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Mark Kalmes on Pathfinder MMO Kickstarter & Business Model – Fear the Boot Interview Ep. 27

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Fear the Boot – Interview Episode 27 – Mark Kalmes (Audio podcast at link)

This is part two of a two-part interview on Goblinworks‘s project based on Paizo‘s Pathfinder, the Pathfinder Online MMO. The transcript of the first half of the interview is hereThe Kickstarter is here.

Dan: You’re listening to Episode 27 of Fear the Boot’s interview series. This is the second half of our interview with Mark Kalmes. Running time for this episode is 52 minutes.

I hate to pull us off-topic, but just real quick before I forget, John has some pretty exciting news.

John: I do. After 10,000 years in development, Bloodmoon Goblins is finally out in a commercially saleable format. It is on the DriveThru RPG PDF market. We will link to it from both www.FearTheBoot.com and www.BloodmoonGoblins.com, so if you would like a little campaign setting full of backstabbing little craps and your players are the type who would enjoy playing CR 1/3rd goblins, please check it out. It is a $4.95 PDF, it’s about 50 pages long, the art was done by Keith Curtis, the writing was done by myself with a lot of help from Dan over there, and the layout and some of the visual design was done by Ruben Smith-Zempel, so…

Johann: And how many goblins were harmed in the playtesting of this product?

John: All of them.

Dan: A lot. The vast majority.

John: Dan was killed, for one. He managed to make it to Level 3 or 4 and literally have like 5 or 6 Hit Points.

Johann: That’s Epic Level for a goblin.

Dan: 7.

John: That is Epic Level for a goblin. So I was playing it under E6, and it was like OK, you guys are going to make it to like 5 or 6 until I wrap the plot up. But no, it was a routine trap chest that had like a C1 Constitution poison on it, and Dan sprung it. All the rolls were done above the table, everything was legit, but it was just OK, you took 8 points of Con damage and you have 7 Con, you’re dead.

Yeah, I think the king definitely died in the first course of the play, and both the orcs died. The thief guild leader did not die, and the temple guild leader did not die, but they were subjugated. So yeah, lots of goblins were harmed in the production of this product, and so were lots of elves, hobbits, paladins, humans, and good guys, so…

Johann: Well, they had it coming, though, so…

John: That’s true. They raided…

Johann: Nobody minds a dead paladin.

John: No. I tell you, it’s an underdog story. Paladins walking into a goblin hole, beating the crap out of them, and taking their stuff is not a heroic epic. There’s no tension, there’s no release, there’s no reversal of fortune. A goblin dropping in on a paladin camp in the middle of the night, clocking him on the back of his head, murdering him, and walking off with his greatsword that he can’t even use but he just wants as a trophy, now, that’s fantasy. So buy Bloodmoon Goblins.

Dan: All right, I have a question, though, about monsters in the Pathfinder MMO: what do monsters represent in the game? Are they simply these things that wander the wilds? Do they have their own ecology and their own goals? If you don’t keep the orcs in check, are they eventually going to attack your settlement, or do they just kind of hang out in their dungeons and do their thing until you get mad at them enough to beat their ass?

Mark: Well, yeah, again, we really want your actions to be persistent, and I think that’s the big advantage of this type of game, is that we’re trying to make sure you make a real impact on the world at all times. So if you kill that orc chieftain, the orc chieftain is dead, and you’re going to drive the orcs out of that area.

We’re still evolving the system, but we do want a system by which all the monster factions have their own agenda. The orc horde is trying to do something, they’re trying to invade the settlement or invade the territory, and you either enlist that captain or you beat him back or you do whatever, but you actually progress essentially a story that relates to those orcs in your hex.

And part of the reason you do need these new players and PvE players to be in your area is that you need them to progress these storylines around your settlement. And you’re going to have to progress these storylines if you want to be able to access the highest-level stuff. You need to beat back the orcs so that the dragons feel safe to come roost in the mountains again, and then you can go steal a dragon egg.

Dan: That leads in pretty well to kind of the next thing I wanted to hit on. And actually, from skimming over all the questions that I was given by our listeners, this is probably going to represent the turning point between the two topics here where we move from the game itself to kind of some of the business and mechanics of it.

One of the things that was talked about in an interview we did with Ryan Dancey a while back was that there was going to be a mix of theme park and sandbox elements. And we have talked at length about the sandbox elements, about how you build your own town and create your own story and fill the roles in the town and…

John: And kill Dan.

Dan: Yeah, and John runs around ganking like a jackass and all that kind of stuff. But could you talk for a bit about the theme park, almost? I know we just hit on a little bit about the orcs having their own story and whatnot, but how does the world-generated content as opposed to the player-based content, how does that fit into things, what does that look like, how do you guys intend to build on that over time? You know, I guess actually this might even lead into another question, because this is kind of theme park-based, what does an expansion look like?

Mark: Before we stray too much into business, that theme park content is by far the most expensive content to make for any MMO.

Dan: Oh, yes.

Mark: So it’s extremely difficult and expensive to make a lot of crafted content, and very detailed dungeons with puzzles, and kind of have a very evolved storyline. I think we would like to focus first on having the enemy factions have their own storyline and their own objectives that the players are interested in and are able to affect.

At a high level, the theme park is about the fact that you’ll see these witches invade the woods, and you’ll find out more about the witches over time and what their agenda is, and ally with them or drive them out or do whatever you’re going to do.

And these stories are interestingly — ideally, they’re told on a settlement level. They’re not about an individual player who over time finds out the story of the Lich King, it’s about the entire settlement talking about what the witches are doing and deciding as a settlement what we’re going to do about it.

So we’re hoping to drive that content to a little bit higher level and make it interesting and a little bit different than other games have done before. You know, obviously this is all in flux, and I think this element of the game is going to get deeper and richer over time. You know, I think the expansions especially are a great opportunity for us to constantly add new monsters and new challenges and things that are going on in the River Kingdoms and things that are threatening your kingdom.

