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Goblinworks CEO here - happy to answer any questions!
rsdancey
Member Posts: 106
Nice to see this forum getting busier. I do try to drop by regularly and read the threads. I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone may have about Pathfinder Online!
Comments
Great to see some activity from a member of a gaming team, let alone the CEO.
With a market filled to the brim with kickstarter games and MMO's releasing what seems like every week; what is there for someone that has been in the MMO market for over 17 years that I cannot find anywhere else?
Total time played: 9125 Days, 21 Hours, 29 Minutes, 27 Seconds
Time played this level: 39 Days, 1 Hour, 24 Minutes, 5 Seconds
Ryan, thanks for answering questions here. I play PFO and am hoping it will be successful.
With that in mind, every time you guys release a gameplay video 90% of the comments are criticizing the graphics and animations of the game which are still in a fairly basic state. Do you guys think it would attract more players if you spent some development time each cycle improving the graphics and animations in order to attract some of the people who put an emphasis on graphics and who tend to believe that they won't improve by any significant amount? I know you guys are currently focusing on adding systems and content over improving graphics but I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to spend a bit of time on improving the graphics in order to attract more players.
Well i guess i am part lazy and part tired so i will ask the obvious that i always look for.First of all there are sooooo many games coming out seems every week,i can't remember one to the next anymore.
1 All classes on player or is this an ALTAHOLIC game?PVE or PVP or both?
2 combat depth/formula's?Examples..Is there resistances,accuracy,avoidance,combos both player>player and solo?Trinity/controlled combat,or random aggro running from player to player?D oweapons actually have better dmg versus certain enemy than others or are the formulas one base idea for all?
3 Limitations?I actually prefer some limitations,i am not a fan of players just auto swapping to be a jack of all trades master of none?
4 Crafting?Is there something beyond the typical food drink OOC ideas used in EQ/EQ2?How is the ratio of crafting gear to drops if there is even any drops?I guess depends on previous question is there PVE...Bosses?Housing items in crafting if there is any housing?
5 Skills and Abilities?Do players have an array of skills and special abilities that might say one class has a speed boost,one might have a dmg boost,one might have an avoidance boost etc etc.
6 Peripherals?Are their mounts,is there ways for movement other than foot,mount?Are there any hidden secrets in game that players have to discover aside from perhaps crafting?
7 Instances?Is the main world an open concept or is it an instance game with lobby?
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Any questions? Excellent!
1) What is your total budget so far?
2) How many players/subscribers you have at this very moment?
3) What is the total number of players that subscribed since the beginning of early enrollment?
4) How many players approximately you need in the long run for the game to at least return the investment?
5) Will we see any significant (or any at all) improvements/revamps of animations and/or graphics anytime soon (say, this year)?
Thank you in advance!
Could be they dont have the skills to make them any better or the cash.
I'd say we're a little bit like the iPhone. Everything in the iPhone had been done before, but nobody had done it quite the way Apple implemented those features. The difference wasn't that the iPhone had a lot of features nobody had seen before, it was that the iPhone had put those features together in ways that finally made the whole idea work and make sense.
I believe we're striking a balance between PvP and PvE that most games miss. And we're working really hard to ensure that our PvP doesn't create a toxic community. I think we have one of the best MMO communities I've ever experienced.
The Pathfinder intellectual property is amazing. Hundreds of books have been written to define the world of Golarion, its pantheon, its geography, its people, and its history. That stuff is all ours to use and we're stirring it into the game slowly but steadily.
I know from my time at CCP that there's a huge unmet demand for a game with the rich sandbox play of EVE except Fantasy, and we're striving to deliver that.
I'll also say that we're out ahead of the pack. A lot of those other games you've seen announced are still quite a substantial amount of development from being ready for persistent live operations. We started Early Enrollment on New Years Eve, and we're live right now. The information we're getting from the way people are playing the game, and their engagement with Goblinworks is allowing us to "Crowdforge" the basic game systems in ways that are just impossible if we'd done 5 years of design and then released a "completely finished" game (whatever that means for MMOs anyway....)
