O&A Board Regular
Registered: Jan. 01
 | quote:
While Verant certainly made their name through EverQuest, undoubtedly one of the biggest success stories in the industry, they seem to have no end of tricks up their sleeves. It looks as though they plan on cornering the online market in a bunch of different ways over the next few years. But if anyone has the know-how to do it, they are the ones. Not only are they continuing the EverQuest lore with another expansion and the rumors of an EverQuest 2 in the works, they also have a very ambitious Star Wars Online project, the persistent MMOFPS PlanetSide, and what might be the craziest project of all, Sovereign. Verant is giving their special touch to yet another genre with this game by giving those strategy buffs the chance to join some huge battles for one of the first massively multiplayer online real time strategy games.
This game has actually been on the decks for quite a while now. We saw the game at E3 2000 and had our doubts. They had, "Come out thinking that an RTS wouldn't be very hard to make after EverQuest." They were apparently wrong. But after we saw the game again recently at the Verant studios down in sunny San Diego, our doubts have been given a serious cleansing and it's apparent that the dev team has been putting a lot of thought into the design of the game. While there still is a lot to do on the project, things are definitely moving in the right direction with some creative problem solving, a reworking of the game engine, along with a bigger move towards the realm of science fiction.
The Challenge
After working here for the last year and a half, I've come to realize that there is a whole lot of work that goes into the process of making a computer game. From the initial design concepts to the engine work to the artwork to the sound, there's about a billion things you need to think about when designing a game. And when you add the extra element of a whole lot of people in the game at the same time, the difficulty of the project increases exponentially. From the networking code to handle the load to the player issues about death and the penalties thereof, cheating, clans, community tools, creating a believable persistent world that changes with the events in the game.... There's a whole lot more to think about than most people would really ever consider, and when you add in the extra issues of hundreds and thousands of individual units on a playing field, things get confusing. Especially when people have to log off and go to bed at some point.
Here's the the orbital view of a theater of war. Get ready for some big ass battles.
Different environments and plenty of objects like trees will bring the worlds to life.
You'll need to have balanced troops in order to survive in the world. You can't just use rocket launchers when you're up against walking assault robots.
Verant has been considering all of these issues and seems to have come up with some pretty good solutions to a lot of the problems while creating some other interesting possibilities to keep players interested in the game all at the same time.
The Love of a Good Home World
One of the biggest concerns on my mind and probably a lot of others' was the issue of logging off if the game is still going. What happens to your units? Are you going to lose all of them to the enemy? Will you come back and find that everything you have worked so hard to build over the months has been destroyed in a sneak attack while you're dreaming about the girl next door? The answer, simply, is no. Each and every player that joins the game will have a home world that can never be touched by battle. The only thing that can ever be done to your planet is a little bit of espionage that could hurt production or something like that. Since you can't command anyone to go take care of those louts, you'll just have to play clean-up anyway. So you never have to worry about losing everything that you've worked for.
All of your research, initial building, economic institutions, and all of that jazz will be housed on your home planet. Home planets in the game will be used much like character models are in EverQuest or any of the other MMORPGs that are out there at the moment. Verant is convinced that part of what people really dig in online games, especially persistent worlds, is the ability to see change in your status in the game both physically and reputation wise. The planet will take care of a little bit of both for you. Not only will it reflect the kind of choices you make at the beginning of the game such as civil and militaristic styles (more on that later), it will also let people know how powerful you are by the state your planet is in. Even though you can't actually go and attack player's home worlds, you will be able to go and take a peek at their planets to grab some basic scouting information on their capabilities.
The Glory and Greed of Battle
In order to better yourself in the universe, you're going to need to venture forth into space and onto other planets to gather resources. In order to do this, you're probably going to have to fight, so you're going to have to bring some preparations with you. This is where the planning will begin because you only get one ship to transport your stuff to one of the excursion battle planets. These transport vehicles only have a limited amount of space, so you'll have to balance supplies and units in your cargo in order to set up shop efficiently when touching down on a planet.
But first, you'll need to pick where you want to go from the galactic map that will give you an indication of the various planets and what is happening on each of them. There are several different sized planets, from the smaller ones that we got a look at that hold 16 players, to the massive ones that can house up to 500 players with 100 units each... that's 50,000 units on the same planet. Yikes. This actually generated one of the bigger challenges for the AI programmers when it came to pathfinding in such a massive area. The lead on the project apparently went into a state of shock when he heard what they were proposing but has worked very diligently to get it running properly.
Anyway, when you pick the planet you want to travel to, you'll get transported there and will be greeted with a view of the entire globe. From here you can rotate the globe around and see the general state of things and where camps are, both friendly and hostile. At this point you can choose your landing point and start setting up shop with the troops and resources you have. Since you will only have a certain number of troops with you at the start, it'll be necessary for you to build a productive base where you can start pumping out units just like any other RTS. The goals of these wars are to keep production up so that you can fill your entire ship up with resources to take back to your home planet for furthering your culture. Of course battle is also there for the glory of battle, gaining a reputation as a badass, and sometimes for the betterment of your house (more on that in a sec as well).
