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This thread is inspired by another: view original post
Edited by Hylebos:
1/17/2014 10:30:24 PM
29
1/16/14 Bungie Podcast Summary
[url=http://downloads.bungie.net/podcasts/bungie_podcast_01162014.mp3]You need to freaking listen to this Podcast[/url], but if you can't I've got you covered. I spent about four hours typing up a very rough account of everything that was said over the hour long podcast. Please let me know if I get any of the details wrong, my sanity got a little strained near the end of the summary, and I'll probably go back through it slowly and edit it for readabillity.
The summary is split into five posts that are loosely daisy-chained with hyperlinks, but if you lose your place, all the bullet points are numbered for your reading and discussion convenience. There's a ton of new delicious info, and a lot of exciting things to discuss, so let's begin.
[quote][b]Introduction[/b][/quote]
[b]1)[/b] DeeJ, Urk, and Halcylon are back for the first Podcast of the new year.
[b]2)[/b] They recorded this just after the Game Informer Article came out, before the beginning of the new year.
[b]3)[/b] The guests for this podcast are Tyson Green and Lars Bakken. This is going to be gory and delicious.
[b]4)[/b] This was also recorded right before the Winter Build that they held right before they all left for break, where they stand up the current version of Destiny and they all play together for a day to see what is good and what sucks as they push towards the public beta.
[b]5)[/b] Tyson specifically is very excited to talk about what he's working on because there's been a lot of question as to "What does it mean to have an investment game?", "How will that get incorporated into the gameplay we know from Bungie?"
[b]6)[/b] We're going to hear about the nuts and bolts, the details, their goals, oh god I'm so excited to hear the rest of this podcast.
[b]7)[/b] There's a nice bit of parrying between the two guests because Tyson wants to create this grand investment system that defines a player and Lars has to then take that and balance it for a multiplayer universe, and how they communicate that and fight back and forth over what is what.
[b]8)[/b] They have a mindset where they try to anticipate what people want and feel over months and months to try to keep the experience organic and evolving and engage players.
[b]9)[/b] For Tyson he's constantly making new characters and going through the system, how does he keep in the mindset of "I'm a new player!" when he's done it so much?
[b]10)[/b] There is a bit of teasing about reading off the Destiny Script that is sitting a few feet from them in the Foley Sound Lab. Tyson is about to enter.
[quote][b]Part 1) Tyson Green, 8:00[/b][/quote]
[b]11)[/b] Tyson Green is the lead investment designer at Bungie, he tries to make people care about the game.
[b]12)[/b] Once people get Destiny, how will they recognize the investment team's finishing touches? The stuff that they do is woven throughout the game, you want to care about the game because it's fun, you want to care about the game because it's got a good story, but the investment team wants you to care about the game because it gives you things to do, things to want, it gives you things to have a social group work together around, basically they try to pull all the parts together and make you want to stick with this game.
[b]13)[/b] One of the things that has struck DeeJ as he's watched people look at investments is that people just assumed that they're tacking experience points on top of the experience, but Tyson cares about the moment to moment gameplay and what happens when people collide together, how do you make those experiences better, how do you reward people for doing the things you think they're going to want to do...
[b]14)[/b] There's a really shallow understanding of investment, most people think of experience points and grinds, but what the investment game does is it tries to broaden the spectrum of ways for you to care about the game, the goal isn't to make you play the game for a thousand hours, the goal is to make a game that you want to come back to and your friends come back to and you all feel like you want to keep playing this game; you have a social game at that point, a communal experience as opposed to the "Done in One" experience you pay $60 for a single play through and then you never touch it again. There's lots of layers here , in some of Bungie's past games there was investment systems that were based on skill, skill is a form of investment, if you spend time to become amazingly good at team slayer on lockout that's totally valid and real, if you spend a ton of time to learn every detail of the lore of the Marathon series that's also a form of investment, it's just as valid to an investment designer as having a couple of items and characters that are leveled up to the max. When you talk about investment, there's surface level investment, which is experience points and item drops, but then there are deeper layers of investment like caring about lore or caring about an experience you shared with other people.
[b]15)[/b] DeeJ says that when they're introducing people to this game who might not know it as well as the people on Bungie.net, they paint it in very broad strokes, the more you play the more dangerous you become the more rewards you earn the more you change the way you look and fight, are those the sorts of things you're creating with your systems?
[b]16)[/b] Yeah absolutely, if you are a person who has really deeply played this game who has done the hard challenges or covering the breadth of the game, you should look different and stand out from other people, your new friends should say "Wow, that's really cool, I want one of those, how do you get one of those?" and instead of you just saying "oh just beat the campaign" you say "oh man me and three other guys got together and we really worked on this one thing for a while and we got good at it and then this led to that and it all came together and that's how I got it. It was totally cool, do you want to work on that?"
