fire while you’re doing it. This is a specific combat boost. We’ve talked about doing similar things like shield boost, maybe armor repairs, things like that. What there isn’t, and I want to be specific about this, is there’s not like a +10 to accuracy buff. Right, like when it comes to aiming it has to maintain skill. And so as far as we can go with it without breaking that part of it, we’ll probably explore more systems like that.
TTH: Okay, JumpgateFan asks, “Can someone become Emperor for the Octavius race? If so, how is he or she selected?” -- & someone else had a related question about the real-time PvP scoreboard, if you could speak to those two things.
JGE: Voted for Emperor no, but that’s a very cool idea. I’m a big fan of the whole endgame sort of political diplomacy systems; we don’t have anything like that right now, but yeah that’s a great idea. I think you’d have to maybe tier it out more, so you have like somebody at the top and then there are, say, advisors or something that get voted on by these groups… maybe in order to be able to vote you have to do these certain activities. That sounds like a great endgame type of mechanic, you know, and then work out how people get advantages from it. I’m sure we could talk forever about that kind of thing. What was the other question, sorry ?
TTH: About real time scoreboarding. Who’s the top PvP player, that sort of thing.
JGE: Oh, ok, I see. In terms of that, we have the stats for open PvP player kills, & that would include like the battle for space type of scenario, which are public areas. I saw some questions about that earlier so I want to clear that up a little bit. The beacon control – that is public space. That’s not instance at all. If you go there you see what’s there. There’s no version 1,2,3,4,5… there’s one control of the beacon @ any given time, & there’s only one beacon in that area, period. That’s completely separate from the sort of battlespace scenarios which have nothing to do with beacon control. The stats on those are also separate & I think that’s very important because people feel very strongly about the areas of the game they really want to achieve in, & so there’s people – they’re just going to sit in battlespace & fight & fight & fight. So it’s very easy for us to create a leader board for that, we can create a leader board for taking over beacons, there’ll be different stats for PvP kills in space that have nothing to do w/battle space… & then of course there are all sorts of other things like missile accuracy, gun accuracy; there’s a lot of different ways we can slice that up – we can do it by ships so people who are in heavy ships that have missiles vs. light fighters w/energy weapons & so on. ((Mike R.))-- Yeah & just to answer that we’ve actually got alot of this leader board stuff on the website. In testing at the moment we’ve got our friends & family guys, so we’re just kind of tidying that up a bit and putting some gumph on it. Yeah, we should have that in time for launch. ((Khatie)) – Some nice what on it? Did you say “gumph”? ((Mike)) – I said gumph. ((all laugh heartily; someone, ”What the **** is that…?”)) That’s an English thing, sorry haha. ((Khatie))-- I’m like, “…wow, what are they putting on their leader boards…” ((Hermann talking thru smile))-- I don’t know about you guys but I don’t want gumph on my leader boards! ((all guffaw)) ((Khatie)) – You’re gonna get in trouble from Ben; I already did.
TTH: Ten Ton Hammer *is* live…
Female: Uh oh.
TTH: Okay, I’ve got a question from Cobra5Mil, “How will exploration work? Will there be a fog of war type system that will let you map out asteroids in other locations after you visit that spot? Also will you be able to add notes &/or waypoints to your own personal map, like this area has (x) type of ore?”
JGE: ((Hermann))—The way that it works right now is there’s a map, a universe map, & it zooms in to each different series of sectors & you see them in like, & I’m gonna make it sound really unsexy, but basically like dots on this pretty-looking background, & when you roll over ‘em you get information about ‘em. And then, you know, you can travel to each one; we’re kind of undecided as to whether we should tell ppl about stuff in advance, because it’s cool to kinda see, “Oh yeah I wanna go there because that’s where this stuff is happening,” or whether we should just keep that a secret and force you to go there, which creates an exploration aspect. I can see the arguments for both; I’m a big fan of the exploration side. There’s no fog of war, per say, like where you’re talking about a WoW-style map where this area is grayed out and then you walk over here and all of a sudden *boom*: it’s revealed & you get 50 exp. pt.s… there’s nothing like that right now. Instead, what we’re trying to do is make it so that there’s different, interesting things to do in pieces of the map, right, so we could hide something over here, hide something over there… as far as waypoints go you can open up the map & right click & set waypoints that you can say, “I want to travel from this area to that area in ,you know, oldschool space style & you just follow those waypoints there. There’s no custom notes right now, but that’s also a pretty cool idea.
TTH: Timmah asks, “Could you talk a little bit about the endgame and what we can see there. As well as what you have in mind for future patches that will enhance the endgame after official launch?”
