Interview With Bobby Baker Of Holy Fire Games, Developers Of Forsaken Legends

I recently had the chance to sit down with Bobby Baker of Holy Fire Games to discuss his company's upcoming game Forsaken Legends. We discussed their use of SpatialOS, the implications of an endless world, instanced guild PvP, and more.

Me: There are three people working on the game, correct?

Baker: Yep. There are actually a few more. The full time people that are working on the game would be Kyle and myself. He’s the main developer and then I’m actually the owner of the game, I guess. The intellectual property. Then we have Preston who helps with design. Things like that. Then we’ve got a few other people who are just helping here and there part-time, just out of goodwill, with like the lore and some artwork and stuff like that.

How has it been working with SpatialOS?

We’ve had pretty good communication with them. We’re not actually running on their servers yet and the main reason for that is just the fact that we don’t have the funds to do so. The servers that we’re running on right now are just Linode servers, so they’re just your standard Linux boxes.

Once we move to SpatialOS, we need to be able to support the ongoing server costs. We don’t know what they’re going to be. Being this early in our prelaunch, it was a bit scary to have an undefined expense.

We understand the technology and what it does and how to implement with it. We’ve looked at their samples and dug into their software development kit and all that stuff, so we know it’s going to work for us, but we haven’t actually deployed onto their servers yet. But I’m supposed to have another talk with their head of support guy. They have some new news or something they wanted to talk about, so hopefully, we can get on there soon, but we need a little more padding in the bank before we move to another new technology like that.

What all will it handle for you?

It’s basically going to make it so that we don’t have to have hundreds of servers and we don’t have to split up the game community. What it will allow us to do is basically have one game world running and then it performs all of the server calculations in the background. So it spreads the load out. If you have 1000 people in an area normally, that would be really hard to do with a normal server because of the bandwidth and the server calculations. What SpatialOS does is it allows you to run all of those computations in the cloud and then all of those cloud servers report back to one game instance that the players then get their information from.

So it basically just spreads the workload out among as many servers as you need to keep the gameplay smooth. It allows you to support those huge areas and the huge player counts and things like that.

What made you decide to go with the subscription model?

Basically just to support the server costs and we also didn’t want to go down the route of pay-to-win or having to do the cosmetic route. We wanted all the players to be able to have access to all of the same content in the game without having to shell out a lot of money if they wanted a special hat or something like that. That’s really the biggest reason.

Then with SpatialOS and the cost and things like that, we’re going to be able to dial down to what our cost is per user per month on average and the subscription model just ensures that we can keep the servers running. It’s not going to be a really expensive subscription model. As far as our initial calculations, it’s going to be under $10 a month. It’s not going to be like a $15 or $19 a month type subscription.

With the endless procedural world, there’s always the chance that people will “hermit up.” Are there going to be mechanics in-game that encourage people to group together and interact?

Yeah, definitely. With it being an endless and a procedural world, you kind of worry about the community and never seeing anyone else. So we’re going to have a lot of large-scale community events. Things like festivals in towns. Then also, we want a really good GPS system where people can find coordinates to an area that are interesting and then be able to share them with their friends, their guilds, and things like that. And then some really good teleportation systems that make sense with the game lore, but would allow players to travel large distances without having to walk for three days endlessly to find a new place or something like that.

A lot of the problems that especially base building games have is that you run out of the good territory to build on. What this will allow you to do is explore to your heart’s content, find a place that you can build your own base, but then still be able to find other players, interact with them, do dungeons, and things like that. Really just have your own slice of the pie to call your home and build whatever you want on there.

The other thing is that I’ve seen a lot of comments on my YouTube videos about the procedural generation and how boring that is. You know, it’s just the same thing over and over. So we’re putting a lot of care into that. It’s not just a strictly procedural system. We can actually hand place content and use different algorithms to say “if you’re this far away from the start area, then this type of a biome can happen or this world boss can happen or this event can happen.” So there are a lot of things that we can either hand place or use algorithms in to mix it up so that it’s not just that you’re literally walking across the same thing for ten days straight.

On the subject of world bosses: They won’t be unique to certain areas because of the endlessness, correct?

They will be unique to biomes and then they will be unique to level areas. So basically, the further away from the start area you go, the higher the level the mobs will be. So if you’re looking for a really epic, high-end world boss, it’s not going to be near the start area. It will have to be something that’s really rare to come across.

What we kind of imagine is, if a player actually comes across one of these and they’re by themselves, that’s where the system would come into play so that they could alert their guild for a massive open world boss fight to where they would start bringing people into the area if somebody comes across it.

So within the procedural world, there won’t be a specific area that a world boss will be in and be iconic to? It will be more like any area that’s snow covered, you could find a giant snow lion boss in that area?

