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0s [Music]
2s [Applause]
9s thank you
11s hey I'm Dennis dalfit I'm the lead
13s designer for koning exiles I'm Chris
15s Meredith I'm a senior technical designer
18s on exiles
23s it was promised a long time ago whenever
25s we first showed off the game
29s Bill said yeah there will be sorcery in
30s the game and you know that that video
32s made its rounds and how people wanted to
35s know more about what would be in the
36s game and it was early access at the time
38s so a lot was missing
40s uh but honestly it just boils down to
42s the Pure Fantasy of Conan right like
44s it's always about
45s a
46s base Barbarian defeating a decadent
50s sorcerer
51s you have to have sorcery to have the
52s decadent sorcerer
58s very abstract at the start we honestly
61s didn't even know what source was going
62s to be when we first started on it we
64s knew we wanted utility
66s but there were just so many questions
68s because
69s in in the lore it's very abstract as
71s well
72s and what fits in the game doesn't only
75s perfectly line up yeah from from my
78s perspective going back to the very
79s beginning essentially our chief creative
82s officer handed me a document and a
84s couple screenshots and said this is the
86s design that I had for sorcery that I
88s made six years ago
89s and you know that's a really good
91s starting point for us for someone like a
93s creative director to give you his vision
96s for what sorcery would be like and it
98s was very different from what sorcery
99s wound up being today but it was the
102s basis for
104s how sorcery ended up there were times
106s where we would deviate from it and we
108s always kind of wound up finding our way
109s back to it because the foundation that
112s he gave us was so good
113s [Music]
118s so in the beginning it was really uh it
120s was really up in the air like a lot of
122s us had ideas for what we thought should
124s be in sorcery there were a lot of
125s suggestions for things that came from
127s the actual Howard books things people
129s saw in comics that they wanted
131s and
133s the way I I approached that was I took
136s down all the ideas that the team members
138s had we had a slack Channel where you
140s would just dump all your ideas for
142s sorcery no matter what they were and it
145s was based on the premise
146s as a sorcerer in a hiborian age I want
149s to dot dot dot and then I took all of
152s those ideas and put them on Post-it
154s notes in teams and I had a giant board
157s with a bunch of Post-it notes and I
159s would Shuffle these things around and
161s try to categorize them into different
162s schools of magic
164s and try to cut out the things that don't
166s make sense in the lore of Robert E
169s Howard
170s and at the end of the day we wound up
172s with this giant list of things that
174s people wanted to be able to do as a
175s sorcerer and at the end of the day the
178s list
179s was somewhere near 200 spells I think it
182s was very large and and we had to pair it
184s way back we just had to keep cutting
186s stuff off that made less and less sense
188s or things that had overlap and we had to
190s take all of those nuggets of ideas that
192s everybody wanted to be able to do and
193s distill them into the bells that you
196s received online
197s also back near the start we had a lot
200s more spells that were combat folks well
203s that was before we decided that sorcery
205s shouldn't actually got invested in
207s combat being a sorcerer is all about
209s preparation for thought it's about
212s creating the scenario in which you will
213s succeed not finding yourself in a
216s scenario and then some imagining your
218s way out of it that's not how
220s and we had a number of spells that were
224s very combat oriented very much in the
226s vein of all right I'm in combat there's
228s a guy shooting me I'm gonna summon a
230s wall in front of him
232s doesn't really work yeah especially
235s because there were a few
237s I guess directives I established early
239s on you know when we we found out that
241s a lot of combat even in the original
243s story or sorry a lot of sorcery even in
245s the Original Stories wouldn't be combat
247s oriented it was really easy to say okay
249s sorcery is a means to obtain power it is
252s not like outright combat damage directly
255s and there was also a really early Focus
258s for things to be ritualistic and slow so
261s while we were working on deciding how we
263s would ask spells and everything that
264s played a lot into it as well as the
266s contents of the Spells themselves some
268s of the things that we saw really early
269s on you know there were there were a lot
270s of really big asks and one one of them
272s that stood out to me a lot was that one
275s of the developers wanted to see
277s basically sorcery on a scale that was
279s like heaven versus hell like demons
281s versus angels and they felt it felt very
283s out of place with Conan so another thing
286s we had to do in there was consider which
287s of those things really worked within the
289s confines of R4
292s in every system that we had in the game
293s not just sorcery we tend to try to look
296s at the actual contents that Howard wrote
299s first
299s and think of ways we can pull little