You'll just have to remember that you still only have the one transport ship to take your materials back, so make sure you make a wise choice. Whatever you leave will be up for grabs by other players once you take off and leave it unattended. There is the possibility of making it back to continue the fight and continue harvesting. Just think of it like leaving some armor sitting on the ground somewhere in EverQuest. Someone's probably going to take it if they find it lying around. Well, if someone finds all of your equipment lying around, they're going to take that too.
During your stay on the lovely excursion planet of your choice, you'll be able to see the planet at three levels of zoom. They did this instead of an arbitrary level of zoom for a couple of reasons, the main issues being keeping the networking speed as fast as possible. So the views you get are the globe view where you can rotate it around and see the very general recon info that you could see when you dropped onto the planet, a closer strategic view that is far enough back to see the curve of the planet and therefore more of the planet and your troops, and finally the closest tactical view that allows you get a better shot so you can order your units around a little easier.
But you'll really need to be careful and come with friends if you hope to live long on any of the big worlds. A very good balance of troops and skills will be necessary for drawn out conflicts, which could definitely go on for quite a while if there's 500 people playing.
The Choices of Power
To this effect, and the hope that they can create a teamwork oriented game, there are several options that players will have to choose from when they enter the universe (server) and begin their lives in Sovereign. You will be prompted to choose from various ways of thinking about military and civil issues. These will pretty much serve as a race and class for the game and should make it so players will want to team up against opponents for their various skills.
You'll have five choices in the military side of things. These choices are assault, defense, stealth, siege, and raider. These all represent styles of gameplay that many people use in the course of their RTS experiences, so you'll probably want to choose one that best suits your style. Each of the choices will be given certain advantages and disadvantages as well as unique units. So if you choose siege, you'll have longer ranged devastating bombardment type of weapons and attacks, but pretty weak defense so you'll need some support from a defensive group to keep you safe. If you choose raider, you'll get quicker units that can get in and out of skirmishes for diversionary tactics and recon missions while not having a huge amount of firepower to go with it. You see the idea.
As well as deciding different types of military styles, you'll also need to pick your style of leadership. This could be economist, politician, research, industrial, and espionage. All of these will also give your society different advantages and disadvantages. So if you're an economist, you'll be able to get more information about galactic trade than others will, industrialists will have better production rates, and so on and so forth. All of these will show on your home planet as well with the researchers having more labs and industrialists more factories and that sort of thing so that other players can see what kind of player you are.
The Protection of Big Brother
So with all of those different choices and the obvious need for balancing your forces out with others, how are you going to be able to hook up with other players to go on expeditions? Along with the use of guilds and clans that you'll find in most online games nowadays, you'll also be able to join the loving fold of one of the great houses in the game. This should allow you some protection from the harsher realities of beginning the game as well as give you the opportunity to fight for a "cause." As I mentioned before, there will also be the opportunity to have battles that will decide the possession of planets for great houses.
Within the great houses are smaller houses and within those can be guilds and clans. Of course with the addition of all of these elements, there is the possibility of infighting over control of the house. While this will be interesting to see how they end up working this element into the game when all is said and done, the idea definitely has some possibility for creating some intrigue that hasn't been visible in online games to this point. Political intentions and bickering on this scale could be pretty exciting.
Along with all of the houses, sub-houses, and clans in the game will be the opportunity to strike out as a mercenary and form alliances outside of the houses for prophet and fun. While they have said it would be extremely hard to pull off, it will be possible for mercenaries to take over a great house. They'll just need a lot of balance to their forces both on the battlefield and off to pull a stunt like that around on such a powerful force. It sounds like a whole hell of a lot of fun to try.
Alliances will also be able to send out messages asking members of their group to come and help in some battles if things are looking bad, or there's just a little extra oomph needed to finish off a foe. There may also be some other added plusses for allies such as the transfer of troops and resources although that hasn't been nailed down at this point in development.
The Economics of Galactic Wars
Of course to run any house, guild, or even planet, you'll have to develop a resource base and trade to make money. You'll need money for such things as warping fees that apply every time you travel to a battle planet. In order to make money and resources you can go get them on the various planets, or you can delve into the life of a trader. It'll be much easier for you if you choose the path of economics at the beginning of the game, but anyone can use the Galactic Trade Commission to trade in the hopes of making money. Economists will have access to market history of the GTC so that they can make more informed decisions. You'll also be more likely to get better deals.
As you can see from this lengthy preview, there is a lot of planning going into this game. It has a long ways to go yet, they aren't even giving a possible date at this point, but things are looking good for the game. It's nice to see considering its rocky start. But if all goes according to plan, Verant may have another genre hooked on persistent online games. We're all certainly looking forward to seeing if they can pull this rather complicated formula off
Resident Board Socialist
Email me here
IM me at stickysituation2 or pinkorag
I am currently looking for newbies to bring into the International
|
