Gamespy: LiveWire interview E3 2004

By The LiveWire Team | Jul 21, 2004

Sony Online Entertainment’s chief creative officer talks Galaxies and Jump to Lightspeed.

IGN/GameSpy teamed up for the 2004 E3 tradeshow with help from hosts David Lawrence (“The David Lawrence Show,” “Net Music Countdown”) and GameSpy’s own Sean “Spiff” Flinn, to probe the minds of several industry insiders, developers, and publishers via GameSpy Arcade. They took your questions and had them answered. You can even download footage of the real interviews with a visit to FilePlanet.

Now that the show has wrapped up, however, and we’ve had time to soak it all in, we’ve transcribed each information-packed interview. Read on! We guarantee there’s tons of facts and figures that are bound to whet your appetite.

E3 2004 – Wednesday, May 12th: Day 1

David Lawrence: As chief creative officer of Sony Online Entertainment, people walk around and grab you and go, “What’s up next?”

Koster: Well, sometimes.

David Lawrence: Do you have people that run interference for you? Do you have people that have people that run interference for you?

Koster: I don’t have people. I plunge in myself.

David Lawrence: You like that? You like talking to the people, right?

Koster: You know I try to hang out on the forums a lot. I try to do a lot of talking to people. It’s an entertainment business.

David Lawrence: Right.

Koster: You’re really trying to find ways to entertain people, keep them happy, and if you loose touch with what people are interested in, then you know… [shakes head]

David Lawrence: Right. The forums are obviously very active at GameSpy, and very active at IGN.

Koster: I read ’em.

David Lawrence: OK. So he’s hanging out there. What’s your slug on the chats? Is it just Raph? You have a name?

Koster: I usually just post under my own name. If I’m posting over on some of the different forums I’ve got a handle. On the Galaxies forum I’m Holocron.

David Lawrence: OK, there you go. If you have questions for Raph Koster get them into the chat. Tell us about Star Wars Galaxies.

Koster: Well you know it came out last year and the response has actually been really phenomenal.

David Lawrence: You are coming up on one year aren’t you? It’s in June, right?

Koster: Yeah it will be June. End of June will be one year. We’ve got Jump to Lightspeed coming out. That’s the next product in the line. Really excited about that.

David Lawrence: I notice you have the Stormtroopers keeping guard over here. Are they with you?

Koster: There’s posters for Star Wars Republic Commando right over there. I bet they’re with them.

David Lawrence: Gotcha.

Koster: That’s kinda scary. I’m being stalked by Stormtroopers!

David Lawrence: I think they are just positioned there. They knew you were coming.

Koster: Yeah, maybe.

David Lawrence: So you got Jump to Lightspeed coming up.

Koster: Yes, we’ve got Jump to Lightspeed coming out. It’s twitch-based space combat. Right off the bat you can get a ship. You can jump in and take off into space. There’s over fifteen different ships. There’s over a hundred different missions. It’s a twitch-based space sim with joystick, gamepad, or mouse control. And it integrates seamlessly with the ground game so it’s a pretty action-oriented experience. You’ve got your escort missions, you’ve got your seek-and-destroy mission, and so on.

It’s space sim-style, but you pick up loot you acquire and stuff you can attach directly to your ship. You can then take that stuff, take back to the ground game and trade with or whatever. There are going to be four new professions. Some of them are shipwrights who can make new ships … things like that. Anybody can get kind of the base ship, but after that you start needing to go to other players to get the cooler stuff.

David Lawrence: Right, very nice. So it’s not just playing against, but playing with?

Koster: Absolutely. There is an Imperial track, a Rebel track, and, of course, the neutral track where you don’t have to be on either side.

David Lawrence: We’ve got a ton of questions in the chat channel and we’ll get to those in just a second. You were talking about how the Galaxies series sort of developed.

Koster: Yeah, you know, we launched the original title near the end of June last year and over time we have been putting in a lot of additions. I think highlights last year were when vehicles went in. People immediately started setting up along the pod race course, which, in our time period, is already destroyed — but they replicated it!

David Lawrence: Doesn’t matter!

Koster: It doesn’t matter. They replicated it, anyway. They set it up again and they started racing speeder bikes around the course.

David Lawrence: Right.

Koster: Player cities have been huge. This allows people to put down their own buildings anywhere on the map that they can, elect a mayor, and set up laws for their cities. There’s over three thousand player cities in Galaxies today.

David Lawrence: There is a phrase in the business called “emergence,” where things happen that you had no idea were going to happen. Do you welcome that?

Koster: Absolutely. You know it’s really at the heart of MMO gaming. That’s what it’s about. It’s about players expressing themselves. When we put in player cities we expected to get mayors and some cities that would fight wars. What we didn’t expect was there to be a Miss Galaxies beauty pageant. But there was!

David Lawrence: Of course!

Koster: The Wookie won.

David Lawrence: Natural gravitation towards sexuality. That’s what it’s all about. Now for some questions. Spiff…

Spiff: TekkiCrust wants to if there are going to be any kind of ships available for players that are non-factioned.

Koster: Yes, there are. One thing you all need to know about Jump to Lightspeed is that any player can get a ship quickly and easily. It’s not going to be a really badass ship. It’s going to be something kinda basic, but any player is able to quickly get a base ship and get out into space. That means Rebel, Imperial, or neutral players. And there are missions tailored for each of these. There are different tracks for the different factions. So, if you start doing the Rebel or Imperial missions you will start advancing in the ranks on that side, but neutrals do have their own track. They can get a ship and get out there and start blowing stuff up.

David Lawrence: On both sides anybody’s fair game for them?

Koster: Actually, that is true. If you are taking smuggling missions, for example, it might be, [looks at Stormtrooper] forgive me … it might be something that is interdicted by the Empire or whatever.

