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Multiplayer in Civilization Revolution: Podcast Transcript Jake Solomon: I’m Jake Solomon, I’m a programmer/designer and I program and design at about a quarter of the efficiency of Sid. Dan McGary: I’m Dan McGary and I’m just a program, not yet a designer. [laughter] But I have aspirations. I’m the multiplayer programmer on Civilization Revolution and I’ve done a couple of titles in the past here at Firaxis. Elizabeth Tobey: Well, let’s start with an easy question: Is there online play for all version of Civilization Revolution? Dan McGary: Yes, online play for all versions of Civ Rev, both locally and on the internet. Elizabeth Tobey: Okay. For the DS version, can you play both locally with people in the room and also with people over the internet? Dan McGary: Yes, absolutely. With a wireless connection, you can play with people worldwide and you can also play with people in the room. Elizabeth Tobey: What kind of games can you play? Is there versus and co-op? What different modes are there for the online play? Dan McGary: There are 3 modes, in all three platforms. There’s a Head-To-Head mode, where two players compete in the same world, with a couple of AIs wandering around to make things interesting. There is a Free For All mode, which is essentially similar to head-to-head, but there’s four player all playing against each other and I think there’s still one AI wandering around in there. And then there is a Team game, where it is essentially a 2v2 scenario, where you can either team with a friend of yours, another human, or you can actually team in specific modes with an AI player against another human and another AI player. [2:00] Elizabeth Tobey: Going more into this co-op team feel. What happens if you don’t have four people to complete the scenario? Can you play with AI? Can you play some sort of online game, just by yourself, to increase your rank? How does that work? Dan McGary: If you don’t have a full game, you can play with the AI, as long as you are not playing ranked games. In a ranked game, all players must be human because we felt that players if their teammate was AI. They’d say “The AI wasn’t good enough and they ruined my game.” So, in all ranked games where the scores count, there have to be all humans in game, though there are still going to be AIs in the game to make things interesting. You can’t partner with them or co-op with them. If you don’t have any friends, and you still want to compete, like many video gamers, including myself. Jake Solomon: And me! [laughter] Dan McGary: We offer a single player mode, where it is a single player competitive mode called Game of the Week. What this is: Sunday to Sunday, everybody, everywhere in the world gets the same map with the same Civ and it’s the same scenario. Jake Solomon: Yah, you start at the same spot. Dan McGary: You start at the same spot, the trees are where the trees are, the barbarians are where the barbarians are, and the goody huts are where the goody huts. And you play can play that as many times as you want to over the week. You can learn the map, you can say ‘I know this map, I’ve got it perfect and this is going to be my perfect game.’ Essentially what we do is track your best game, and you can go on and see how your best compares to other people’s best games. It’s apples to apples, it’s the same game everywhere. So, you basically don’t have an excuse. Jake Solomon: Yeah, it’s kinda cool. Every week there is going to be someone who is the best civ player in the world. We’re pretty excited about that. Dan McGary: Another cool aspect about that is the Game of the Week will change significantly each week. The map is going to be different and your leader is going to be different. So one map and leader may be geared more toward combat and those that are more aggressive players might to do well. And some maps you might end up with Gandhi or more cultural leader, so that a cultural victory is the best way to win and those players will get a chance to show their stuff. Elizabeth Tobey: And this Game of the Week is on platforms and the same map on all platforms? Dan McGary: All the platforms and about the maps, that’s a really cool thing. Jake Solomon: That’s a really good point. Elizabeth Tobey: Don’t mean to lead you. [laughter] [4:40] Dan McGary: This actually struck me after I’d seen it myself. I was testing the DS version of Game of the Week. I was playing around on the map and having fun with that. Then I said to myself, “I just want to make sure this is the same map that’s on the 360.” And sure enough, I turned it on, and my starting location was the same, the goody hut right there to my northeast and I thought how cool that was for the hardcore players. For a hardcore 360 player, if you are practicing your map and then you have to go to work or go somewhere else, you can practice on the DS. Jake Solomon: You take the DS to work? Dan McGary: Of course, I’ve got mine in my office. Jake Solomon: You’re suggesting that. Dan McGary: Yeah sure. During your downtime or during commute on the bus, probably not when you are driving that would be a bad idea. [laughter] Dan McGary: On the bus or the subway though, you could practice that map and you’ll have the same game when you get home. So that’s a really cool aspect of it. [5:43] Elizabeth Tobey: Going back to the online modes, what happen if you are playing a game and someone has to leave early? Dan McGary: Well, that depends. If you are playing a standard normal friendly game, someone can leave and an AI will take over their Civ. If they come back online later, the person hosting the game can invite them back into the game. We took a page from Civ 4, where we allowed people to jump into a game