KTAM Interview with Trick Dempsey

Sunday, July 21 KTAM interviewed Defiance Lead Developer Trick Dempsey where they talked about current development tasks, upcoming DLC and questions from the community.

Questions

Current responsibilities

For the initial release of the game he was in charge of making certain that they had the storytelling methods available to them to tell the story in the most effective way possible. That involved writing the specs and maintained a lot of the work for how do characters talk in the game, if they use the radio, how the data recorders work and when they are given to you during the game. Decide what they are going to tell the player and when, and when it will be most effective.

Currently works on encounter standards, and more complicated methods of engaging players inside of the world. Like creating standards that aren't just shooting or hold to interact.

Data Recorder crossover complications

Worked with the writers of the TV show to make sure that anything they established in the game that it was also consistant with the show. They also had the TV series in their hands and received updates when it was edited so they could collaborate on pieces of fiction that the other side wanted it avoided.

The Plague Inconsistancies

The first stage was just sick people around town, they wanted to make certain they established it would take longer to incubate than it was going to exist on the TV show. They wanted to keep it open for the afflicted to appear on the show, but they knew that action sequences as long as it would take to take down a plaguer and keep them with a consistant with health and capabilities would maybe disrupt the flow of the TV show.

They made certain they established the development of the symptoms and how to cure it. They knew the show didn't really want to go down the route of shooting zombies, it wasn't where the narrative of the show was going.

Constraints with TV limitations

Making a new character is a very long process in the game, and quick in comparison for the show. Making new enemies for the game which they can use over and over again is great for the game, but gunfights are very expensive for the TV show.

They always have to keep in mind what is easy for the game and easy for the TV show.

Do you think we will see Sensoth as a playable race?

We do like adding more playable races. It is expensive for us to do. They are one of our favorite races. They put a player balance in pvp because they are so much larger, their size is a big deal for hit detection and balance. 

It's certainly possible, in the short term the Castithans were enough of a headache and it will be some time before they add another one.

Dark Matters involvement in The Plague

It was in Dark Matters interest in preventing a cure to be reached, as they want to see the humans downfall. I wish we messaged that better.

Voice development

When we were still in development voice was relatively cheap, as far as production cost goes. So we could have lots of data recorders that referenced events and characters that the player didn't interact with. Now that people have to patch the game, sound is veryexpensive as they have to send the data to players and don't want to fill up their harddrives and make them wait longer to patch.

What were some of the weaker points in your delivery of Episodic content?

One of the things that we didn't get the chance to do (essentially ran out of time), was to make Gretch's incursion into the game world more significant. We wanted to actually have the rogue E-Rep soldiers coming in and doing sieges early on, but the sieges weren't ready in time. Or have a more significant presence inside the game world.

When it is just missions that is just 15-20 minutes of players lives and they are difficult to replay. So they wanted to be able to add more in-world content from the Manhunt, from the Rynn missions. Replace some of the populations in one of the other mission areas like Kenn Farm which doesn't get much play apart from plague siege. Take that over with Gretchs soldiers and piper devices and have that play out as something that people can play over and over again.

The other big thing that we feel pretty bad about, due to us updating the siege content for the Volge. The sieges for the plague no longer function, so we couldn't turn those on and leave them on while we were developing the significant improvements to their replay value.

We really wanted to take the time to improve it like improving your score and have better ratings and more significant changes in each of the events for replay.

The Manhunt and Echelon in TV

Sometimes episodes get edited down. Essentially they found that the pacing of the episode had more dramatic punch the way that they had it play out.

Black Jonah is an Echelon mercenary, but apparently got paid better money by the Earth Republic to do one job than it was to capture and bring in Nolan.

Do you have plans to bridge the seasons in the game?

The big DLCs are coming in, and each of those will allow us to quietly slip in new episodic content in the patch and release that over time to build up the second season.

We are going to show the transition and major events which are going to impact season 2. A lot of them are going to start in The Bay or will start affecting The Bay.

Is there anything going to happen with the New Freedom?

Colonel Grant is not a conqueror, if he was asked to take over The Bay he would say no. With Gretch and his commanding officer would definitely be all for that.

From a practical standpoint, it would confusing to new players to find a phased version of the New Freedom, as it would make the beginning of the game make less sense. It would be a logistical nightmare.

It is easier and more bang for our buck for it to remain as it is, and instead build up other areas of the game later, and build up new areas perhaps for players to play in as the new episodic content comes online.

Were there any improvements made for Castithans that didn't make it into launch races?