David Lawrence: Hey, you’ve got to protect your cargo!

Koster: That’s right.

David Lawrence: OK, back to the chat.

Spiff: So Coal wants to know what are some features planned for players who have maxed out their skill points and their credits.

Koster: Well … you know we have been doing a lot of stuff. We’ve got this monthly publish plan that’s been going on and we have been slowly revamping a lot of some of the systems. So, for example, we’ve got a major Galactic Civil War update coming up, a big combat revamp where we are going to be going through and adjust the difficulty on a lot of stuff. I would actually expect to see the high-end difficulty of the game go up quite a bit. I think we are going to be seeing that. Combat will hopefully become much more tactical than it has been till now. I think we are paying a lot of attention. A lot of our user base is up at that high level and at SOE we’ve got a long tradition of cranking it up, making it a little tougher. I think you’ll see a lot of that.

David Lawrence: When you walk the floor here, or go to user conferences, or when you are online and you are sort of just touching the customer, have they come up with stuff that has made you change your ideas about the game?

Koster: You know it’s pretty common that customers will come up with things that the developers didn’t think of. That happens a lot. The fact is the developers are working on it all the time, but rarely do they have as much time to play as the users do. So the users often have a very different perspective on what is going on.

David Lawrence: Do you have an play rule for the developer? Like they have to spend at least fifteen to twenty percent of their time playing the game?

Koster: We do. We have a rule that all the developers have to play, every Friday. We call them Play Day. And the second half of the day is specifically set aside for stuff that’s not on the schedule — anything you saw that really bugged you this morning, go fix it.

David Lawrence: Right.

Koster: Right, so yeah, we absolutely try to keep them in the loop that way.

David Lawrence: Let’s go back to the Arcade and see what else we have for questions.

Spiff: HotHead wants to know will Wookies be able to wear the Jedi robes in the upcoming revamp

Koster: Actually, I don’t know the answer to that question.

Spiff: We stumped the guest! CloudStrife18 wants to know if the Empire in Star Wars Galaxies feels really greatly outnumbered, is there any balancing issues to fix this plan?

Koster: You know, it actually varies by server. So some servers have more Imperials than Rebels, others have more Rebels than Imperials. That said, a lot of the balancing isn’t necessarily about numbers. The Imperials get much better equipment, for example. You know they get AT-STs that you can command kind of like pets, or hirelings you can order around if you’re high enough rank. So, they do get some gear that really kind of overwhelms it. A well-commanded Imperial troop against a same level Rebel group, if the Imperials have the gear they can often win. That said, that is something we pay a lot of attention to as part of the GCW, one of the things in the revamp that we want to do. We obviously want to pay attention to the balancing, want to make sure that both tracks feel appealing.

David Lawrence: Again, do you dream about this stuff? Do you find that your dreams have changed because you’re in charge of projects like this? Because the way you speak is a language that is very specific to what you do.

Koster: It takes over my life. You know when we were working on Galaxies I literally had daydreams about sand patterns on Tattooine. I’d fall asleep at night going, “Oh the ripples on that look wrong, we need to get the rock to stick out more.” That kinda stuff. It takes over your brain. It’s kinda like the old Tetris dreams.

David Lawrence: Sure. Absolutely!

Koster: Where the whole world would look like blocks.

David Lawrence: The first time I used a mouse, I was mousing in my dreams and dragging and dropping. The very first time you use a graphical interface, it’s such a change in how you do things.

Koster: The game is rewiring your brain!

David Lawrence: That’s right. Back to the chat. What else we got?

Spiff: So, Tobanick wants to know if you’re going to be able to take ships out like vehicles and fly around planets. How seamless is the vehicle action going to be with action on the planets in the game?

Koster: We’re not doing atmospheric flight for Jump to Lightspeed. What we are doing is you go to a starport, you gotta check your vehicle out of a spaceport. And then we do zone you. It’s not seamless, unfortunately tech isn’t quite there yet to let you just fly around, come down to the atmosphere, burn up in it or whatever, come down land at the spaceport, and fly around. We are also a little bit nervous about letting people strafe X-Wings down the streets of Tattooine. That does make us a little nervous. It might be a little bit unbalancing for the guys on the ground. So right now you do zone.

David Lawrence: Use those great cannons! Can’t they just set those up? Can’t attack unless you’ve got cannons.

Koster: Well, the problem is you don’t have a cannon and the X-Wings come in anyway.

David Lawrence: Then they cant come in?

Koster: Might be a little hard.

David Lawrence: OK, fine. Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to jump the track there.

Koster: You know, there’s over ten space zones and the space zones are centered around the different planets. Once you head out into space you are then able to go to the different hyperspace points, navigate through those to get to different space zones, and once you’re in a different space zone by a different planet you are able to land from there. You just need to get to the local spaceport orbiting beacon so you can then head down to the planet. So it isn’t seamless in that sense. Part of it is because the mechanics are fairly different. On the ground it is an RPG combat system. But up in space it’s twitch-based. It’s literally you’ve got to aim, you got to click the mouse, shoot your bolts.

David Lawrence: Right!

Koster: So part of the goal here is what we’re trying to do with Galaxies is really encompass a variety of experiences that’s really been the name of the game since day one. We’ve got the social aspect of it, we’ve got the city building, we’ve got the economic system which a lot of people will play like a strategy game. You’ve got the RPG combat.

David Lawrence: Right. I’m going to ask you, sir, to help escort our guest out. [speaking to Stormtrooper] Make sure he’s safe and goes on to his next mission.

Koster: I’m not going to a cell block, am I?

David Lawrence: Nah, I don’t think so. He’s just going to go to the bathroom. Raph Koster from Sony Online Entertainment for Star Wars Galaxies, thanks for being on.

Koster: Thank you very much it was a pleasure.