after it had already started. But here, the only way to jump in is if you’re invited in. If you are playing a competitive (ranked) game, and you leave, that’s it you lose. That’s to prevent players – if we didn’t do that – it’s common for players to say “I’m surrounded by armies, I only have one city left, I don’t want to sit out these turns, I’m gone.” If we said, “He didn’t really lose because he disconnected, we’re not going to count that as a loss,” then anyone, right before they were destroyed would just – Jake Solomon: Yank the cord. Dan McGary: Yank the cord, turn off the console, they don’t lose. So, if at any time you need to leave during a ranked game, you’re going to take a loss. Fortunately, Civ Rev has been designed such that we’ve significantly shortened the multiplayer experience from what Civ 4 often expected of players. Some Civ 4 multiplayer experiences were designed to be epic experiences. To have that whole epic quality of 10 or 20 hour games. They are kinda unwieldy, though, especially with a lot of players and you expect players to leave and come and go. But with Civ Rev’s streamlined design and focus toward shorter game play and more action, it’s going to be really unnecessary for people to abandon games partway through. They are epic all at once. Jake Solomon: They are epic from the get go. Take the epic to 11. Elizabeth Tobey: Heh. Jake Solomon: You can use those for marketing if you like. [laughter] [7:45] Elizabeth Tobey: I know that this can be a touchy question sometimes, for online – Jake Solomon: I don’t know what you are talking about. Elizabeth Tobey: -- how long do you think the games typically would take? Dan McGary: Our original high level goal at the beginning of this project was 45 minutes. But that seems unlikely, we felt like that was maybe a little too short. Right now games are typically taking about 2 hours, or an hour and a half to two hours. You still get that invested feeling in your game, but it’s not something you are going to have to dedicate your entire day to. Jake Solomon: Yeah, and it’s still Civ Multiplayer. We want to make sure that the experience is still the Civ experience. It is simultaneous moves too, so the games tend to still roll on pretty quick. [8:32] Elizabeth Tobey: What do you mean, when you say ‘simultaneous’ move? Jake Solomon: I don’t know, they just told me to say that. Dan McGary: Buzzword! [laughter] Dan McGary: Essentially, unlike a board game, unlike a true, pure Turn-Based game, every human moves at once. Every human’s turn all activates at once. So you are all moving around the world at the same time. After all the humans are done, then the AIs take a turn, and then it goes back to the humans. The way we enforce these turns to move along at a clip, especially in multiplayer, is we have a turn-timer. This is basically a countdown clock on how long you have to take your turn. It comes on after the first person ends their turn. We figured that everybody’s turn should take about the same amount of time. So if we didn’t have this, then a player could say that they weren’t going to take a turn and instead sit there for half an hour and watch these people wait for me to take my turn. We allow the player to turn on the turn timer and to pick its speed. It actually adds a new game element because it can put pressure on your opponents if you finish your turn really fast and you have a quick turn timer. Suddenly they only have 30 seconds left to finish their turn and they have to scramble around and do things quickly. That’s going to really help push the games along. Of course, you do have the option of turning it off. If you are playing with your friends and you want to linger and talk and have fun and get a sandwich, you can turn the turn-timer off and take your time and play like a traditional board game. But if you want to be a little more immediate about getting to your next turn, which a lot of people want, you can put pressure on your competitors. [10:23] Elizabeth Tobey: Another question a lot of people have been is asking is, for online mode can you save the game and pick it up later? Jake Solomon: Dan you want to handle that one? [laughter] Dan McGary: We made a decision not to allow that this time. Jake Solomon: Oh, that’s terrible! You know what? That is ridiculous! [more laughter] Dan McGary: What we found in Civ 4 – Jake Solomon: I personally wanted it. Dan McGary: We didn’t want to answer no to any of your questions but this we are going to answer no to. We found in Civ 4 when we allowed this, essentially if a game was saved it would rarely be continued. It would basically be the end of the game. So we did feel we were getting a lot of value out of that. Also, the logistical complexity of getting that same group of people together, getting your friends together at the same time and saying “Let’s load up the game and start it all over again…” It didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. It seemed overly complicate. It almost seemed like an option that a lot of people wouldn’t tend to use. Especially considering that the games are drastically shortened. Jake Solomon: It is certainly less of an issue with Civ Rev. These are really quick games. Dan McGary: I can’t ever really see wanting to save and restart. There’s really never a game where you think “Wow, we’ve invested so much time into this game but now we have to go to bed. I really want to continue this game later, because we still have ten hours left before anything happens.” Civ Rev is a different game from that. I really think that is an unnecessary option and one that would go largely unused. Elizabeth Tobey: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, let’s talk a little about ranking and if there are any achievements