Dan: So I want to shift topics here a little bit and move away from the gameplay to some of the questions that are being asked about the business behind this whole thing. There has been no shortage of questioning and critique about the way that this project is being set up and funded and run, and I have to admit to both the people here on the interview and the folks at home that this is a somewhat difficult portion of the interview for me to conduct, because one of the things that we have always been able to do in the past is our interviews have always been 100% cordial. I mean, you know, we might kind of ask somebody to explain something a little bit, but it’s always very conversational, we’re just kind of curious about what they’re doing.

But when I talked to Ryan Dancey, who was kind enough to set up this interview, and Mark was kind enough to have enough trust in us to come on the show and do this, one of the things that I said to both of them is I said look, there are these hard questions being asked about the value proposition of the Pathfinder MMO, and I would like to chase these questions. On the one hand, I have no interest in sensationalism, I have no interest in just trying to crucify you guys in nerd rage or because it’s going to get me five more listeners or whatever it is I think it’s going to do. That’s not the kind of organization that we are. But on the flip side, if we don’t ask the questions with any amount of real critical scrutiny, then I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favors, and I also don’t think we’re doing the guys over at Goblinworks any favors, because we’re not going to win anyone that’s sitting on the fence.

Johann: Also, I drove all the way up here just to be here to call you rude names.

Mark: Uh-oh.

Johann: So I have no idea about this whole MMO thing.

Dan: Yeah, he’s just got a list…

Johann: I just got a text that said, “Need U 2 insult some1.”

Dan: Yeah. He just got a list of four-letter words, and he’s going to work through them one at a time. So let me start off with the first question, which is a pretty blunt question.

Mark: Sure.

Dan: The question is why? Given the number of MMOs out there, do we really need another MMO, doubly so, do we really need another fantasy MMO?

Mark: Oh, wow. I’m surprised that’s a question. OK, let’s talk about that. Before we even get too far into the business side of the conversation, let me at least set up how we at Goblinworks think about the history of MMOs and where the environment’s going.

Dan: Sure.

Mark: This is a gross generalization of time, but I’ll say there was a first generation…

John: We do that here on Fear the Boot. You’re OK.

Mark: There was a first generation of MMOs that were…

Dan: There was Battletech, something-something, today.

Mark: Yeah, there’s the pre-Warcraft MMO days, and that’s the time in which City of Heroes was built. So obviously the big kahuna then was EverQuest. I think EverQuest and EverQuest 2 peaked at around a million players or so. Dark Age of Camelot was huge, Ultima Online, huge. There’s a lot of games coming out, Jumpgate, Earth & Beyond, EVE Online, and City of Heroes in that time. In this time of MMOs, it was all about putting together the best product you could, and the budgets were set at a certain level, you know, City of Heroes was a very modest budget, less than $10 million, which sounds like a lot, but when we get to later-on numbers, it’s not going to sound like a whole lot.

All these games were successful if we hit a couple hundred thousand players and built a community that enjoyed the game and we just kind of had a core subscriber base that enjoyed and had a good time in it. Then World of Warcraft came along, and World of Warcraft, because of Blizzard’s reputation and because it’s just a fantastic game, it pulled in, at its peak, 10 million players. And it did a couple things: World of Warcraft, they spent $50 million just on quest content before you get to any of the rest of the game. All of the quests in World of Warcraft were crafted to a very, very high degree, and were an incredible amount of fun, but were also an incredible amount of investment.

So after World of Warcraft, investors started chasing this. Investors wanted to replicate World of Warcraft and make the next World of Warcraft game. From then on, most of the big projects were all theme parks. They were all…

Dan: I was going to say, I think replicate is a very well-chosen verb.

Mark: And they were very much focused on that theme park, we’re going to spend a huge amount of money on story, and invest just in that and try to go up against World of Warcraft. And they all fell apart. So you’ve got Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic earlier this year, and a few more games are at this epic level. These games have these $100 million, $200 million, even $300 million budgets. They’re enormous undertakings with hundreds of people. And they’re all about trying to get ahold of that World of Warcraft pie and convince the World of Warcraft player to come over.

And unfortunately, no one has ever closed this business case. So a lot of these games are great fun, and I don’t want to besmirch them. I mean, I think in general, the industry has gone really far in making better and better games. But in general, all these games are financial disasters for their investors. They just don’t make back nearly enough money to justify the huge investment and cost.

You know, a lot of that comes down to, you know, World of Warcraft kind of has the equivalent of, say, 10 single-player games built into it at launch, and now it’s more like 40 or 50 single-player games’ worth of content. I mean, that’s the massive-level investment you’re trying to compete with if you are trying to compete on an equal footing with World of Warcraft, and it just hasn’t worked and it’s fallen apart.

And so there are a couple of big projects, Guild Wars 2 came out and is doing fantastic, Elder Scrolls Online is the last of these big projects that’s going to come out, and I’m looking forward to playing that, but the investment climate for MMOs essentially all dried up. Nobody wants to do these crazy investments anymore. And unfortunately, as typical in the investment community, they spent a long time just trying to chase and do exactly the same thing as another product, and then that didn’t work, and so now they are not investing at all anymore.

So we think it’s the right time for a different take on the genre. You know, sandbox games, for one thing, we can put it together with a reasonable budget, so we don’t have to attract millions and millions of players to be successful, we can attract an audience of core Pathfinder fans and an audience of core fans of sandbox games and do a fantastic business, and it’s kind of a harkening back to that first age of MMOs, where if we’ve got a couple hundred thousand players, all of our business case is closed and we’ll be very happy.

So that’s kind of the environment in which, you know, we thought about this game and how it fits into the world. I mean, on the positive side, we’ll be one of the few MMOs coming out, because people just aren’t making these investments in these MMOs anymore. On the negative side, maybe we’re wrong. Maybe our judgment about the marketplace is just flat-out wrong and the whole market has just fizzled out.

I don’t think that’s the case. I think that there’s always going to be an audience for going online with your friends, being able to see them in real time and run around and do things with them. It’s just core experience that’s fantastic and it’s a lot of fun, and I think the genre is going to go beyond this.

