Ask a Developer Interview with Producer Bryan Farina

[Sonic 297]

Its the second round of Ask a Developer. Producer, Bryan Farina, is the next Victory Games developer to answer the fan submitted questions. Some of the hot topics discussed in this interview are the campaign, mod tools, eSports, Pay2Win and much more. Here's part of it....

 

How frequent do you plan to release new generals once the game is released and what does that mean for the balance of the game?
We haven’t gotten into a post-release content creation cadence yet, so I don’t really have a definitive answer on how frequently. To put it into perspective (and, to repeat these times are for comparative purposes and are completely non-binding) we’d prefer something like a general a month vs. a general every six months.

In a world where there are multiple ways to play the game, 1v1, team games, co-op missions, and the like the balance of the generals against each other is less important than the balance of all the possible combinations of the generals—and oddly, that is usually a bit easier to solve than the 1v1-only case. Some generals might be better for certain modes or styles of play, some may be very good against certain other generals, and some might be generally good in many cases but easily countered by skilled players/teams—think Marvel vs. Capcom as opposed to Street Fighter 4.

At this point in time, can you discuss how likely any sort of custom content creation tools are likely to be made available?
The issue isn’t that Frostbite doesn’t allow modding, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Some of the issue is that we need a consumer friendly version of FrostEd. Some of the issue is that the game is client-server and we don’t have consumer-friendly tools to deal with a lot of the modding aspects of the game yet(it involves actually coding and not manipulating a friendly UI). Some of the issue is that weare busy with other tasks right now.

Modding and mapmaking are a huge part of the community, and this is something that the dev team desperately wants to make available, but it’s not a simple ‘check the ReleaseModToolsToCommunity flag in FrostEd’ situation.

Are there definite plans for Singleplayer campaigns and other singleplayer modes beyond skirmish?
Here’s everything I can tell you:

We absolutely want to create and support singleplayer experiences beyond skirmish. Additionally, we want more co-op experiences as well. Campaigns, specifically, are a lot of work to produce to quality and it’s even more difficult given the switch to a new engine and all the other issues that arise as part of creation. Every game balance tweak, every pathfinding/movement bug, every AI bug, every feature that gets added or tweaked all complicate the design and creation of campaign scenarios.

So, yes, we are ideating campaigns and how we would produce and release them given the new paradigm of the game, but there’s no way they will be ready at the initial open beta.

 

Check out the full interview right here.