302s tidbits out of it to make the game
304s really unique and stand out because
306s those stories are something we have that
308s nobody else has if we can use unique
310s elements of those
311s to create our gameplay as well we also
314s have a unique game
320s um so basically we took that
322s sticking the entire page of sticky notes
325s that everyone had for ideas and I broke
327s them down into schools of magic and then
330s we had from our creative officer we had
332s a list of things that would be our our
334s domains of Magic the schools in which
336s magic would operate and we could try to
340s figure out which ones of those actually
341s fit into a school and which didn't so
343s that was like the first cut off point if
345s it didn't match any of our actual
346s domains of magic you're gone uh a lot
349s went that stage and then after that we
352s kind of had to prioritize them based on
354s usefulness and a big directive that I
357s gave early on as well was that a spell
359s had to First have a use in PVE because
361s we know the vast majority of players are
363s going to be using spells in PVE so if
366s the spell exists it has a PVE use and if
369s it has a use in PvP that's just added
371s incent it was kind of in the collective
373s conscious but it wasn't being fully
375s adhered to by everyone so we had some
377s spells like invisibility they originally
379s didn't have
380s and it was it was a bit of work to make
382s them actually work in people yeah it's
384s true it was that or we just lose the
386s spell and we didn't want to lose spells
387s like that
388s and then after we had um you know a list
391s of all the spells that actually worked
392s we had to decide which ones we thought
394s were coolest and we could actually
395s prioritize in it's easier for us to have
397s a ton of ideas than it is for us to have
399s a ton of time and money so we have to
401s pick and choose which ones we actually
402s make so you know everyone kind of
405s collectively went through and I sent out
407s a survey to everyone and had them rank
408s which one which which spells they liked
411s the most and then I aggregated all the
413s data from which ones people liked most
414s and then put my own you know opinion on
417s top of that of which had the most value
419s to the most types of players and we
422s started to get a list that filled out
424s what we would actually make and then we
426s took that list and prioritized it based
428s on the most interesting and compelling
429s thing so the things that wound up at the
431s top are the really obvious ones like the
433s army of the Dead with a fog in the
434s zombies the lightning storm the bat
436s demon the teleporters it was all stuff
438s everyone wanted to see for sure
441s um and then you know beyond that we just
443s had a list of things that had were
444s really um you know certain types of
447s player really like seeing this or
448s certain types that I really like tea
449s yeah it's also worth noting that there
452s was after we did an implementation of
455s adding in the alpha State we were able
458s to play test a bunch of stuff we looked
460s at a bunch of spells and said this
461s doesn't work we thought it would be cool
463s it's not we had to go back to the
465s drawing board and in some cases some
467s spells actually didn't exist in the form
468s that you see now originally Army of the
471s Dead used to be two separate spells
472s that's right it used to be fog an army
474s of the Dead yeah I did the same thing we
478s also had spells that we cut entirely we
480s had a a vertical ice wall purpose was to
483s let you climb up things it wasn't the
484s icebridge you've got now that goes in an
486s incline but I mean we tried it and it
489s just it wasn't useful enough wasn't fun
492s it was too clunky and got replaced with
495s a different concept the New Concept
497s works way better some spells were too
499s good like we already had the directive
501s uh you know no combat spells while the
504s firewall used to deal damage on like a
506s very fast interval uh you could pull a
508s bunch of enemies with a thrall and have
509s them all like annihilating your thrall
511s and cast one firewall on them and it
514s would just dupe everything in like two
516s seconds used to have a very painful heat
518s component where if you as a player stood
521s next to a firewall it was it was very
524s much like standing in lava
526s instantly very very hot by health
529s the the play with temperature was the
532s thing that we thought could be
533s interesting but
534s I don't know if it wound up being as
536s interesting as we thought it would be
538s there was an interaction for a while
540s between the ice wall and the lava wall
542s where their temperatures would fight
544s each other and they would melt
546s but in part of the fire it was too
548s obtuse it didn't make sense naturally
550s yeah part of the firewall like the idea
552s was that when you're in those really
554s freezing places like if for some reason
556s your food buff wears off and you know
558s you're now freezing you can cast a
560s firewall and have that feel like hit
561s these scores exactly uh realistically
564s with the slow ritualistic nature of
566s sorcery it would have Frozen adaptive
572s [Music]