galaxy, will try to work with an alliance that is
going for Grand Terrestrial planets located in
the most war-torn areas of the map. They will
start sharing intelligence and military power
to overpower their enemies. The enemy of
my enemy is my friend.Is there anything from EVE specifically that
you’ve tried to bring across? The sense of
community, maybe?
SG: A lot of the influence and similarities
have become clear now, in hindsight. Both
games are player-driven, deeply political, and
set in space. In 2014, our founding team and
the EVE veterans that would join the team
agreed that the political intrigue and the
strong community were the most successfulIf that is something that remotely piques
your interest – then Starborne is for you.
How challenging is it to marry the
concept of grand strategy (typically the
reserve of offline single-player) with an
MMO framework?
HSL: It is a match made in heaven. What is
more grand than the collective scheming,
plotting, and strategising of thousands of
real-life players?
How does the MMO framework
modify the standard strategy
game approach? What
special tucks and tweaks are
you having to make?
SG: Most real-time strategy
matches are over in less than an hour, and
a lot of turn-based variants you might finish
a playthrough in 10–20 hours. Of those
that are multiplayer, you might only be
competing against a handful of opponents.
For Starborne, we are talking eight-week
games competing against thousands of
players. So, as a designer of an MMO
strategy game, you need to be able to
forecast how players will be doing, feeling,
and what they will be excited by weeks into
the future.
It is therefore not as simple as ‘jumping in
a match’ yourself to try out an idea, as you
might be designing a feature that will come
into play in week four, and one that might
be mostly focused on alliance warfare. So
that’s why we started running huge alpha
tests so early on, both to build up our
community but also just to simply validate
our game design.
Has anything major come to light from the
numerous alphas?
HSL: One of the biggest things to come to
light last year was that our initial assumption
on having just one victory condition was
barring Starborne from being as political as
we wanted it to be. We are condensing all of
those ‘lessons learned’ into our
new open-beta map, [which
will] feature three distinct
victory conditions. All of them
are very unique and reflected
in the world. It is going to be
nearly impossible for an alliance to go for
more than one, so it will encourage a lot of
backroom agreements, political partnerships,
and betrayals. An alliance trying to hold on
to and fully construct a Dyson sphere, the
ancient super-structures deep within the A player-driven universe
should make moments like
this all the more impactful. Is space really full of giant
hexagons like this?08 / wfmag.cc
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