Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Erik (Archon) Krebs and I am the Lead Game Designer on The Matrix Online.

A lot has been going on over the last few months with the move from Monolith to Sony offices, but our progress on the game has continued throughout the transition. Our team is focused on improvements and we’re working on some exciting changes. As Andy has mentioned, content, new player experience, combat, and Spies are some of our top priorities. There are a few other items on the list I will include as well.

This week I am going talk in broad brush-strokes about the items the team is already tackling and then end the article by talking about what we’re going to do with Hackers. Before I get down to details, I am applying a design disclaimer:

“Each of these items is in development and subject to change or cancellation at any time. For the people that might misinterpret me, these items are NOT promises of any sort, consider them ‘Design intent.’”

About Me

The big question on everyone’s mind is who the heck is this guy and what is he going to do with the game?

As I said above, my name is Erik Krebs. I’ve been a game designer for about four-and-a-half years, having worked most notably on Dark Age of Camelot and its first two retail expansions. In November last year I jumped at the opportunity to come work on MxO during its final development stages. In March 2005 I took over as the Lead Game Designer. I enjoy working on a game with such a great license and interesting concept.

Let’s get on to the business at hand: Talking about upcoming changes.

Content

As any player can tell you, The Matrix Online currently relies heavily on missions as the main form of content. In the coming months we will be adding a greater variety of content and improving what already exists. However, important items like critical missions and story will continue.

Our first new-style content release will include Pandora’s Box, a feature designed for our mid- to high-level players. Pandora’s Box is a great blend of gameplay types and we think you will find the story, encounters, and rewards very interesting. Odds are you will be playing with Pandora’s Box early in September.

Another one of our major efforts is to improve the new-user experience. We are revamping every District in the game, starting with the Slums. Our goal is to introduce the players to the Matrix a little more gently, initially focusing on game play mechanics and Organizational agendas.

Our current plan is to revamp each District until we have improved them all. We are dedicating a lot of resources developing more interesting stories and content at the neighborhood level. The new-and-improved Slums district should be available this fall.

Marketplace

We are also working on some significant improvements to the Marketplace. The Marketplace should be a great tool for players trying to buy and sell items and the current system needs to be re-tooled. Improvements are focused around expanding the design and fixing broken or user-unfriendly issues. Our goal is to implement an overhauled Marketplace before the end of the year.

Spies

I’ve also been working on revising the Spy tree. There are multiple parts to the revision, which will be rolled out in phases. The first part involves timed interaction with game/mission objects such as doors and computers. This is a prelude to adding a consistent set of rules under which Invisibility works. These changes are proper solutions for the temporary measures put in place a little while ago.

The last part of the rollout will be the new Spy tree itself. The design is progressing nicely and I am very happy with what we have so far. You may see the first two items before the holidays while the archetype changes are dependent on the combat revisions (see below).

Combat

Since early April I’ve been working with the team on some major changes to the combat system. It’s a big, complex system that involves a number of functional groups including Design, Engineering, and Animation. We believe these changes will be a vast improvement and are taking our time to do things right.

The first step in the process was to identify problems with the current combat formulas. After we did some research to identify all the issues, we created a new set of formulas to use with the rest of the combat revision. The new combat formulas are designed to remove situations where Abilities always hit or attacks always miss--including viral attacks. You won’t see a level 1-player beating a level-50 player but, as an example, the revisions do make it possible for a group of level-40 players to take down a level-50 through attrition.

We decided early on that one of our main goals for the combat revision was to significantly improve game-play without losing the cinematic fight-scene quality of the movies.  This means Interlock stays.

During our meetings we came up with a concept for an improved system that does not rely so heavily on “zero-sum” game-play and removes multi-on-one Interlock. (“Zero-sum” means one player wins and one loses—two players never both hit or both miss. –Walrus) The new Interlock system has most of the zero-sum game-play removed and uses a series of exchanges where both people will have a chance to hit or miss. The main win is that Interlock fights will be much shorter, with fewer pauses and less prone to breaking game-play.

To coincide with the changes to the Interlock syetem, we are altering out-of-Interlock fighting by expanding free-fire to include melee attacks, which is similar to standard MMO melee-combat. We will be adding new Abilities that take advantage of free-attack mode and altering some existing Abilities to strengthen the benefits of being in Interlock.

The final result of our efforts is a series of cascading changes that allow us to create a proper damage-per-second (DPS) model that we can use to balance damage, Abilities, attributes, caps, items, and content and ultimately provide you a better game. When the combat revision launches, a large number of Ability tweaks will accompany it with the goal of fixing most of our current balance issues.

Hackers

We know that certain areas of the Hacker tree do not play nicely with the rest of the Disciplines. After much deliberation, we decided that Hackers will remain unchanged in the short term. Since we’re overhauling the current combat system, it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of resources balancing the Hacker tree at the moment—we would only have to rebalance them after the combat changes are implemented.

However, we also know that something needs to be done in the meantime. So we’re adding a temporary measure to help players deal with Hackers: A new consumable which can be used while in a pacified, stunned, or rooted state. This pill will clear the negative effect and return movement control to the player and will have a medium to long reuse timer. It won’t level the playing field completely, but should make the current situation more tolerable while we work on implementing the proper solutions.

Closing Words

It has been a pleasure bringing you all up to date on our current projects. My hope is that there’s a little something for everyone in the community. In a few weeks, I will be talking about what went into the design of Pandora’s Box, and what you should expect if you haven’t already experienced one. Thanks!

Archon

Discuss this article on the Broadcast Depth forum.