Dan: Obviously I can’t speak for a market, but I can speak for an individual, and as an individual who’s an avid consumer of MMOs — in fact, during the early days, I had just about every MMO that came out when it came out, in fact, I can note a few titles back from the early days you’ve missed such as Anarchy Online.

Mark: Sure.

Dan: Which I played quite a bit, even back when you were picking up loot that was a question mark. It was literally a question mark. I played for about an hour as a terminal. My character was replaced by the graphics for a terminal, and I was running around doing quests as such.

Mark: Wow.

Dan: So this was hardly the — and don’t get me wrong, I think Anarchy Online did a lot of things right, and I think it did a lot of things that today other MMOs emulate, but one of the things that really came out of this problem was while EverQuest was not the first, I mean, really, EverQuest, quite frankly, was a three-dimensional extension of a MUD. And a MUD was really an electronic imagining of a tabletop roleplaying game dungeon crawl. You went out, you killed monsters, you gain levels, you get their gear, and then eventually, gear becomes the new metaphor for levels, because it gives you exactly what levels would give you: more stats, more hit points, more abilities. And you go through these theme parks, and you grind the stuff and you kill it out, and quite frankly, as a player, I am burnt out on it.

I will say that of all the ones that I’ve played, I got the most playtime out of World of Warcraft, and it is not because I enjoyed World of Warcraft the most. I actually enjoyed EverQuest 2 a little more than I did World of Warcraft. The reason I played World of Warcraft the most is there’s one simple truth about online gaming, and quite frankly, most social activities in general: the game that you are most likely to play, statistically, is the game that your friends are playing.

And so I followed my friends around until eventually one by one, they all got burnt out as well, and we have now, quite frankly, all moved away from games like that to now the games that we’re playing are things like PlanetSide 2, MechWarrior Online, World of Tanks, it’s games that don’t look even vaguely like the old MMO structure.

Mark: Sure.

Dan: I remember playing Star Trek Online, and I was aghast when I was listening to some of the promo videos. And the main motivation, by the way, for even picking up Star Trek Online, as many reservations as I had about it, is the fact that my wife will not play an MMO, but she’s a huge Star Trek buff. So when she found out there was a Star Trek MMO coming out, I was able to set up a laptop, give her an account, she made a Betazoid, and she could play. And she would play. And that’s what kept me in that game for even the short period that I was in there.

But I was aghast sitting there listening to the people in the demo videos talk about oh, yeah, this ship’s a tank, and this ship’s a healer, and I’m listening to them like what? These are starships! How does it draw aggro? I mean, this made no sense, you know? This is not how ship-on-ship combat works!

I remember with Star Wars: The Old Republic, pretty excited about that game because BioWare was doing it, I was really looking forward to the single-player experience, and then I heard George Lucas, who has a knack for saying brilliant things, in an interview, somebody asked him, and as best I recall, the exchange went like this: so it’s pretty much just World of Warcraft in space? And his response was yeah, it’s World of Warcraft in space. We really need World of Warcraft reskinned in space? I mean, we honestly need this?

But let me take this to a second question, which is your cash model here. This is a subscription-based game, yet as of right now, the games that seem to be doing the best is the free-to-play or the freemium sort of model. Why did you guys choose to go with a subscription-based model?

Mark: Well, I think maybe we haven’t messaged things well enough; it’s only during the early access time, during the beta time, that it is strictly subscription-based. After that, we’ll move to a hybrid subscription/some sort of free-to-play model. And honestly, most games that start with a hybrid of subscription and a free-to-play end up moving only to free-to-play pretty quickly. So if we figure out that system and it’s working well and it’s working for the players and we’re happy and it starts drawing all the players to that free-to-play model, then we’ll just withdraw the subscriptions and not worry about it. But it’s a little bit of a way of hedging our bets, starting out with a hybrid model, we can see what’s working.

Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. That’s the way of the future, is free-to-play models. It’s a tricky one. Some of them work way better than others, and it’s tricky to figure out how to monetize without driving your players and without, you know, impinging on their play experience too much.

So it’s something that we don’t feel confident enough to want to experiment with while we’re in beta. So while we’re in beta, we’re just subscription. But it’s definitely where the market’s going and something we’ll have to do.

Johann: I suggest using the business model of product placement. So, you know, have Coca-Colaville and Pepsitown.

John: [Laughs] Yeah.

Dan: Instead of healing potions, you…

Johann: You kill a troll, and he drops a pack of Marlboro’s, and…

Dan: One of the other questions that was thrown my way: if Paizo’s looking to get into the electronic market deeper, why an MMO and why not focus the resources instead on a really high-end virtual tabletop? Because I know there was talk, at least earlier on in the arc of Pathfinder, about trying to do the suite of electronic tools that Wizards of the Coast keeps promising and not delivering.

John: Hey, Gleemax is awesome.

Dan: Yeah. [Laughs] Ain’t it? So why an MMO and why not a virtual tabletop?

Mark: I think this question comes back to the companies being much more separate than maybe it appears at first. Paizo has a full technical staff that runs their website, and that technical staff is actively working on their virtual tabletop product right now. They I believe have it in beta, so they have a select set of testers who are trying it out and working on it and playing games with it and trying to drive up the quality there. It’s absolutely something they want to do, and they’re investigating it.

And I think even beyond Goblinworks, there are other companies that Paizo is happy to work with and will continue to look at doing things like licensing Pathfinder for any and all electronic products. You know, our relationship with Paizo is that they have licensed us the Pathfinder Online license for purpose of the MMO, but, you know, there’s certainly a lot of attention that we’re all spending making sure that this product’s going to be awesome and hit what it needs to, but it’s not the only focus that Paizo has.

Dan: I’ve seen some footage of the tech demo. I have not seen the tech demo in full. I was not one of its backers, I will openly admit that. But one of the things that I’m curious about, and was also asked about by one of our forum users, is the appearance of the tech demo. Obviously, look, I accept it was a tech demo; what do you guys intend to do with the graphics engine and the character models and things like that between the tech demo and the real game?

