Trick Dempsey Interview on KTAM

Last night Trick Dempsey the Creative Lead for Defiance was on KTAM Radio, the internet themed radio for Defiance to answer some community questions.

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Negative reaction to grenade system, are players missing something in understanding?

I made a couple of changes to the Alpha so that you will still get a bounce time on a grenade, I think on a legendary grenade a half or quarter of a second, so that you can still get a rebound effect that people are fond of.

Flashbangs have a slightly longer time like their original counterparts did.

By and large people are getting it on the forums, it's pretty clear we need to better message out how picking up a lower rarity grenade rarity fills up your higher rarity grenade. That needs to be made more clear that it is a upgrade path instead of individual grenades.

The three second cooldown, we considered two second. The three second worked better from the server side.

Some people have figured out how much of a DPS boost they have got from this change. Seeing some of the debate between holding on and using the grenades sporadically versus using the whole slew of the grenades simultaneusly versus the Warmaster.

Why the grenade change?

We knew we wanted to have them in a more limited supply, there was some odd behaviours you could get into because you had an unlimited supply.

We also wanted to entice people to more frequently have the cycle to go back tot he vendor to sell stuff and be more fully supplied. As soon as we added the Spikes and Stims we knew we had an opportunity to get that economy back in.

Back in Alpha I can't remember if we had multi throw grenades, with obscenely long cooldowns but you could throw 2 or 3 at a time.

How is this going to affect the inventory of players?

If you are looking at the inventory space, if you have a max set of spikes, stims and grenades you are looking at a maximum of 11 slots taken up. 3 spikes, 3 stims and 5 grenades. Compared to what we saw with multiple copies of grenades and trash with breaking down. There was no excitement picking up a grenade. No real change apart from economic impact, you are getting less salvage and scrip but you are able to have longer combat runs as your spare items don't fill up this inventory.

We knew we had to get in the mass salvage and mass sell, we wanted you to have more mass control of your inventory.

Warmaster

We've buffed the warmaster since we launched Alpha, since we got numbers back from people in co-ordinated groups and uncordinated groups.

He will be the first of many hopefully. We are always testing encounters in lab conditions. Each time you are learning the strategies that players are making.

Bonus Loot Rolls

We put a global boost on the damage effectiveness on rare weapons (maybe 10 or 15 percent), because we knew that older weapons had fewer rolls on them and people would be troubled on that. We didn't want to just penalize people in the future because we didn't have a good enough loot system in the past. We knew that we had to do an update to get a better variability and output from the weapons.

We've gone in and done some retroactive fixes to some bad loot rolls, there was a couple of rolls that was applying incorrectly. Our goal was to make the loot chase was still competitive and interesting going forward.

Economy

The weapons they were selling are exactly as effective as they were, just less effective than compared to new rolls.

We are familiar with the trade economy, we generate reports on it. The fellows who make those trades have a lot more scrip than absolutely everyone else by several orders of magnitude. We did change the economy of the game by introducing newer and better weapons, it will happen continue going forward.

Right now one of the biggest dangers, and why people are able to make so much money. They are running onto servers and sending a message selling a thing, and they appear to be the only person with it. You might be able to see some competitors making shouts, but you can't compare prices across several different vendors. That seeming monopoly is definitely a big part of how they are exagurating their prices.

Something that I am looking forward to doing, whether it is through an auction house or another system, making trade more exposed. The time that will go in, we have a team dedicated to fixing chat, and a team for xbox and ps3 stability issues, getting time since they are all the same people, putting in an auction house that has a secure trading system is lower on our priorities than those other issues.

Prices would drop drastically if people could compare them.

Co-op Arenas

We are going to be introducing them, I can't tell if it will be for DLC 3. It's suprisingly complicated as to why we couldn't introduce them. We want to make them better than the scoring inside of sieges.

DLC 3

We are prepping a DLC 3 tease. We are working on a large story related update, I can't say if it is for DLC 3 or DLC 4. We are very keen on exploring the impacts of Von Bach Industries, the Mag Lev and intercontinental trade on the universe of Defiance.