Making an MMO is not like making other kinds of games. For one thing, it's extraordinarily expensive. For another, development is a continuous ongoing obligation; work never stops. And for a third thing, live operations requires a lot of overhead.
Our budget for the game to date is around $4 million, and we think we'll need a couple of million more in a combination of investment and income from operations to get to the next major evolution of the game (which we call "Open Enrollment").
Given the failure that the MMO market has been for investors in the past 10 years, where AAA games spiraled out of control and ended up costing more than $100 million and yet returned very little income (and virtually no profit after you consider the sunk costs) there is no way to raise enough capital to make even a small sandbox MMO like Pathfinder Online without relying on crowdfunding and on income from operations.
We are not really in a "testing period". Our Alpha Test ended and we are now in Early Enrollment, which is live operations. The game is now persistent and there won't be any resets.
We committed to starting Early Enrollment with a "minimum viable product". The game had to have achieved a certain state of development before we felt comfortable charging people to play it, and we have reached that objective. Early Enrollment is not for everyone. The big upside for people who are playing it is that their feedback really matters. We're engaged in a process we call Crowdforging with our Early Enrollees. Their input is having meaningful substantial impact on our work so that they're actually helping us design the game. That's not just lip service - if you spend some times on our forums you'll see how much attention to we pay to the community and how often we change course based on what they're telling us they like and don't like about the project.
We expect to appeal to a small hard core audience of early adopters at this point. But every 3 weeks we release an update that moves us forward towards a more robust and developed game. People can pick their own "start point" based on that development. We have done 4 updates since we started, and Early Enrollment v6 will be released next Thursday. Since we started play we've added core systems like player corpse looting, upgraded the monster AI, and with Early Enrollment v6 we're adding shared persistent storage. In the very near future we'll add character-built persistent structures, and we have plans for more roles, more monsters, upgraded visual effects and animations, improvements to the terrain, and more on tap. Every time we update I think we make the pool of potential players larger.
No, I don't.
Frankly, we can't afford to move the needle enough on graphics and animations to make the people who have issues with them now give us a passing grade. It's not just a matter of a few weeks of work. A major overhaul to get the graphics anywhere close to "AAA" (which is what they're comparing us to) is a $10 million, 20-30 person commitment. It just does not make sense to pursue that goal.
A lot of people who see it "live" in high quality (as opposed to the low quality a lot of streamers use) are really surprised by how good the game looks when you play it. Industry folks who have taken a look are also pretty impressed. Over time, we'll iterate on the graphics like we do on everything else, and we have been doing so all along. Folks who remember what the game looked like when we started the Alpha test will tell you that we've already made huge improvements.
Some of what people critique isn't graphics or animation. It's system-level functions like causing the characters to turn and face their targets when they attack (which also requires camera moves, etc.) We don't have kinematics in the game so hits don't cause visible reactions on targets yet. And the visual effects ("VFX") are very basic. Those are things we are going to be spending time on in the near future (actually, we spent a lot of time on some of the kinematics in the work for Early Enrollment v6, but they're not ready to deploy yet). Those kinds of improvements have a big impact on how people perceive the game's "graphic quality". Same deal with things like making the grass look better, and reducing the tiling effects on steep slopes. Little things, but big impacts. It all just takes time, and we have to allocate that time wisely and balance it against all the other things that people want, like more weapons (requires graphics & animations), more monsters (ditto), more roles (ditto), more structures (ditto), etc.
There are no classes in Pathfinder Online. We use a system like EVE's where characters are developed by learning Feats (aka Skills) over realtime and you can mix & match those abilities however you wish.
We do have a system called "Roles", which works in a unique way. Instead of taking a level of a Role and getting a pre-packaged set of benefits, when you have trained a certain list of prerequisite Feats we recognize that by giving you an Achievement in a Role. It's completely optional.