Mark: Right, right. Sure. The lighting model in the tech demo is very basic. It’s just a basic lighting model that really has nothing to do with the lighting that will be in the final game.

We are actually working on putting together a video right now with a much more modern lighting pipeline. So we’ll take a lot of those same objects and show you them in a much better light, and you’ll get to see them in more of a modern look.

You know, it’s funny, here we’re all veteran MMO people, and so we’re kind of used to the phases of the project, and it’s interesting being so open with the public about every phase of the project in that most people just don’t know what phases these projects go through. So for us, spending first three months getting things working in a real MMO engine so that multiple characters are all synching across computers and there’s a basic version of all these systems implemented and it’s all functioning and we’ve started to develop the art style in terms of taking a projection of the 2D art and figuring out what that means in the 3D world, we’re really very happy with what we accomplished in such a short time.

But that’s all very early work, and it doesn’t necessarily show off that great. To us, we’re amazed with what we were able to accomplish, but people have to, unfortunately, kind of understand what goes in later into the product, things like lighting and more and more polishing of the art look. It’s going to look better and better over time, and definitely the intention is to have a modern fantastic-looking environment.

Dan: This is probably the core of the objections that I have seen online, and I think it’s probably one of the hardest questions in here: a lot of people feel like they’re basically funding a for-profit project twice. And what I mean by that is this: you guys came out, I — you’ll have to excuse me, because I’m terrible with calendar time, as I regularly admit to the audience — but you guys came out at some point here within the relatively recent past and started off a Kickstarter to fund the tech demo. The tech demo I believe was set to be funded at $50,000, if memory serves.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Dan: Is that correct? OK. When was that? And once again, I’m going to fully admit here, I am terrible with calendars.

Mark: I want to say it was March.

Dan: OK, and so we’ll just say it was March, and if that’s not correct…

Mark: But then the campaign runs for a while, and then it takes a while to get money from Kickstarter.

Dan: OK. Right, right, right, right, OK. So it gets funded back in March, or it gets funded sometime after starting in March and you guys get that money.

Mark: Sure.

Dan: And right before we recorded this episode, going off of a question that I had seen getting asked pretty repeatedly in a variety of places, I wrote down a quote here from the promo video for the current Kickstarter. And I’m quoting Ryan Dancey here, and he says, “Last summer, we asked for your help to Kickstart the Pathfinder Online technology demo. The project was an amazing success. We raised over $300,000, six times our project goal, and as a result, we were able to complete the technology demo and secure the financing we need to put the game into production.”

All right, so let me focus on that last part there, “… secure the financing we need to put the game into production.” That being the case, if you have the funding, what’s the purpose of the current Kickstarter? I mean, I know the official line is to speed up development or whatnot, but a lot of people in looking at this have interpreted this as, to be blunt, a fairly shameless cash grab. A for-profit company comes along, gets the public to fund the tech demo, and at least claims to have gotten the main product itself funded, and yet is coming back again this time asking for a million dollars to fund the project itself while saying funding is secured. How should the public make sense of that?

Mark: Sure. And again, actually, we’ve detailed a lot of these things in more blog posts, you know, outlining how much money we spent in different places with the Kickstarter. I think it’s funny, because we’re trying to be so radically engaged with the public and explain everything that goes on that sometimes people get confused, it seems like.

So everything you said is absolutely true. We’re very excited to have raised the money we did for the technology demo. It’s a very small amount of money compared to an MMO.

Dan: Oh, yes. I realize a million dollars does not get you much MMO.

Mark: No, no. Our budget for the game is a good amount south of $10 million, so it’s a large project, and it’s going to take a lot of money to succeed. The first technology demo went fantastic. I think it comes down to the great Pathfinder fans really believing in us and wanting to put together the best thing they could to get this project started, and we were very, very happy to raise $300,000 just for a technology demo. You know, again, we only expected to raise $50,000.

For this next iteration, the investment climate for MMOs is not great. We do have investment money, and it’s enough to have a staff. We have a staff of 11 people right now, but we can only really stay at about that level, which is unfortunately suboptimal for making an MMO.

You know, so a lot of this comes down to we can produce the product with our small, shoestring team, but it’s going to take a long time and we’re going to be struggling to get the features we need to get. We’d really like to push the team bigger to ideally more like 20 people. I think 20 people gets a lot more of the disciplines we need.

Take the art group, for example: we’re stretched very thin right now because it’s hard to get all of the character art expertise and the environment art expertise and the animation expertise and the concept art expertise and the effects expertise and the tech art expertise in order to put together the fantastic game that we want to do for Pathfinder. We’re really below the ideal team where we would be churning along and have ideal velocity, you know, for the game.

So this Kickstarter, it’s really nice because it’s able to round off those teams a lot. We set it at a million dollars because that’s really the amount that will make a significant bump in our ability to produce the product and ability to put together a great game. It’s definitely aggressive, and, you know, we’re doing pretty well. We’re tracking along with our goals right now.

But it’s nice in that each dollar in the Kickstarter is really letting us flesh out a lot of features and flesh out the team a lot better, because we get to hire more of the disciplines that we actually need to fill out the team.

Dan: Well, let me ask you about that, though, because you say that each dollar’s helping you hire somebody new, but at least how I understand Kickstarter’s model, you don’t get that money unless the Kickstarter actually succeeds.

Mark: Right.

Dan: Whereas with Indie GoGo, if you raise $5 out of a billion, you still get the $5. In Kickstarter, if you get 99 out of 100, you don’t see a dime. So what happens to this project if you guys don’t make it? I was looking at a site the other day that tries to estimate whether a Kickstarter will succeed or not. Let me start by saying that I don’t put a lot of stock in these things, because Kickstarters are very finicky things that tend to see bumps usually right at the start, right at the end.

John: That’s what I was going to say, they’re not so much finicky as they are bimodal.

Dan: Yeah.

John: I’ve done a Kickstarter; you get a ton at the beginning and a ton at the end.

