PGW : The Secret World [Interview EN]
Interview
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INTERVIEW of GLEN 'FAMINE' SWAN Community Manager The Secret World- FUNCOM On Saturday 22nd October 2011, during the Paris Games Week show, I've had the great honor and pleasure of interviewing Mr Glen Swan, CM for Funcom. |
Oo : Could you present yourself ?
Glenn Swan : Yes, my name is Glen "Famine" Swan, i'm the Senior Assistant Community Manager for Funcom. I've been working there for 6 years and i'm in the community team of Secret World.
Oo : 6 years is quite a long time !
Glenn Swan : Yes I started on Dreamfall which is the base story to what the secret world is. I started as a tester and moved up from there, went into the community and social work.
Oo : We are here to talk about Secret World and, as the name says, there has been a lot of secrets about it, so I am here today to try to discover a bit more.
Let's start with the game itself. A big work has been made about the NPCs, hundreds have been motion captured and been given a voice. Do you roughly know how many people have been involved in this and how long it took to record all of it?
Glenn Swan Well I don't know the specifics but I can talk to you about everything that has been motion captured and voiced over. There has been hired actors to do them in english and possibly in other languages. It's very extensive and yes, it takes a long time. I think that at this point we have made most of it, I mean there are still more to do, especially to make different accent from around the world, but most of the missions and the important story line are done, voiced-over and motion captured.
Oo : Well it is quite uncommon, we don't see this in many MMOs.
Glenn Swan : Yes, because it is hard to do as it is very expensive. It has a lot to do with the technology that you have behind your game engine and a lot of our game engine has been refined since Age of Conan, when we started doing it in 2008. Unfortunately not all the game could be motion captured or voiced over and it was our goal to make sur that everything that we wanted voiced over and motion captured would be done.
Oo : We know that the world is big, could you tell us how the players will be able to get from a zone to another? Will there be portals, teleports, warps, flights?
Glenn Swan : Well we have this very cool system where you go inside this place and you move to the world that you want to go to and it instantly teleports you. It is like, hum, you're walking into this void and there is nothing but platforms and this platform takes you to another world. It is both seamless and both instant at once I would say. You can teleport to a zone and then from there to another zone and another zone after that. There will be no loading screen, the world will load up as you are teleporting to the next zone. It is very hard to explain unless you see it.
Oo : The base of the game is that you have to choose a secret society in which you want to evolve and fight evil with. It has been told that this choice will have a long lasting effect on the gameplay, can you tell us a bit more about it?
Glenn Swan I can't reveal too much of course but when you choose a society you are following a story line throughout the game, and as you move up in the society, as you go further in the game you discover why the secret world exist, what is its meaning, what it is all about. And this is done through our missons, through discovering and exploration. There is more than what you see in a mission, there is a world within the world that you have to unearth and discover both in game and out of game. And what i mean by "out of the game" is that there are things that will happen outside of the world that will play a role inside of the secret world, and also things inside the secret world that will play a role outside of the game.
Oo : It is possible to rise up in status insite the secret society by doing missions. Could you tell us if it will be easy or quite hard and if it can be done solo or in group?
Glenn Swan : Yes, there will be ranking missions and these missions will allow you to rank up in your secret society over time. As you know, there are no levels and no classes and this is a way where you can progress throughout your secret society so you know how you're moving, ascending though your society. Regarding the missons, it hasn't be fully revealed yet, but it is going to be a mixture of everything, there will be solo and group missions. If this is a mission that can't be done solo, it will be a very small group. I think it is mainly based on solo missions to rise up in your secret society.
Oo : I am asking this because it has been said that players will get bonuses for reaching a specific rank, don't you think it may make pvp unbalanced if those missions were too easy?
Glenn Swan : No, it is obvious that as you go higher in your secret society, the missions will become harder.
Oo : Talking about pvp, do you know if there will be tournaments that will be organised?
Glenn Swan : At the moment there are no discussions about a tournament system. We have this persistent world where we have the possibility of having mass pvp, where you will be fighting over pieces of the world. As you know all the societies are working together to fight evil, but when it comes to the controle over the world they are all split apart because thay all want control.
Oo : So will it be possible to team up with other societies to make temporary alliances?
Glenn Swan : No the pvp is excusively society vs society. When you go in the world in pve, you can team up with other people from another society and play together, which allows you to play with your friends even though you are not in the same society. But as soon as you go in pvp, you will have to fight each other. It is a kind of love/hate relationship, you know, the societies have to team up to fight evil in the world but they also want to have control of everything, they are greedy and very power hungry.
Oo : Do you think that the game will support very large scale pvp?
Glenn Swan : Yes, I don't have a number, but idealy, we're not shooting to big, we want to keep that good feeling from back in the old days with games like Dark Age of Camelot and Shadowbane and so forth. We don't want to go too crazy like hundreds and hundreds of people in one place like Eve Online is doing right now.
Oo : As you said, we can get control of different places in the world such as El Dorado or Stonehenge. Will the controlling society get bonuses from controlling these places?