The combat system is one of the richest, most complex things I've ever seen in a videogame. Not surprising given our roots in tabletop RPGs and the fact that the designers are all veteran tabletop RPG designers and players.
I wrote a "simplified" description of the combat system as a how-to guide. It's only 25 pages long. LOL.
You make constant meaningful choices. Everything you do typically requires you to forgo doing other things, at least temporarily. Being a jack of all trades means you're the master of none.
Again, rich, deep, crazy complex.
Luckily, the Crafting Guide is only 8 pages long. But that is because there's no exhaustive list of the recipes or their ingredients.
Every item in the game except for basic starter gear and some basic consumables is crafted by player characters. The persistent structures in the game are crafted by player characters (although we have 2 buildings available for direct sale in our cash shop, with Early Enrollment v7 which is due in a little more than 3 weeks, player character crated structures will be as good as or better than anything you an purchase directly.)
Yeah. Hundreds.
Currently there is no way to move faster than running. We have lots of plans.
No instances. The game is a single-server world like EVE. And it is HUGE. It takes about 2 hours to travel at full speed from one side of the map to the other.
I just want to thank you for coming here to answer questions. I myself have already bought into the game because I am ready for something different. I feel like you are doing what EQ Landmark/Next are doing but i am actually playing a game and not just wasting time in a beta. You have also answered a lot of questions that I have had.
My question has to do with my character now vs when more customization and races are available. Will I at least be able to customize my character again or even change my race when more are added to the game? Because the graphics are what they are right now, I didn't feel there was much reason to agonize over the looks of my character outside his hair.
Understood. Thanks for taking the time to explain this.
We've spent more than $4 million, and we'll likely spend $2 - $3 million more before we get to Open Enrollment.
A lot.
We are following the industry standard and not disclosing subscriber numbers.
We need 10,000 active accounts to achieve positive cashflow. We believe we'll have more than 100,000 active accounts in 3-4 years, similar to what CCP achieved early in EVE's lifecycle. That would be sufficient to generate a meaningful return on invested capital.
Yes. We continuously improve all that stuff. Every update includes some progress.
We do updates every 3 weeks. (We were doing them every 2 weeks, but the next several are so big that we needed more time. We'll go back to 2 week iterations eventually.)
The upcoming releases feature shared persistent storage (that's in Early Enrollment v6, which will arrive this Thursday the 26th. The next big feature is Holdings & Outposts, which are player-crafted, persistent structures that plug into the economic and territorial control systems, and we'll have an announcement about them in Early Enrollment v7 next week (Early Enrollment v7 will be due around the 16th of April).
Does this look like 2001 to you?
You obviously care about making this game great and that is commendable, but it still sounds like a beta without a wipe. "Early enrollment" would imply not finished, and I just hope for your sake you can convince enough people to pay a sub in an unfinished MMO to sustain your operations. I have interest in your game, but not sure about commiting to a sub model to play it just yet. I am going to grab a 15 day key to check it out and see though. I wish you luck sir.
The power curve is shaped like an inverted hockey stick.
You get a lot of power quickly. After about 3 months, the rate of increase slows dramatically, and thereafter it is very incremental.
The power curve is also very flat. Like in EVE, a character that has maxed out Feats (aka Skills) in one aspect will be better than, but not overwhelmingly better than less well trained characters
Like in EVE there will be some people at the very far end of that hockey stick, the "grizzled vets". They'll be enormously powerful, wealthy, well-connected, and you don't want to make one your enemy. But they won't dominate a battle singlehandedly, and a group of lower level PCs will be able to take them down.
Yes.
First, we've committed to the idea that you'll be able to make a free change of race from any of the starting races to any of the player character races from the Pathfinder tabletop RPG core book as they're added. We don't want people to be sitting on the sidelines waiting for "their race" to get put into the game.
Second, we're going to make it possible for you to change most of the visual appearance aspects of your character. We haven't worked out what that system will be yet and it has no eta. I expect that you'll have a range of options you'll be able to select for free, and then you will be able to buy other options in the cash shop since they have no mechanical effects.