Dan: Right. And unless there’s some major publicity, there tends to be a lot of emptiness in the middle. And also, if I look at projects like the one that was done by Double Fine, if I look at the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter, if I look at Star Citizen, I mean, these went way beyond the million-dollar mark. And so certainly the goal that you guys have set forth I think is a plausible goal. But what happens if you guys don’t make it? What happens if you make something less than a million, and as a result, cash out nothing?

Mark: That’s a good question. I don’t actually know the answer. I think we’re pretty happy with how we’re tracking right now. Kicktraq may be the site you’re referring to; it just does a linear extrapolation of your project, so…

Dan: Yeah, and that’s why I didn’t buy into it, because it’s linear.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, so…

Dan: Kickstarters aren’t linear.

Mark: No, no. But we’ve tracked consistently on Kicktraq at somewhere between 90%, 95% funding, which essentially means as long as we keep along this course, even without the final spike, we would be 95% there. So we’re kind of tracking along the course of lots of successful projects where they’ll track at these numbers, and then there’ll be a big push in the end, and who knows where we’ll end up at? But barring any disasters in terms of the constant level of funding we’re getting, we’re pretty optimistic. I mean, we’re definitely on track to do the job.

Dan: OK. So let me give you an opportunity to try and pitch this, I guess, in the simplest way to the people that are listening right now. Let’s say that I’m kind of on the edge, that I like the idea of an MMO, I’m a good fan of Pathfinder, but I could go either way on this, you know, there’s plenty of other fantasy MMOs out there. Sell me on why I ought to invest in this game, presupposing you don’t say I’m going to add a backing level where you get to play lizardmen.

Mark: So I think there’s two big answers. One…

Dan: Because if you could do that, my wallet’s coming out right now, I mean…

Mark: OK, well, we’ll have to work on that for you.

Dan: OK.

Mark: There’s two big answers. One is that we’re trying to make a very different game. The sandbox game is not that common, and there’s very little investor interest in it, and it is a way of making a massively multiplayer game where everybody really makes a big impact on the world. And so, you know, if you believe in that project and the type of game we’re trying to make, then definitely, please support the Kickstarter, because you’re going to enable Goblinworks to do that. It sounds like we’re some kind of big company, but 12 guys working in one big, empty room trying to put together an MMO is surprisingly shoestring for the MMO market.

Dan: And I get that. And as an interviewer, I have to be careful not to become an apologist in the middle of this. But one of the things that I get, as someone who has been around the RPG industry, Goblinworks is not a spin-off of an MMO company, you’re not a spin-off of EA, you’re not a spin-off…

John: Thank God.

Dan: Yeah, thank God. You know, you guys are a spin-off of Paizo, and what people think of as the major players within the tabletop gaming industry are very small fish.

Mark: Right.

Dan: I mean, when you go to Gen Con and you’re looking at Wizards of the Coast, you’re looking at a really big fish in a really small pond. And that fish is…

Mark: Right.

John: Unless you play Magic, then that’s a fat fish.

Dan: Right, well, OK, fair enough. But the point being now, and with Pathfinder having eclipsed Dungeons & Dragons, you’re still looking at a big fish in a small pond. But if you were to put that fish in the ocean and have it competing against all these other major companies, you know, it would not…

John: Certainly, yeah. Opposite Sony, it looks very tiny.

Dan: Exactly. If you put this thing opposite Sony or Microsoft or EA or whatever…

Johann: But probably more profitable than Sony.

John: Well, yes. But smaller.

Dan: Well, quite frankly, the average child with a penny chart is a little bit more profitable than Sony, and might have their money more securely kept than Sony. But that’s another story for another day. But the point being that I certainly do understand that Paizo can’t bankroll a project like this.

Mark: No. Yeah, it’s just too big.

Dan: And that’s something that I hope the audience understands, I mean, whether you’re interested in funding this or not. That’s your decision and your decision alone. But there seemed to be this kind of implication there’s big money behind this, and it’s like no, there really isn’t.

Mark: I wish.

Dan: If this was BUNGiE doing this, yeah, I’d be a little more offended at them asking me to bankroll their project, but that’s not what’s going on here. And I hope that that is something that people are able to take away.

Mark: Let me answer the second part of the question.

Dan: Oh, yes.

Mark: And the second reason to back the Kickstarter is just that it’s going to be a fantastic time. You’re going to get to see into the development process, for good or for evil, we’re trying to be as open as possible and show people what’s going on and get the game out there as quickly as possible so that people can actually start modifying it and start giving their feedback and we can start building the game around the players. And then I guess the third reason is just the amount of stuff you get.

I mean, the one thing Paizo can do is throw in a lot of fantastic rewards for Kickstarters. So that’s been outstanding, what they’ve been able to put together. They’re putting together the biggest dungeon they’ve ever made is being built as part of this Kickstarter, with just an all-star cast of writers. There’s all kinds of fantastic minis, and just a lot of stuff that you’re going to get, so why would you not back?

Dan: One of the things that you guys talk about in the back rewards on the site is that once you’ve backed at a certain level, you get to be part of this sort of clique that joins the beta. And one of the things that’s going to occur during the beta — and I want to talk about the beta in more detail here in a second, because there’s a specific quote someone sent me that I want to read — but once you’re in this beta, one of the things that’s a selling point that you just mentioned is that you have some kind of a feedback in the development process.

And I have read a fair amount of skepticism about OK, that’s real easy to say, but what does that actually translate into? You know, you can tell me that well, the fans get to pick everything, but how is that actually going to play out? What kind of real control does the community have as opposed to you’re just kind of telling them they have control and waiting until they name the idea you were going to do anyway?

Mark: [Laughs] Yeah, I wish it went like that in the forums. No, I think we’re already engaged at that level with the community. There’s been lots of great design discussions on the Paizo forums about the game.

Dan: Give me an example, give me an example. Like what is something that somebody from the fan community has suggested that is either in the game or is on the conveyer to go into the game?

Mark: Sure. And I’ll have to apologize, because I’m not actually the person who trolls the forums for this information.

Dan: No, that’s fine. Sure.