Glenn Swan : Yes of course, in order to reward the societies, we had to give them bonuses, and one of these bonuses is rewarding everyone: if you're an Illuminati and you capture a key point, then all the Illuminaty get the bonus. As far as bonuses specifically, I can't really reveal them but I would assume that players will get bonuses for both pvp and pve gameplay. And the guild that will have them will get more popular and they will actually rank up. It will be very similar to what we used to have back in the old day like in Dark Age of Camelot, where the bigger guild are very popular in the server, we want to get that same feeling in Secret World.
Oo : Regarding the societies and the guilds, will the be a housing system?
Glenn Swan : That's something that we haven't really talked about, as far as I know, it's not in the works, but of course, as a community manager, I think that's one of the top suggestions. We definitly have the technology, since we are using the system engine that we used with Age of Conan, the DreamWorld engine, so we do have the possibility to make guild housing like we did in Age of Conan. But as far as doing guilds housing and player housing, which is also a possibility, we haven't discussed it or have any information on it yet, definitely not right now.
Oo : Will there be a crafting system?
Glenn Swan : Yes, we can not released any information about it but we will definitely do it.
Oo : Will there be mounts?
Glenn Swan : The discovery of the world will be done by foot for now.
Oo : Most of the people are really focused on the appearance of their characters. Will it be possible to customise your character so it will look unique with things like scars and tattoes for exemple?
Glenn Swan : I don't know if it will go to the extend of scars and tattoes but this is something that we can definitely do as we have the technology. We have already done it in Age of Conan, but for now it is not something that has been discussed.
As far as clothing, yes, you will have the possibility of buying social armors, so you can totally pimp out your character. There will be player shops in game, I give you an exemple : You are in London and you walk in the street and you see a clothing shop, you will be able to walk in and buy the social armor that you want, that will look completely different to what you are wearing so you can customise the way your character looks.
Oo : Will the armors have different statistics or bonuses?
Glenn Swan : Some will. Some of them will boost abilities and some will give abilities additional bonuses. For exemple a pourcentage on the chance of knocking down your opponent. The way the abilities will work is like Magic The Gathering, the card game: you have a deck and you have certain cards that work together, some cards are not that great on their own but together as a combo they are spectacular.
Some abilities will work with the armor that your wearing and some will work with other abilities that are on your 7 slots.
Oo : Will it be possible to change the skin of your armor with maybe an additional slot that changes the skin?
Glenn Swan : I don't believe that anything will be revealed on that yet. All I can say is that there will really be a lot of different social armors so you will have a lot of options for decorating your character and a lot of those armors will be statless, they are just for looking good.
Oo : So it will give more possibilities for role playing gamers.
Glenn Swan : We wanted to make it a good foundation for role players, the game is very story driven in Secret World, we wanted to give them the tools and the assets to look the part and do the part.
Oo : Will the weapons also have different skins?
Glenn Swan : I don't believe so, but there will be a lot of weapons, a lot of different choices, there will be melee weapons, ranged, semi-ranged, automatic... and they will all be unique, each weapon has a unique ability and a targetting line. Some will be single target, others will shoot in a cone and do aoe. But it will be very realistic: for exemple a single target weapon will be a pistol. And when you shoot on somebody, it will look really realistic too, you will shoot to different parts of the body and you will be able to see the shells of the bullets coming out of the gun and falling on the floor. We wanted to make it look as realistic as possible. I played the game a lot, of course, and i tried to make screenshots of the casing as it comes out of the gun, it took me hours just shooting to be able to capture this screenshot.
Oo : You said that there will be a lot of weapons, was it made to attract a bigger variety of gamers?
Glenn Swan : No it was made to give more choice to the player and also to make it more realistic because in real life, people use knives, not everyone goes out there with a gun. Even though the secret societies are very powerfull and organised, they are not like the U.S. Army, not everyone will have the best weapon at the beginning, people will have to work with what they can find, and if it is melee and ranged that you find, then you can use both at the same time.
Oo : Can you tell us how many servers there will be at the beginning?
Glenn Swan : No information on that. They have not decided what will be done yet.
Oo : Will the game have a monthly fee?
Glenn Swan : No information on that either, they are still discussing about it.
Oo : Will there be expansions for the game?
Glenn Swan : I would assume that there will be expansions. I don't know for sure, but idealy we will since it is an online game and we want to add to the content.
Oo : Last question but not least : since you have played the game a lot, could you tell us which secret society you prefer?
Glenn Swan : I can't say, I do have a preference, but as i am a community manager, eveyone wants to know, so I can't tell.
Oo : Can you tell us your favorite weapon then?
Glenn Swan : I definitely like wielding the dual weapons the most, like the dual pistols because it feels like in Counter Strike.
Oo : Thank you for your time. Have a good day!
There you are, I hope that you found some answers to some of the questions that you had.
Have a good day!
interview réalisée par Kimy
Nikity
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