Stargate Worlds

• Platform: PC
• Published by:
• Developed by: Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment
• Release Date: TBA
• Genre: RPG
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Online: Yes

 

Stargate Worlds Interview

-- June 28, 2006 by: Chris Remo

As World of Warcraft continues to gain more and more subscribers--and, by extension, as Blizzard continually disproves estimates about the total potential size of the massively multiplayer audience--more and more companies have joined in the MMO fray, in hopes of getting a piece of that mammoth pie. Enter developer Cheyenne Mountain. The studio is staking its claim in the MMO world with a game based on long running sci-fi television series Stargate SG-1, soon to enter its tenth season on the air. Cheyenne Mountain itself, on the other hand, has only been around since 2002. Its staff has no dearth of experience, though, with talent from Blizzard, Raven, the Hollywood special effects industry, GT Interactive, and others; they've also got one of the founders of Electronic Arts.

Cheyenne's first effort, Stargate Worlds, is still a ways off, but I had the chance to get some early details from developer Jake Simpson to see how the game is shaping up.

Shack: There hasn't been much too information about Stargate Worlds so far. What's the game all about?

Jake Simpson: It’s about Stargate SG1, the universe they inhabit, the bad guys, the good guys, the political situations and mostly its about really cool StarGate effects, because hey, you’ve never seen one of those before, have you?

(Oh, you have? What?? Where??? Rats, back to the drawing board for that then!)

Seriously, it’s an MMO that contains lots and varied elements based in the Stargate Universe utilizing the rich and varied situations and characters therein. You don’t get to be a 10 season Sci-Fi series without creating a pretty compelling and interesting universes along the way.

Shack: Stargate Worlds is based on the Stargate-SG1 television series as opposed to the film, correct? What's the basic setting?

Jake Simpson: It is based on the TV Series, not the film, although one does follow on chronologically from the other. So the basic idea is that the US Military have discovered a large ring that has a combination key on it. When the combinations are set right, it sets up a wormhole between ‘our’ ring and another located on another planet. Different key combinations dial up different planets. The military (most specifically the Air Force) has set up a program of small teams that explore these different planets to bring back useful technology and meet the inhabitants.

In doing so, we found that humanity was used to seed lots of these other planets by a race called the Gou’ald, who are a bunch of parasite snakey things that take over people and make them their puppets. They pretended to be the ancient gods of our planet, and still think they are gods to this day. When a person gets taken over they get deep voices and glowy eyes and other things that would make Marylin Manson dance with glee if he could get his hands on this technology.

Anyway, these are bad people and they don’t like us and want to do bad things to us, like kill us all, make us slaves, eat all the Twinkies, the usual meglomanic stuff.

In the mean time, the Stargate exploration teams have also come across other races, like the Jaffa (pronounced Jaf-fa), who look like us but are bred as warriors for the Gou’ald and act as wet nurses to the parasites.

And so on. You get the idea. Lots of different locations, political situations, cool electrical guns and opportunities to do episodes where people loose their memories and spend the episode ‘remembering.’

Shack: The game seems heavily focused on squad-based PvE gameplay. How much focus is there on PvP?

Jake Simpson: There is a roughly equal amount of focus on PVP as there is on PVE – For some reason people tended to focus on the PVE aspect of the original announcement – however interally there has always been intent to have a large PVP element. At this stage, with the design more down, PVP is starting to come into focus more. The end game should be 50/50 in terms of what you’ll be doing.

One thing we are trying to do is make the distinction between parts of the game where PVE is the main focus, and other parts where PVP is a more natural mechanic. This may come at a quest level, or even a server level; at this stage we are still nailing down the particulars. Suffice to say PVP is just as important at PVE right now. You can’t have an MMO without the opportunity to blow your mates away, can you?

Shack: Bots are something that are not particularly common in MMOs, but we'll be seeing them in Stargate. What is Cheyenne doing to ensure that the MMO feel is not lost when players are making use of bots?

Jake Simpson: Good question. Right now we are doing a lot of prototyping using Unreal Script to ensure that we get smart bots, but not so smart that you don’t actually need to play yourself. There’s a balance between dumb as a post bots that bump into walls and can’t operate an elevator without you, and bots that run out at the start of the mission and have it half completed by the time you get to the action, and that balance is what we are going for. There are many things we want to try and just see how it works – much as I’d love to document them here a) we aren’t sure what some of them are yet (bot decision making is very much an iterative science) and b) do I really want to tell everyone else doing an MMO what our secrets are? Aha! I think not!

Shack: Introduce us to the game's two factions, and how they differ in gameplay terms.

Jake Simpson: Who said anything about 2? Lets see, in the show you’ve got the Ori, the Gou’ald, the Jaffa, the Asgard, the Tau’ri (that’s us!), the Tok’ra (Has anyone else noticed a pre-ponderence of apostrophes’ in the Stargate naming conventions?? I gather the writers get royalties on apostrophe’s usage...) and so on. And that’s not counting what we may or may not create ourselves.

In terms of questing factions, you’ll probably be looking at two distinct factions point of view – although which factions go into which point of view you are looking at will get shuffled about based on the content and aim of the specific question undertaking.

And, of course, Amanda Tapping (Colonel Sam Carter) would get her own faction all by itself because, well, obviously she needs it. I, personally, have it all planned out.

What?

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