Mark: I believe the whole leveling-up system and how the achievements fit into a time-based acceleration system kind of got worked out and built up through the forums. I may be wrong, but I know that the designer staff is constantly drawing the forums and pulling those ideas from there.

The second thing we’re doing is as soon as we get over a million dollars, we actually set up all our stretch goals so that the players could vote on them. So you’ll actually get to flat-out do a player vote on what the next race is beyond humans and elves and dwarves, and…

Dan: Is lizardmen on the list?

Mark: I’ll put it — we should put a lizardman level.

John: Is goblin?

Mark: It’s not right now. It’s all the core races, so…

Dan: Aw.

John: Aw, boo!

Mark: I think halfling is the current winner, but it’s just players’ choice.

John: That’s just sad.

Mark: Yeah, well, I mean, we have to go on with, you know, what the players want.

Dan: No, I understand. I may be the most important person, but I am still just one person, so I accept that.

Mark: Yeah. We’re trying to engage as much as we can right now without even having the game.

Dan: Right.

Mark: And then once we have the game, then we get to do all kinds of things. And it goes everything from just observing the players, so if you like having a particular play style, then we’ll try to make sure to build the game around that play style, to directly contacting the top guilds and make sure we’re serving their needs and getting, you know, voting and all kinds of player feedback.

This is a style that some of us are new to, including me, but we’re inheriting from Paizo. You know, Paizo just does a fantastic job of constantly engaging with their customers. You know, they’ll ship out actual beta copies of the rules for the tabletop game and have people test it out and then send back their comments, and then revise it. They have always believed that they can make a better game if they stay engaged with the customer. And we’re trying to take that lesson and move it into the online world.

Dan: Actually, that’s a great talking point, but let’s run with that. How has the Paizo development process informed this MMO’s development process? How hands-on — and I know that we talked a little bit earlier about the company distinction, I don’t want to retread that territory, but how hands-on are these people in terms of seeing to it that this is the kind of product that they want to be representing Paizo in the electronic space?

Mark: Well, I think we’ve got a good mix of constantly checking in with them and making sure that we’re all on one page in terms of the overall themes of the game, but they also let us do our thing. You know, we’ve got several designers that have a lot of MMO experience, and Paizo doesn’t have that experience. It’s hard to replace that, and we want to build a great game first and build a game based on knowledge of what’s happened over the past 10 years of MMOs. And then we also want to make sure that game expresses Pathfinder as much as possible. But there’s really no point if the game is not fun by itself.

Dan: You mentioned the importance of guilds and what they’re being allowed to do. How are you balancing people versus pocketbook? And what I mean by that is let’s say that I come into this game, and I’m really not interested in forming a guild. I’m just going to kind of solo play, or maybe I’ve got my buddies I’m going to play with, and so I’m going to have my little band of adventurers plus John, and we’re out running around.

John: Hey, I adventure.

Dan: But let’s say that I backed in at a real high level. So let’s say on the one hand you have a guild whose total contribution to the game is $1000, and I’m Uncle Moneybags and I come in and I grab one of your $10,000 pledges. How do you balance my say against theirs? Because…

Mark: Custom art.

Dan: Well, yeah, OK, I understand there’s a difference in the backer levels, but when it comes time to actually make decisions about how this game is going to be shaped…

Mark: I don’t know. I don’t think this game is shaped by who votes. There is always going to be a filter through which our design staff is talking to the players and trying to figure out what’s going to make the best game for the players. It’s just the nature of human beings that if we just ask everything the players want and do those things, everybody would just ride a dragon on day one and there wouldn’t really be any game left.

Johann: I might buy that game.

[Laughter]

Dan: I can actually show you that MMO. It exists.

Johann: I know.

Dan: It’s a Chinese MMO or a Korean MMO or something like that, but yeah, you fly a dragon from the get-go.

Mark: There’s always going to be that filter, and I’m not sure it’s really as simple as just votes. I would say that if you do a $10,000 pledge, we’re certainly going to pay attention to your voice.

Dan: This is one — and this ties into a quote, but the question that was asked is given the fact that a beta period is where a lot of testing occurs and a lot of things are shaken out, the question that was raised for us to pass along is does it really seem appropriate to have people paying to play during a beta?

And there was a press release that got sent out, or some kind of public communiqué that got sent out from Goblinworks that reads as follows: “We can’t change the text for the rewards. Once the first backer picks on, that text is locked in. So we can’t remove the word beta from the reward text. What we can do is ask everyone who has backed the product help us evangelize the idea that the beta period is not the beta test. The purpose of the beta is not to test, it is to build core game functions crowdforged with the community. I know it’s an awkward way to use the term, but due to the way Kickstarter sets up their rules, we can’t change it, so we’re relying on you to help clarify this point with your friends.”

OK, now, I’m going to for a moment put aside the kind of the PR press release here thing, and as a developer, I know what a beta test is. As someone who has played in the betas of many different MMOs, I know what a beta is.

Mark: OK, I’m not sure you do. I’m going to argue with that a little bit, but go on.

Dan: OK, well, I’m going to give you an opportunity to answer to that. So what are you guys defining as a beta test? Why would I want to pay to be a part of that, and what do I get out of being a part of that outside of the kind of fuzzy thing of oh, well, you get to give us your feedback, which really means helping us track down bugs?

Mark: Sure.

Dan: And I’m hoping that’s not something that cynical, and so I want to give you an opportunity to respond to that.

Mark: Sure. First I’ll just address the quote real quick. I think that’s just a comment on the Kickstarter thread by Goblinworks. So to be honest, it’s not the easiest thing to defend. I think the intention there is that it’s a little bit of splitting hairs. We’ve been trying to communicate, because people worry that beta means beta testing phase, that that’s not exactly what we’re going for, and we’re trying to call it early access beta. It’s an early access time for playing the game.

Anyway, but now let’s get into the overall question: programming development has changed over the years, and the current style of programming is to — the understanding is that you proceed faster if you keep your bug count low constantly. This is very different from the older-style programming that was prevalent — well, it’s still prevalent in a lot of places, but it was certainly the rule five, 10 years ago that you did as much development as possible and then you had a big, long phase where you’re trying to fix bugs.