[b]17)[/b] DeeJ says they talk about how the weapons tell stories and how many people take that to mean that there's fiction behind them and there is, but what they really mean is when you have that epic gun like the Fate of All Fools and when people go "Oh how did you get that?" you can tell them how to get it or you can help them get it and form a party and you create a story out of that moment for a player and those are super powerful and we see players do that intrinsically, guys like Mythic Tyrant for Halo would go out there and beat the game on the hardest mode and difficulty and what he would have to show for it was people knew his name, they saw his videos, if they wanted to beat the game in that same mode he could take them out and do that, part of Bungie's job with Destiny is to make sure that people know who he is IN the game, he doesn't neccessarily have to create a youtube channel, he can if he wants to, but in the game it will actually show that in his gear or some other stuff that they aren't ready to talk about or when you look at his profile on Bungie.net, those stories are really cool and potent.
[b]18)[/b] Tyson says the Mythic players are a really good example of: Hey once you have a game people care about for whatever reason, that gives you as a Mythic player an audience to play to, and another example with another game is you've got all these players who play Dark Souls a lot and you've got this tiny slice of those players who play through Dark Souls on level 1 characters to beat it, why are they doing that? Because there's an audience of players who think that is awesome! They are always impressed when you can do that and you do it for them, when you have a game that people don't care about because it came and went, well, you don't get that kind of community it doesn't really build up around those games, investment isn't about experience points and item drops, it's about having an enduring attachment to a game and community so that community can exist and thrive.
[b]19)[/b] How do you take this sort of old world order of a skill based first person shooter, 30 seconds of fun, I'm a player I'm powerful I have all these awesome weapons against enemies, be they AI or Human, and then fuse it with an investment game, does that require a whole lot of new thinking, does that require you to work a lot with a bunch of the activities guy sand the world designers to see wholistically how that should work or do you layer it in like icing on a cake?
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=63361420&path=1]Link to next post[/url].
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Edited by Hylebos: 1/17/2014 4:59:52 AM[b]30)[/b] Tyson doesn't mention the game franchise, but he played a lot of it recently and he also played the prequel and there's a difference between those games where in the first one they had a fairly punchy progression and you could have a functional character in a night's worth of play or a weekend of binging with your friends, you could try a lot of things in a short period of time, and when the sequel came out he and his friends all went out to get it only to discover that it took 50 to 60 hours to level up a character and it was a completely different experience just because of the time scale of the game from a something you felt you could do in a weekend to something you had to do in a week or two or three. On the other end of the spectrum you look at MOBAs like DOTA and League of Legends where you say "this is remarkable because you take an investment game and you compress it down to about 30 minutes", every single game of DOTA is an investment game where you say I want to roll a new character and I'll get him these items and he'll do this thing and that was great or oh that sucks I'm going to do him differently next time, and that's an intersting style of investment game there and people wouldn't neccessarily look at that and say "DOTA is an investment game" but it totally is. [b]31)[/b] How do you balance those two extremes between the short punchy cyclical rewarding investment game with the long term goals that is more in line with the Road to Recon or Mythic Tyrant stuff how do they collide? Tyson doesn't think they collide at all, they're just two different wavelengths in the same game, you can have a tight investment game where you find a new weapon and it's interesting and you ask "how can I upgrade this?" and you keep using it and you decide to go all the way with it and and that might only take an hour or two of play with a bunch of PvP matches, or you might have a long session where you're saving up for a new ground vehicle with freaking cool blue contrails, but the point is that you can have short cycles and long cycles and you want to introduce cycles of play, cycles of activity and their most famous design axiom at Bungie that gets the most press is 30 seconds at fun, and they think it's famous because it's true, it's a really useful design axiom, but that's not the only cycle, you have cycle of seconds where you get good feedback from firing a single bullet from your gun, to long cycles where you say "What am I doing this week? I'm going to get together with my friends for thursday night firefight and this weekend we're doing those challenges" you want to cover both ends. What the investment game brings to the table is "What if you had some even longer cycles?" The kind of cycles that make it worthwhile to form a clan and to have friends that your'e playing with in a commuinty and those sorts of things aren't in conflict at all, they're synergistic. [b]32)[/b] That's the intrinsic motivation again, when the community gets together and they do things to enhance each other's experiences that really don't have anything to do with what the developer intended but they take their own queue and they make their own action and what Tyson is doing doesn't get in the way of that, and if people want to speed run the game and if people