I think gender will be in that list but there may be some technical challenges with making that happen when things like hair and skin color changes are made available. There's no game design reason we would not allow gender changes.
Over the very long term when we start adding races from outside the core player-character races in the core book, we'll probably have fees associated with some or all of those options, but we have not even begun to think about it in any specific way yet so I couldn't venture a range of prices.
EVE - CCP nailed the sandbox gameplay. The game design is unique and not derived from any other game. It's really special.
Star Trek Online - I'm a huge fan of Cryptic and they've made a game that Star Trek fans love. Lots of interesting design innovations like the bridge crew system.
Guildwars 2 - beautiful, story-driven theme park, clearly the best AAA Fantasy Themepark ever made from a technical and storytelling perspective, and their business model is unique and interesting.
Shroud of the Avatar - I consider everyone at Portalarium to be rock stars, I owe Richard Garriott a lot for creating a game format I love, and I think some of what they're doing, like the card-based combat system, is really innovative
Do you consider League of Legends an "MMO"? Love that game, both for its mechanics and fun gameplay, and for it's fantastic business model.
Hmm,most answers were well handled and seem fair enough in the answers.
As mentioned by another person,i would need a play test before committing money,takes me about 30 minutes to know somewhat.if the game has enough depth,then it would take me maybe a week to know if i would commit money.
I literally,physically struggle to pick a game everyday because all of my many purchases over the last few years have left me with boring games that never finish development properly or have so little depth,i get bored in a week.
I have commend a lot of gamer's who can stick through some games for months on end,but i think most streamers are simply pushing themselves for the money not the games.
I watch streamers game hop almost everyday and the one's that stick with one game seem bitter,salty or plain angry,you can see they are pushing themselves to play a boring game.Point being,i don't want to make anymore of these choices,i want to stick with a game and enjoy it for a year or more.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
terrain and props kinda look like shit bro(especially the painted on grass and tent clipping through the ground).
as for my questions
1) in the video you guys posted https://www.goblinworks.com/blog/pathfinder-online-massively-multiplayer-video/
the terrain rendering distances looks quite small... is there gonna be any work to improve that?
2) going along with the previous question how many models can render at once? 3) In large pvp fights/pve encounters how likely is it that adverse server effects(lag related skill delay, slideshow combat,etc) or lack of rendering will occur?
4) seems like most of the players were using some form of ranged attack(bow or magic) how are you going to make sure melee is relevant in pvp
5)from a little research it appears PFO uses a threading system as well as a durability loss system. from what ive seen its been stated that both of these seem to be too high(threading mechanic is too powerful and durability is too forgiving). are these systems in a release state, or will you be lowering them?
Looks acceptable to me against the grand scope of systems you are putting in game.
My first mmo was Asheron's Call. Even at the time it wasn't the best looking game around but what many players today fail to recognize or even have experienced is the scale of a massive open landscape. I live near the prairies here in Alberta, Canada. I can drive out, leave my car and walk for a hundred miles (for you Americans) if I wanted and barely experience any changing landscape. I can head north and see nothing but the muskeg for hundreds more miles. I can head further north and see tundra for hundreds more miles. This is called reality and a real world isn't often a dramatic shift in terrain and a new town every 30 seconds of running like most mmos today offer.
Once in a game (even ones of a more simpler design) I find scale and scope define a sense of reality far more than great graphics. An example is ESO. Absolutely beautiful game ... but drives me bonkers that LoS is broken up every hundred meters or less, towns can literally be seen from one another and fog is placed in game to hide the terrible textures at range because the engine can't handle it. Yes beautiful ... but a realistic world it is not.
I hope the best for your game and my passion for pre-4.0 (travesty) D&D guarantees I will try your game at least some point in the future.
For a question I guess I'm most interested in what drove your choice of game mechanics seeing how it isn't actual d20 rules and how did you strive to keep at least the feel and essence of the system?
You stay sassy!