It’s now well over a month since I attended Austin Games Conference. One of the highlights of that trip was the opportunity to meet with some of the minds behind Star Wars Galaxies at the SOE-Austin studio. It was a very informal thing, something that John Blakely had mentioned as a possibility when I had the chance to talk with him at SOE Gamers Day early this year. Schedules and stars aligned, thankfully, and I made the trek out to their offices for a few hours with the game’s creative leads. So why hasn’t it shown up on the site until now? I blame illness and brain worms. Hopefully my memories here aren’t so stale as to be useless. I’ll try to give an overview of the experience and the topics we touched upon, which ranged from the SWG development process all the way to the role of bloggers and podcasters in MMOG communities. The latter conversation was, admittedly, as much friendly conversation as idea exploration for my panel session that Thursday.

The big picture: SWG is still not a game that I (personally) want to play every day, but you really have to hand it to those guys for the passion and persistence they’ve displayed in keeping that ship afloat. Also, DCUO concept art is gorgeous.

I arrived at the SOE offices as Austin experienced one of the rainstorms I personally associate with areas near the gulf coast. Apparently, they’re actually not that common down there; Austin is further from the water than I always think it is. This lack of rain results in stupidity and accidents whenever it does come down. I got to witness a fairly impressive one on the way over, and at the end of my trip it resulted in a rather long wait for a cab back. In any case, when I got there the sky was working on a sweaty downpour. The area around SOE-Austin’s office is landscaped like a mini-jungle, and it seemed somehow terribly appropriate.

After a quick wait in the lobby, Chris Cao ushered me into the office of SWG lead designer Thomas “Blixtev” Blair. We were soon joined by Producer Lorin “DeadMeat” Jameson, and launched into a discussion of Galaxies’ workflow process. On an intellectual level I’d understood the challenges they face in working on the game before, but it was really driven home looking over Blix’s shoulder. Most Massive games, like your EverQuest 2s and your World of Warcrafts, have well developed tools sets that allow them to add content to the game with a reasonable amount of effort. It’s not trivial, from what I understand, but there is an understood workflow for adding a quest (for example) and tools to support that flow.

SWG has no such niceties. At the time I was in his office, Blix was adding in a set of armor to the game. A camouflage-patterned scout trooper set, it was added into the revamped Imperial Theme Park as a result of Test Center player feedback. The number of files required to be checked out, the lines of scripting required, the hoops to jump through, the swords to swallow … to describe it as ‘fiddly’ would be an understatement.

Mr. Jameson explained that this is the biggest legacy of the original vision of Star Wars Galaxies as a sandbox game. There is no concept of a ‘quest’ in the game’s basic structure. At its core SWG is a wide-open system, inside of which almost anything can be built using their powerful scripting language. It’s a double-edged sword. That power is incredibly flexible, but ultimately requires a lot of acquired knowledge before new team members can contribute to the game’s creation. When the game launched there wasn’t even a tool for outfitting NPCs with clothing; clothes had to be manually added to each NPC via database tables.

My immediate question was, of course, “Why don’t you make yourselves some new tools?” Essentially it all comes down to priorities. They only have a certain amount of developer time in a given week, and (understandably) they primarily want devs creating content for future chapters. Any time spent away from content creation for tools development is ‘wasted’ time from the player’s point of view, regardless of what it might mean for future content or the game’s workflow. It’d be kind of hard to sell ‘Chapter 9: The Fantastic Developer Tools!’ as a good idea.

Discussion of concrete game elements primarily revolved around the upcoming badge system. The badge system as it exists in the game right now is the addition of a simple line of text in your character’s description. Something like ” … has visited the Agrilat Crystal Swamp” is an example. You can view other players’ badges, and if you’re wondering how long an avatar has existed in-game that’s a great yardstick. Characters that existed prior to the NGE have “Elder” profession badges, and ones that go way back reference things like the Dead Eye project. The ‘new’ version of the badge system is going to add slick looking little icons to each of the badges and generally make it a much more interesting visual experience. You’ll still be able to look at badges on other players, and (like the ones in City of Heroes) there will be lots of fun tweaks in the badge visuals. More interestingly, there are going to be a metric TON of new badges. Most of these new badges are of the collection variety, a subject that was covered extensively in a recent Friday Feature.