Dan: Sure, waterfall development.

Mark: Right. And in fact, you end up slowing yourself down, because you’re constantly trying to develop around bugs, and you have no visibility into when you’ll be done, because the nature of bug fixing is such that each bug takes a random amount of time to fix. You just don’t know if it’s going to take an hour, a day, or a week. And so you don’t get much visibility into what’s going on if you don’t constantly fix your bugs as you go. And there’s a lot better tools now in terms of automated testing tools and continuous integration and everything else to keep your build quality very high and your bug level very low.

So I mean, I think in today’s world, the beta label is more and more being attached to products that are feature-incomplete, but they’re not intended to be buggy. So we’ll have a separate alpha phase in which there is a lot of time and attention being spent on beating down the servers, making sure the networking’s working, and getting through all of the difficult-to-find bugs that we can’t find internally very well. And there’ll be, you know, a slew of alpha testers who are nothing but beating on things, and there’ll be automated AI testing bots that are beating on the system. And that’ll all happen during the alpha phase.

You know, in my blog post, I outlined, you know, a lot of projects that ship with the beta label, you know, Gmail had a beta label on it for years. Minecraft had most of its sales while it was still on beta, right, while he was still developing features for the game. I played Tiberium Alliances, which is an online browser-based Command & Conquer game, and played it only during the beta period. It was for real money, I played real money to do upgrades and things like that, and I had a great time playing the game. Again, it was not feature-complete, but it was stable to play.

Battlestar Galactica, I was looking to see if we were the first MMO to do this, but we’re not. Battlestar Galactica shipped the end of last year. It ran for about six months, I think, beta label on it. So again, it was for pay, everybody was playing the game in a realistic environment, but the beta label’s on there to let you know that the game is not feature-complete. If you want to wait for all the features, you’re totally welcome to do that, and you just wait until you hit a release date and you drop the beta tag.

Dan: I realize that the beta, as best as I recall the timeline that was in your Kickstarter video, and I may be a little bit off on here, but the beta early access, or whatever we want to call it, is somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three years off still, so it’s hard to make any commitments on this. But one of the frustrations that I’ve had during a lot of betas is because of the fact that you’re accepting as a testing period. Now, once again, I understand that you’re using the nomenclature a little bit differently, but because the typical beta is a testing period, one of the things that you have to accept is that stuff’s going to be reset.

Mark: Right.

Dan: You can work really hard, you get a big stash of gold and to build your town up, and all of a sudden, it’s like you know what? Actually, we made it a little too easy to accomplish that and we really don’t even want a town over here. And all of a sudden, it’s taken away, and you’re told well, you’ve just got to accept that because it was a beta. You know, that’s part and parcel of being a beta.

Mark: Yeah. And that is not going to happen in our beta. From the day one of beta, we’ll be running on production servers with real-time backups of everything. There’ll be constant off-site backups happening as much as possible, and at worst-case, you know, tape every day. So if we had some sort of data, you know, completely catastrophic, I can’t imagine rolling back more than a day, and I doubt we’ll do anything like that. We’re running in the full production environment. Your progress with your character is going to stay, and it’s going to be exactly the same all the way through release.

A couple more things: people have pushed back and have been worried about paying for time in beta. We’re very happy to take any of the months in the Kickstarter that you’re getting with the subscription time in beta, those can absolutely just be transferred to release. If you’d rather play the game after release, that’s no problem, we’re happy to do that. You can just not play the game in beta and get all that subscription time after release.

We’re hoping it’s just a benefit. If you’d like to play the game early, then we’re setting up this system. Unfortunately, we’re a small house, so in order to run a real-style beta with real production servers with constant availability and a real ops team that supports the servers and real customer service to call and fix your problems if you have any trouble, it’s just costly, you know, it just, it starts up all of our server costs at that point. And so that’s really why we have to do a subscription. We wish we could do a free beta, but realistically, in order to pay for all the server costs and bandwidth and everything else, we need to be pulling in revenue for that.

Dan: Do you know what I would pay good money for other than lizardmen?

John: Gnolls.

Dan: Reserved names. Yeah, gnolls too, but…

John: A wemic.

Dan: Gnolls or wemics as well, but yes, but specifically reserved names.

Mark: Reserved names, that’s a good idea.

Dan: Yeah, if you guys had like a $50 Kickstarter level where you get the game and we will reserve one name of your choice, first-come, first-serve basis, amongst the people on that level, you better believe I’d freaking take that.

Mark: That’s a great idea.

Dan: Man, Pat, it’d save us getting up at midnight until 4:00 am trying to, you know, camp the servers and grab the name.

Pat: Yeah. Well, one way you can do that is, I don’t know what your naming convention’s going to be, but if you were to allow a first and last name, that would not completely alleviate that, but it would go a long way. When you are trying to reserve your favorite name, one-word name, that’s gone.

Dan: Oh, yeah.

Pat: But if it’s a combination, then all of a sudden, that’s almost eliminated. So suggestion…

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, we really haven’t worked that out yet, but I mean, that sounds pretty reasonable. That’d be very cool.

Dan: All right, so is there anything else about the Kickstarter or the beta or any of the stuff we’ve covered that you think is really prone to public misconception that you’d like a chance to respond to?

Mark: Well, I think your earlier point about, we’re a pretty small development team, we’re smaller even than Paizo, but Paizo’s not this huge company with funds that can, you know, can fund a huge MMO of their own. The entire Paizo staff is always dedicated to trying to put out a great product for Pathfinder fans, and they definitely want to make sure that we fit into that culture and are doing the same thing. We’re just a few guys working and putting together the best thing we can put together. That’s why the Kickstarter campaign exists, is we hope that people find that attractive.

Dan: I realize this interview kind of ran an unusual course, because we started off with all the exciting and positive stuff and then ended kind of on the rough beatdown side of things. And you’ll be pleased to know I at least stuck to my own forums, where people tend to be nice. I didn’t pull anything off of RPG.net or whatever.