They got a lot of love from modeling and costuming, a lot of their outfits incorporate their religious and classic iconography, so a lot of their outfits and hairstyles are in keeping with that.

Another feature that didn't make it into launch, was the ability to choose between 6 voices for your character.

Castithan story mission line open to Castithans only?

Open to anyone who has purchased with the DLC. Dialog in the quests will change slightly based on the race you are playing.

Battle Arenas

They are essentially an upgraded version of the rampages that exist inside of the game, but rather than being constrained to the outside world which needed to allow vehicles to go through and that sort of thing. The new arenas are entirely designed to allow enemies to showcase themselves in the best way but also allow player mobility.

A lot of our instanced areas for PvP were much more detailed from an architectural standpoint and now we are doing that since we are inside of an enclosed space we can have traps and various interactive environment objects and all of this while trying to track a high score.

How many people will be able to participate in the battle arenas?

Initially at the launch it will be one person at a time, it will be a time trial high score type of thing. We have the capacity to expand and take that further.

Modding Charge Blades

Variety of models for charge blades with different statistics, the only mods that can be applied to colour change the weapon.

Raptor Turret

It's not a balance thing, we've been interested in doing it.

One of the big technical achievements that we pulled off in the game was having 200-600 players all playing inside the same world at once with firearms. But you may have noticed that when grouping with someone in a vehicle that the location, because of the speed that they move, is not entirely accurate at all times. Because of this discrepency we didn't want vehicle combat inside the world until we get that precision improved.

We are working on that, because we are working on improving the vehicle experience, but until we've gotten it as solid as it is inside a PvP map, which we can cheat a bit as we can get the reporting to be a lot faster as there are less players. We really can't honestly release a vehicle with weapons until we've got that to be split-second accuracy.

Another thing that we've all wanted is to be able to carry a pistol on an ATV.

Charge Weapons

There are going to be 9 new charge weapon types, 3 shotguns, 3 sniper rifles and 3 pistols. Each of those 3 intepret charging in a different way. For example a burst fire sniper rifle which will fire a number of rounds at once after being charged or a pistol which charges up which makes the area of impact bigger and applies knockback.

Mods with the DLC

Clearly one of the big problems with our economy right now is the fact that mods you can acquire 150 of them from side missions without using a lockbox. With side missions you get such drasticly variant quality. 

We are working on improving the shopping experience. Also other things we are doing is making sure the stats make sense for all the mods and weapons.

Military Academy PvP Map

We've been working on it for a long time, we really hoped we could get it to come out with the main game. We couldnt get either the playability or the art for it up to the level that we wanted at the time.

Dueling

It happens in the open world, which could be a little confusing for people. You could set them up during an event or emergency.

Chat Changes

We are doing a massive chat improvement, we had so many chat problems during the launch of the game. We've expanded how private channels work being able to designate voice and text channels. We've added zone chat because there is an awful lot of information that needs to be conveyed across a region.

You will be able to make your own chat filters, but you can create private chat channels.

It has its drawbacks as tabbed interface takes up valuable parts of the screen in a shooter, but we've got the ability to hide and close that down.

UI Improvements

We are fixing a lot of issues, there have been hardware and software issues causing a trouble with clan chat.

Customization Changes

Current plan is to give everyone the chance to change their appearance once. After that it will be a Bit Store thing to change their appearance.

DLC Patch

The Volge sieges that will occur in a select few places like the plague sieges. But now we have a powerful scoring system inside of it which created randomisation so there can be different footholds at different times in various areas, so the shape of those conflicts can change. We've done massive updates to the behaviour and animations and appearance of all the Volge so they can be better more dynamic enemies for everyone.

Added a load of Dark Matter arkfalls which culminate in the battle against the monolith. I like that he has an area voiding attack, he has a lot of dangerous threatening things but he telegraphs them effectively. It shows one of our more complicated environmental interactions, we now have dark matter extractors that extract nanites from ark hulks that fall from the sky. They effectively get a powerup pill, both dark matter and the ark hunters can move fast, do more damage, a boost to all your abilities.

Some of the hellbug arkfalls you will see skitterlings eat some gulanite and you will see them evolve into something bigger.

It has been teased about Arkfalls like the show

It's awesome but I'm not allowed to talk about it.

Ark Hunter Identities

One of the things we try to address is the core identity of an ark hunter. We've got 3 identifies that come with that, a monster hunter, bounty hunter or treasure hunter. We've noticed that a lot of the playing of these characters those 3 distinct roles don't come across as well as we'd like.