in online mode. I know that there are difficulty levels for single player. But how do you work with ranking and choosing your difficulty levels in online? Also, are there achievements for playing online? Dan McGary: We have a cool scoring system that Chess uses, a lot of other games use. It is called the Elo system. You get a rating, and it is a number between 1000 and 2000. Jake Solomon: Wow, that’s sounds high tech. Elo. Dan McGary: Well, you know I’m a programmer. Electric Light Orchestra. [laughter]Dan McGary: If you’ve ever heard of them, they’re pretty cool. Jake Solomon: I have. Using the Electric Light Orchestra scale. Dan McGary: Of course. Jake Solomon: The cheesier you are, the higher your score. Dan McGary: There’re a lot of Elo fans out there. Jake Solomon: I apologize. [12:55] Dan McGary: So, what basically does is measure how good you are. It is a numerical value of how good you are at the game. That’s based on not only how many games you’ve won and lost, but also the ratings of the opponents you’ve either beaten or lost to. Each game that you play, affects this score. It will either increase it a little bit or decrease it a little bit. We had to modify the system for 4 player games. So you still actually get a bump in your score if you come in second. That’s commendable if you come in second; second out of four is pretty good. That is how you are rated when you are playing multiplayer games on the leaderboards. You are rated by that rating. But you can also look at your record, you can look at your favorite leader that you use, you can look at the way win most games: favorite victory… All sorts of cool information is on these leaderboards. But you are rated by that career rating that you’ve earned. So, if you are a first time multiplayer player, but you have the game down pat, and you go out and beat a Master – someone who has a 2400 rating – your rating will be bumped up significantly, initially right off the bat. Not only that, but these rating are used to match you in these ranked games, so you don’t end up in a game with a bunch of people you are easily going to beat or in a game where a bunch of people are going to absolutely destroy you. When you go into a ranked match, a quick match, you’ll go into a game appropriate for your skill level. [14:20] Dan McGary: As far as achievements are concerned, achievements are enabled on Xbox360, and we’ve utilized them to their fullest extent. Sid designed all 50 achievements, that’s as many as we are allowed to use. You can get 1000 gamer points by unlocking them all, that’s as much as we’re allowed to give you. They are really, really cool. It’s Sid’s first time doing any sort of achievement thing and he just took to it like a fish takes to water. He came up with a lot of really cool ones. Things to get you started: “Build your second city”, “Build your First Wonder”, “Win your first Battle” or “Do your first Diplomacy”. Things to string the new user along. He did ones – Jake Solomon: He did the esoteric ones. Dan McGary: Well, he did the esoteric ones, which is after you’ve mastered the game and won with every Civ, then he’s done ones like “Win 20 or 30 battles with the same unit”, or “Get a city to size 20” or… Jake Solomon: “Win with One City” which is a class thing. Dan McGary: Right, so a lot of different ways to play were opened up through the use of achievements and he just did a really great job designing all of those. We’re really excited about having all that. Jake Solomon: He’s not bad, as a designer. I think there’s a lot of potential there. Dan McGary: Yeah, he’s a rookie, but, you know, we’re proud of him. [laughter] [15:42] Elizabeth Tobey: There’s also this new feature, for Civilization Revolution that hasn’t ever been in any previous Civ game, and that’s Video Chat. Can you explain to people a little more about what this is? Dan McGary: On the 360, you’ll actually see what your opponents want to show you. Jake Solomon: [laughing] What they choose to show you. Dan McGary: Using their Xbox Video Camera. There’s a cool little diplomacy panel up in the corner that you can choose to bring up and then you can see your opponent’s Civ leader heads. You see their attitude, like if they are angry with you or happy. But if your opponent has a video camera attached to their Xbox, instead of a leader head, you’ll actually see your opponent’s head, hopefully. [laughter] Jake Solomon: Hopefully. Let’s hope. Dan McGary: It really facilitates conversation. It’s going to be a lot of fun with playing with friends, taunting each other. But we felt that was a cool new feature. Sid was really excited about it and I don’ think there are that many games taking advantage of this technology right now. So we’re actually really excited to see how it’s used. Jake Solomon: I actually think it’s the perfect way to play Civ. Diplomacy especially, that’s the perfect way: to interact face-to-face, let’s hope. But it’s also, if you are playing with friends, that’s the way you’d want to do it. Not playing with friends, you know… [clears throat]. Dan McGary: You have the option to turn it off. Both: Right, that’s the most important thing. Jake Solomon: It’s not required. Dan McGary: Along with video chat, of course, voice chat is integrated right into the game. So if you have a microphone hooked up, it’s going to be really easy to communicate. In the past, we’ve depended a lot on text chatting, which is obviously very difficult on consoles, so we’re going all voice & video. So it’s going to be even easier to communicate with your friends or opponents. Elizabeth Tobey: Well, I think that wraps it up for today. I want to thank you guys for being here with me and this ends our podcast on online mode for Civilization Revolution. [end] |