Let me ask you a couple things here to try to end this at least on a somewhat more positive note. What are some of the things you’re excited about? What are some of the things that you know are on the horizon that you’ve already played with, you’ve seen play out, or maybe aren’t even in there yet but you know are coming up that you are really excited to see in this game, and you think the people sitting at home would be more excited about the game if they also knew about?

Mark: I’m not sure if we’ve announced this feature. We probably haven’t, because it is super early in our discussions. And honestly, I don’t know — this has a real risk of not being in the game, because I don’t know if it will actually pan out to be fun.

Johann: Prostitutes?

Mark: [Laughs] Yeah, that’d be great.

Johann: Oh, OK.

Mark: No, formations. So what we’d really like to do is have there be a big combat advantage to standing in an actual infantry line in formation. Part of the problem with PvP on a large scale in MMOs is that what happens is the whole battlefield is nothing but a grand melee. So people are just running constantly back and forth and there’s all kinds of crazy actions going on, and it’s just bedlam. It doesn’t look like a normal combat, right?

We’d love it if people can lock together into a shield wall, for one thing, block movement when they do that, so you can’t…

John: I was just going to say that: if I may offer one suggestion to be the cornerstone of this effort, don’t let people just run through one another.

Mark: Exactly.

Dan: And actually, there are two game precedents I can think of for this, which is Warhammer Online, they did not allow you to pass through, and so it was very common, once you were inside of one of the keeps or whatever, to put your warrior classes at the top of the stairs and then have your healers and range somewhere behind them.

And I think Age of Conan did something similar, because there you also had an attack arc. You didn’t target somebody and say I want to attack that guy, you just hit an attack button and swung your weapon within an arc in front of you, and anyone that that connected with, that connected with. And so similarly there — now, don’t get me wrong, Age of Conan was a massive cluster in so many different ways, but at least the principles were in place to make that work, even if the game itself didn’t play out terribly well.

Mark: We’re interested in making this feeling of grand combat between, you know, two huge nations really fun and exciting and feel and look like the real thing. Now, we have to figure out how to make that actually fun, because, you know, to a certain extent, if you’re locked in a shield wall, you’re not having as much fun running around. We’ve got a lot of schemes we’re working on internally about how to make this work, but I think it’s a feature everybody’s really excited about.

Dan: OK. So to go ahead and close this out, we usually ask our interview subjects what it is they’ve got coming up they want people to be excited about, but in this case, I don’t think I really need to spell that out, unless you’ve been asleep for the past two episodes.

Mark: Right. Just the Kickstarter.

Dan: Yeah. So I will link to the Kickstarter, I will also link to the…

Johann: Wait, there’s a Kickstarter? I missed something.

Dan: … the Goblinworks web page.

Pat: Go back to sleep, Johann.

Dan: But Mark, you also said that you keep a blog somewhere; where is that blog at?

Mark: Oh, wow, man, uh-oh. Now people will look at my three sad blog posts. It’s www.kalmes.org.

Dan: .org, OK. All right, I will…

Mark: I’ll put together, you know, maybe another post.

Dan: You got a couple weeks to do that, because part one will drop the week that we’re recording this, part two will not drop until the following week, so you’ve got a little bit of time to get yourself figured out.

Mark: All right, sounds great. I’m going to do a rant on patents, I think.

Dan: OK, I will [laughs] I will then, in the meantime, be sure to get all this stuff posted in the show notes along with an online petition to get lizardmen added to the game. As for you guys at home, I hope we did a good job of covering the questions that you guys had about this. I’ve got to say, in walking away, I think this sounds pretty cool. You know, I certainly think a lot of things are obviously going to be decided in the execution, the devil’s always in the details; I can’t tell you whether this game is going to be fun any more than I can tell you whether the world is going to end on this Friday, but — I’m deeply worried about that, though — this looks like cool stuff. I know some of the people involved in it. I at least have met Wolfgang Bauer, I’ve talked to Ryan Dancey on multiple occasions, I now know you, Mark, we certainly know Erik Mona and some of the other people that are involved at Paizo.

If you are interested in a fantasy MMO, if any of this sounded good to you, then at least be willing to go out there, to check this out, to read some of the material on it, to see what they’re doing and to give this a serious chance. I know there’s a lot of cynicism about the project, and I’m not here to tell you what sort of opinion to have or what to do with your money, I would just say…

Johann: Give it to me.

Dan: OK, give it to Johann.

Johann: Yeah.

Dan: Johann.org.

John: Give it to me and I won’t kill you in Pathfinder Online.

Dan: Yes you will.

Pat: Yeah.

John: I’ll wait for like a day.

Dan: Yeah, he’ll wait for like a day and then do it anyways. But anyway, be sure to check the show notes for all the links and all the usual good stuff we put out there. Don’t forget to get out your votes on the Postcards contest, and hopefully by the time this show drops, we will have a link up as well to John’s Bloodmoon Goblins project.

John: That’s right. Buy my book.

Dan: Out there on DriveThru, and…

John: Can’t play a goblin in an MMO yet, I don’t think, but you can play one in tabletop RPG.

Dan: I know. That’s not the petition I’m starting, so… alrighty, anyway, Mark, thank you very much for joining us. I appreciate you taking the time to yak with us here for a little bit, and tell Ryan that I appreciate him loosening your leash enough to talk to us and for him trusting me enough to have my swings at someone else on his staff, so…

John: Yeah, and thanks for giving us the dish. I really liked going back and forth about actual gameplay elements that you haven’t necessarily talked about yet.

Mark: Yeah, it’s a complicated thing to make an MMO. No, it was great fun. I appreciate you guys having me on.

Dan: All right. So as for you guys at home, you have a great week and great games, and we will catch you next time.

John: Seeya.

Dan: This has been a production of Fear the Boot, copyright 2012. You can find previous episodes and other resources at www.FearTheBoot.com. Fear the Boot is also a member of the Pulp Gamer Media Network of shows. You can find other great shows in this network at www.PulpGamer.com.


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