want to go off and find ways to enjoy the universe they can, but you for the less inventive players lay out some bread crumbs between them and their future greatness. [b]33)[/b] Tyson notes that they might not neccessarily be less inventive players but they simply don't know that they hunger for these sorts of things until they taste it for the first time where they're going into an intresting space where Destiny is a shooter Destiny is an action game a lot of people out there are really familliar with and they love and they spend time playing it and they try to bring some additional elements to that where they're saying this is a game that is more fun playing with friends. You look at Halo 2 and it took Halo 1 and said "What if you could have that experience that you had during a lan party with friends and have that experience any time you wanted with a virtual sofa of friends?" The friends list came from Halo 2, they've always liked these games that you could play with your friends in a social fashion, and the best outcome is if the game introduces you to that even if you didn't know that you liked that and you find out you love it and all of a sudden your play experience has been enormously broadened. And there's a lot of people who know that they don't like certain things and such but that's pretty common and the game is great for those people to because there's a lot of content, but they think they're saying "Yeah, we want you to play this game with friends and if you don't have friends to play with then we got you covered we'll find you some we've got a ton of couches." [b]34)[/b] DeeJ knew that he liked social experiences going into Halo 2, but it made him love it to the point where he went "What am I doing? I'm starting a blog I'm starting a website I'm building teams to play this game, when my team gets full I'm building other teams to play this game" to the point where that's the reason he's working for Bungie. The systems Tyson's team has designed changes the way that gamers play games is the reason why you DeeJ is talking to Tyson in front of the internet. Hugs are shared. [b]35)[/b] Tyson started back in the Myth days where Bungie built this little community of a couple hundred people playing the game at any given time playing this obscure RTS game and the experience of playing that game and being part of that community is what eventually brought him in direct contact with people from Bungie and then he did an internship for a couple of months.. it's a process that brought many people to Bungie. [b]36)[/b] They joke about how many freaking exclusives Tyson revealed in this segment and how they'll have to go back and bleep that out, thankfully it sounds like most of it made it through the censor. Tyson's segment is coming to a close, DeeJ mentions that Bungie makes games that they like to play, and it's interesting to hear Tyson talk about the games that he likes to play and that Destiny is one of them. [quote][b]Part 2) Lars Bakken 38:36[/b][/quote] [b]37)[/b] Lars Bakken is the lead designer in charge of competitive multiplayer activities. Any time you go in and fight against other human beings he is in charge of that experience. Jokes are made about how he wasn't quite ready to talk about his job title quite yet but it would happen soon... [b]38)[/b] They encourage him to say whatever the hell he wants and not hold back because they'll just censor what they cant let through with bloops and such. Some jokes are made about what the noise should be. [b]39)[/b] They went at a really high level with regards to the Game Informer interview, they don't want to paint themselves into a corner but they're anxious to talk about the real stuff because there's a lot of cool things they're doing in Destiny. Game Informer really enjoyed the game, the first day and a half they were holding their cards close to their chest but at the end they somewhat lost it. [b]40)[/b] It's weird to be in a place where you can talk about concrete things after all of this time, not everything can be said but there's definitely a change in mode where they say "Well actually now we're going to let people play the thing... oh shit, hope they say good things" [b]41)[/b] What are you excited to see with the Winter Build? Lars wants to see how the story missions are coming together, they've made a lot of progress recently and some of the experiences are so freaking good with Marty's Music. Having those experiences coming together, the encounters are whipped into shape, the audio is coming in, the missions make sense, the fiction pieces flowing, it's really cool. Lars plays his stuff all the time so he knows what he's getting into with regards to the winter build. His voice is hoarse because he spent the past hour screaming during a multiplayer session from the sheer awesome, it's a good sign that things are coming together and he thinks the game is at a good point. [b]42)[/b] If the podcast gets delayed till January (it was), suck it, he was playing Destiny. [b]43)[/b] There's some amusing anecdotes about prepping the Bungie team before the Game Informer guys came and Urk is like "You've been playing for a while, please don't throw down and make it really obvious that you're not playing, but just be aware that they're getting their berrings for the first few minutes, and whoever gets first we're going to fire you." and then Luke Smith who was busy comes in last minute and they have this ongoing thing that goes all the way back to Halo 3 and he didn't get the message and the first five minutes he's taunting Urk and Urk is like -_-. Urk apparently took first place that match and they tap him on the shoulder and much amusement was had. [b]44)[/b] More amusing anecdotes are had about returning to old games like Halo 3 and they discover that "Oh shit there's people who have been here this entire time, they never left..." [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=63361451&path=1]Link to next post.[/url]