So the big things we're trying to get to is trying to show you being that hunter aspect of it. So a better tracker or more capable engineer, or better person than everyone else. That will be the core focus for the next few DLCs. To get that core fanasy fulfilled for our players.

Explanation for the Volge Siege

We are definitely bringing in things to explain why the Volge are there. Primarily in the form of Data Recorders, a few voice over samples from concerned characters to mention and explain what is going on. We do put a lot of that under the EGO.

Pursuits

We love using Pursuits to drive people to do things, although we are looking to re-engineer some of the pursuits so they encourage more positive player behaviour not just to kill things.

Without a social hub does it cause problems when players do gather, or are there any plans to introduce a social hub?

For a long time in development we had a social area that was Aru Shondus place, originally that was a much larger area. The problem we ran into there, while players can gather in large numbers as you can tell in arkfalls, there are some constraints into how many we can put into one single place. So we split up the social areas amonst the major hubs inside each of the zones, so we could get more division onto the places on different areas. Also to provide insentive to cross the badlands and fight through enemies and face the emergencies.

We are always discussing plans to create a major social area and the best way for us to do that. And until we have more significant interactions for our players to do with eachother, systems to support them needing their assistance to do some specific thing. We don't really have a use for it.

Being able to put your gun away would drastically improve the performance of those areas. There are serious constraints you work under when you are sending a lot of stuff over a network or operating on a console.

More outfits

We are adding new outfits all the time through the store, and adding more new outfits with the new DLC in. A major stepping stone is players default to a base skin and outfits in arkfalls due to dedicating so much memory to seeing the enemies and characters. We are working on a higher priority that you can see more people and how they actually look.

One of outfits we all want to give people, is Sukars tophat and goggles outfit. Some of that is a technical constraint. Another part is that we are always working on other things.

What is the end-game plan?

We are building the end-game (retention), making it more valuable. New types of content that isn't just grinding arkfalls. All endgame players are asking for raids, all players who ask for sieges because they brought in so many players. We have another type of content that will pull in large numbers of players and give them a unique experience.

One of the mechanical issues I am working on right now, that every time an additional player shows up that it has a positive impact on your experience. We have some sections of the game to retrofit a better mechanic, for example the hellbug arkfalls when people kill the skitterlings.

Once we have done that we can start using these group experiences as a major driver for improving your character. Providing unique to that event rewards. We also have plans to make clans more significant part of your experience. Some of that will be from traditional MMOs but look at things like Call of Duty or other big shooter games to look at what encourages people to group up, make clans and make larger social experience.

What is being done about PvP and Co-op maps booting people out at the end?

We've worked on that right now. One of the main problems is that they manifested as a variety of different bugs which made them really hard to track down. They were problems of scale it was the existance of thousands of players in the main world. We had no test environment where it happened, each time we had reports we got more data and that led us to finding the root of the problem.

DLCs Timescale

All plan to come out before season 2.

Items with redundant synergies

That should be drastically reduced already, and we are doing a major revamp of bonuses that go to our weapons and their synergies. As well as the accessibility of synergies. After running numbers you are more likely to win the Calefornia lottery than you were to get 4 matching synergies with a weapon with a matching synergy. We are doing some revamping to make that easier and you dont end up with quartermaster synergy on BMG.

How they choose which weapons to nerf?

There are two things we do. Make certain to track what are the popular loadouts to PvP. It is how we made the discovery about a certain Infector. We look at numbers, we hear complains and we investigate them.

The SAW nerf was a big deal for all of us, SAWs were doing well over twice as much effective damage as every other weapon in the game. They are still more effective at medium and long range than any assault rifle. They just aren't doing an exponential amount more than other weapons.

Salvage Costs

We are hoping to time that along with the DLC. One of the big changes that went in already, was the power rating was factored heavily in the cost of salvaging things. A bunch of mission items were way easier to upgrade than their like powered counterparts. We are doing an economy revamp when it comes to salvage and it should be hitting with the DLC so it can be noticed.

Sight mods slots on BMGs and Infectors

We are definitely handling that. We are also allowing mods to weapons that go inside the sights slots that don't add sights into the guns.

Clan Pursuits / Events

One of the things that does not exist inside the game right now and we are definitely trying to improve is that once you are a member of the clan is that you can be improving your clan in whatever activities you take part in, providing benefits to other members of your clan but worthwhile to join groups to reap the benefits of those activities.

Video

Links

• KTAM Website
• KTAM YouTube Channel