JGE: Right, so endgame: there’s a few things that are there; I think, of critical importance is, the public open space PvP. That drives a lot of what ppl wanna do. So if that’s not really fun to do over & over again & if there’s not a reason to control this part of space & you lose it over time & get it back, then there’s a significant # of ppl that will maybe not even get to the top – they’ll just go away. Then, um, the other side of it is that you need to have sort of very difficult-to-achieve tasks. This can be things like Conflux hive ships &… I don’t know if this should be like a permanent thing or if we should make it like a time-based thing, but we’ve discussed having things like any sort of endgame regions you could have monstrous #’s of conflux that are invading an area, and that happens on sort of like a nightly or weekly basis, or a special event kind of thing. Because that’s something that ppl come there, & then of course you could give them a reason to do it, so there’s an award like this ship & we’re only going to give it away this one time & it’ll never come back again. Or this cool piece of equip. that you really wanna get – collectors’ items & things like that, so… really the PvE & PvP, that’s really big & then, of course, you also need I think (cuz I’m kind of a meta-game player) you need this sort of high-end manufacturing stuff. I want to spend a lot of time building things in the game, & collecting all the pieces that I need order to go & get them, & so I think those 3 pieces represent what the endgame has to be. To me the most important part is that you’re able to, with some predictable frequency, release new content into the game. New areas to explore, new PvE & PvP things for ppl to do, new stuff to make, new ships to get and, I mean, the natural tendency is to get bigger & bigger & bigger. At some point maybe you want to add things like this is speculating for future features. Some of the feature that I’ve heard over and over & over again are: multiple player being together in a big ship, flying around & fighting, so that’s a big one… the other one that I hear a lot bigger is you know, planet that you can go land on and explore. The other one that’s really high on the list is player-owned stations, right? We’ve got lots of ideas for modular station designs so that you can actually create, literally, your own parts of space & put stuff out there that other players can go & interact with. Ideally you want to get to this scenario where your players are creating content for themselves & each other. It’s hard to do that, and like I said, if I had time & resources I’d add *all* those things right now, hehehe, because I think they’re *all* awesome.
TTH: Okay I’ve got a question from Glenario ((Glenarielle? sp?)) who’s asking, “Can you tell us a little info. about the guild system – will the guilds be an important part of the endgame, & are there objectives… specific guild objectives or will the guilds be more of like a chat system? (like in other MMO’s)”
JGE: Yeah, this is another one of those sort of, you know, terrible time-vs.-feature sort of things. Ideally, what guilds will certainly be (squads) is you’ll name them, they have a hierarchy, you can see the name of the person’s guild when they’re flying around, of course, there’s special chat channels, voice-chat channels for that guild, you can see where ppl are, what lvl they are, what they’re doing… so that’s the basic functionality. We’ll certainly have that. Going up the ladder of speculation, guild banks I think are an important thing so that you can share resources & money, going *further* up the ladder of speculation something we encountered was group manufacturing kinds of things would be really cool, so that you have different ppl kind of aspiring to make stuff, & then of course group medals, things like that, you know, group achievements so that they’re guild-types of achievements, so that you can say, “Well, get 100 members, this happens… these guys working together can open up this area to go fight this stuff, but if you’re squad doesn’t have 50 ppl in it, you can’t get access to that. So there’s a lot of different things we could do there; how many of those things we get in before release, I don’t know.
TTH: Okay, there’s a bunch of questions about the release of the game in terms of, I guess, kinda like the marketing angle. D-Hack ((sp?)) was asking if there will be a Mac release of the game…? Doomtron was asking if they get a month free w/purchase & a free trial, & someone was asking about digital download. Are these questions you can answer right now or should we expect some info. soon?
JGE: ((Mike))—So I could answer a bit more about this: Mac support – we haven’t done any specific work on that; I know that a few guys in our friends & family are using Mac’s & operating systems to get the game running & that’s been quite positive so far. Re: digital downloads, we will be having digital downloads I believe we may be going with Steam for that, so you might be able to grab it on Steam. The month free trial, yes. You’ll get your month’s free subscription when you buy the box, if you get the other editions which I’m probably not supposed to talk about you might get a bit more time. Yeah watch their website for that one; I’m sure Hermann & Khatie will be talking about that in great detail. Was there any other questions? Did I get everything there?
TTH: I think you got it all.
JGE: ((Khatie))—There will be different levels of membership that you can buy – different packaging; we just saw it so it hasn’t been finalized & approved, you know, Net Devil just sent their ideas to Codemasters so we’ll learn more about that in the months before launch for sure.