In part because we're teasing and in part because it's video game development, and that's how it works.

Story Updates

I've been working very closely with SyFy on our crossover content, and we are going to be seeing more of it. It definitely won't be in the next month. But we are intending to bring it up before the next season of the TV show. In the season one finale there were a lot of drastic changes in the foreign policy of the E-Rep and that has to be addressed.

It's interesting to see what worked well and what didn't work well in season one and adapt that to season two schedule. SyFy and us are more excited for this season than last season on the crossover content. 

The content is more consistant, a more thematic unified storyline.

Stability Issues delaying content

The odd thing is, less than you think. We generated that content, we have to have long lead times inside of a video game particularly one released on several consoles. Even for QA time, certification time. We had a scheduler that was turning on and turning off content throughout the season.

It was less a problem with the stability, it's really hard to make weekly style episodic content than you would initially expect. Because we were constantly iterating on new ideas and discovering what scale we could execute on.

I liked the structure that went out with the Rynn episode missions where you had a bit of a combat when you were getting that information. We are taking feedback into mind from those events.

Story Re-runs

Yes we are definitely going to be doing that, the update is under way, we are doing some sprucing up to make sure they are still functional. Not too far from now.

New rewards will be for the missions, and pursuits reactivated.

Open world instancing, crowded events

We are doing more instanced things. It's a balancing act. More like arkbreaks. Having more stuff in the world that is attrative for players to go to, so they don't all go to an arkfall. We don't want to make arkfalls instanced like conflict sites as it is very disruptive if you split people up.

DLC 2 Pursuits

Yes there will be DLC 2 pursuits clan progression is a good example.

Battle Rifles

We won't be making a new category. What we are more likely to do is to introduce an Assault Rifle which has the kick and stopping power of the semi-auto. We're looking and talking about moving SMGs into their own ammo category.

PvP Experience

We are looking at what to add to the PvP experience, the quickmatch changes will also help the queue times.

We have looked at capture the flag style events, we've also looked at capture the flag as an objective inside the open world.

Clan tags on the results screen

That's a great idea. We've got a few updates to leaderboards on Alpha, there are a few more updates to the scoreboards to be more attractive and useful and give greater bragging rights.

Dynamic events that have meaning

When it comes to a community votes type event when it creates a branch in the world, you are doubling the cost of producing something but also having the quality of the results. Right now we don't have any vote changing the way of the world. We have talked about events like that in the future but nothing to announce right now.

We've talked about and begun work on a type of moving event / invasion style event.

Will we see why the Volge are in the bay area?

Yes you will, I can't say when. We do have a lot of the information on that. Mostly its a matter of when they want to tell it.

New characters on Alpha Server

We made some big updates to the test area, so we could get feedback and metrics. We also wanted people to get the primer of the tutorial power change buttons (non pc...)

What worked and didn't work in DLC 1

The thing that most frustrated me in DLC 1 was the that the primary activity was solo. That didn't fit with Defiance co-operative features.

I really liked the new arkfalls, especially the rush to destroy enemies before they power up.

Spikes and Consoles

One of the magic things that goes on with lots of people at arkfalls, they hit the hard limit to the number of proxies that can be displayed inside of the game. You can allocate more ram with the slider in DLC 2. Who you can see and not see if determined with who you have interacted with recently are displayed.

Spikes because they provide a benefit will have a higher priority than most of the other players that are further away.

DLC 2

The baseline game has changed so much with the addition of spikes and stims, as well as the grenade changes. I am really interested in seeing what strategies people do at sieges and arkfalls. And how the new mechanics are going to impact people inside of co-op maps or solo missions.

Mission Replays

Side missions don't reset when you activate a replay since they don't contain new activities or phases. However are enabling all of the storyline instances from the episodic content.

I don't think we are re-activating the side missions or putting a cooldown on them. A bunch of them start at the same place, and it will be a hassle for people to interact with the different icons.