An interesting point they made about the badge system, and with many of the systems they’re adding into the game as they go: those systems get decent tools. Since they’re adding content to make use of the systems they’ve made, their attitude is now one of making tools as a part of the system creation process. They demonstrated how easy it was to add content to the badge system, and I assume that there are some decent tools revolving around the Beast Mastery system as well. Even if it’s still a painstaking process to get armor into the game, new things at least won’t suffer from the same limitations.

We relocated to a ‘hang-out’ area at the Studio for a less formal chat about the game’s history. Much of that revolved around the New Game Enhancement, from their point of view. I didn’t even bring it up, I don’t think. I haven’t been a hater for a long time on this subject, but it was obviously still something that caused them discomfort to talk about. Primarily we discussed the reality of having to deal with a large group of very angry people who won’t go away. The problem was more one of conveying information in the right fashion than anything else. It was a matter of community relations and consideration, and ultimately required that they reassess the way that they made the game. The sense I got was that in ‘breaking the game’, they gained a better understanding of what was required to serve the players. Obviously a painfully learned lesson - but an important one just the same.

There was a great deal of discussion here about those learned lessons, and I think all of them felt humbled by the experience of dealing with the NGE. Chris Cao brought up his ‘players who post’ post, the legacy of which lives on thanks to the unblinking eye of the internets. It’s hard, a month on, to convey how much respect these guys have for the process of selling players on an idea. Most of my notes are now faded to the point of being encrypted. I’m left with a sense of disappointment, because I know what we talked about was fairly important to my understanding of SWG.

To a greater or lesser extent, these guys are the ultimate example of how to make a game. The depths of their screwing up is obviously something that we all wish could have been avoided, but consider what SWG represents today. It’s a quality game getting more polished by the month, with a (slowly) growing population amid a crowded and competitive field of games. They’re not trying to beat number one; they’re not even trying to beat number five. They’re focusing on what is most important for their game, for their community, for their players, and they’re executing with skill and passion. To borrow Paul Barnett’s analogy: if WoW is the Beatles, SWG is like … Information Society. Very fun for a small group, and completely different in the here and now from what was there and then.

We moved rooms yet again to continue our talk about the ecology of communication surrounding games, with an eye towards the outer bits. IE: blogs and news sites and such. Our discussion there centered around the usual blog tropes covered in a dozen discussions of the medium: perpetuation of bad information, reliability of posters, relationship to the dev team. We also chatted a bit about podcasting, and I was surprised how big of fans they were of Yivvits and Mr. Bubble. Well … maybe not surprised.

Folks had to actually get back to work at that point. John Blakely took me for one last tour around the office, heading into the scrum areas for both SWG and DCUO. I got to see hints of things that will be in that latter game, but what I saw is nothing that you haven’t already guessed already. What I was surprised by was the art. Arena.net’s walls of art were beautiful, but since GWEN was almost done most of the art I saw was on the floor. There in Austin all the art was still on the walls in the cogitating phase - and it was incredible. My wife is a much bigger DC nerd than I am, and it made me very regretful she wasn’t there; We just watched through all of Justice League recently, and suffice it to say there were a lot of familiar faces hanging on the walls.

That was pretty much the end of my tour, and the much of the rest of the evening was spent having dinner with Brent and folks, so I didn’t have much time to cogitate on what we talked about. It was a great experience, and one I’m grateful I had the chance to participate in. I’d like to think I brought something to the table as both a player and a commentator. It was also another chance to learn that almost without fail people who make games are overly intelligent excellent people. Working in close proximity to that kind of creativity has to be a rush.

Many thanks to John Blakely and Michael Shelling for setting it up.