Well, the bosses will all be randomly generated as well, so it’s not going to be like if you find a snow biome, you’re always going to find that boss. Certain mobs will always stay within the biomes that are procedurally generated, but, for the higher end stuff and the world bosses and the random events and things like that, it’s not going to be a given where you’re going to find something. It might roam between one of these two biomes at this distance from the start area, but you’re not going to be able to know instantly where to find something basically.

But once you’re past that certain distance from the start area, every instance of that biome beyond that distance could have that boss?

Right. Whatever the requirements are for that boss to spawn. And it might be one of those things where the further out you go, a different world boss spawns that might be a higher tier of the previous one.

It’s interesting that it’s set up like that because, when I’d read that mobs fight, kill each other, and level up, I had assumed that mobs of all levels would be mixed in as they level up.

Right. All of that stuff is supported. We didn’t want to go the straight procedural route because that gets extremely boring, so we have to add in these other systems on top of it to make sure that the content is adapting to where the player is at in the world rather than just having it be kind of like Minecraft where you come across different biomes, but it’s basically the same thing. The textures are just different.

So when we add in the different layers on top of it, it allows us to more finely control what shows up where and what level ranges they are. With the monsters fighting, depending on how far away from the start area they are, we can cap so that we don’t have like a level 100 wolf in the start area ruining everyone’s day. I’m sure that’s going to happen in some cases—especially when we’re testing. You might have a wolf running through town killing everything in sight. But we’ll be able to put in certain limits there.

Certainly, we want the element of surprise. So if you’re in the starter area and you have a mob 20 levels higher than you where players have to band together to take care of this community nuisance, we definitely want that kind of thing. We just want to make sure that there’s some sort of balance there to where there’s actually a chance that players could take down the monster that’s going around killing everything.

How is claiming land going to work?

I’ve been watching a lot of videos on Landmark. Kind of like how their stuff goes, except different. We want players to be able to expand their land plots. So it’s going to be similar where it’s a box around you—not even a box. It could be a circle or any shape around you. It’s just a perimeter around where you want to claim it. Then right now, we’re thinking of having a skill, sort of like a builder skill, and as you level that up, your plot that you can claim can grow.

But we want to make sure that players have enough area around them and, once again, this comes into the endless aspect of the game to where we don’t have to worry about running out of that build space, so we want players to be able to have really large plots of land to build on so they can build these massive fortresses and guilds will be able to claim plots and build huge fortresses. We want the player to have as much creative freedom as they possibly want with being able to maintain it.

How will the guild instance battle system work? Will it instance out the land for players to fight on the land that is instanced out?

We have a full blueprint system to where a player can take a blueprint of his base that he’s built. We’re going to allow them to sell them at the auction house and things like that. It will be the same system where we take a blueprint of whatever guilds are fighting and then place those in an instanced area on two opposite sides of the map and then the two teams can just go at it with, we plan on, siege warfare. Just all out.

So both guilds or players will have their houses or castles on the instanced map. It won’t just be one attacking side and one defending side. They will both be attacking and defending.

Well, there are so many different battle modes that we could do. One of them could just be attack-defend and then each round, the opposite side’s base would be loaded in and the other team attacks it. There’s tons of different game modes that we could do. It could be two bases at once. It could be one or the other and then flip. It could be anything.

Since it’s instanced out, will you have the ability to take the other guild’s or player’s land?

In the instanced battlegrounds, we could definitely do conquest things like that. It will be full destruction so, if you take out a wall, things could collapse. It’s all physics based. If you take out the supporting foundations, the whole thing could collapse down. It wouldn’t translate over into the open world.

In the PvP zones, that’s all happening in the main open world. So if you’re in a PvP area and a guild attacks your guild base, that destruction would definitely stand.

Basically, the world’s split into four quadrants. So depending on what direction, what angle from the start area you go, it’ll either be normal PvE or you’ll have PvP and then hardcore zones of each of those where the penalties for death are a lot stricter.

One of the big things that we’re on is allowing players to play the game style that they enjoy, but still being able to interact with the larger community. So one of the ways that we’re going to control griefing and things like that is that, if you claim a plot of land in a PvE zone, you can’t go and attack someone’s base in a PvP zone, just simply for the fact that, if you’re not willing to risk your base, you shouldn’t be able to take out somebody else’s base when they are taking the risk.

We’re thinking that, once every 30 days, you will be able to take a blueprint of your base and move it to whatever zone you want. So if you want to start PvPing, then you can move your base into a PvP zone and go from there.

Will there be mechanics in place to keep people from running over the PvP to PvE line and potentially deactivating PvP?

Yeah, definitely. There will have to be a cooldown period where if you walk out of a PvP zone, you’re going to be flagged for x number of minutes or something like that. That way people can’t sit on a border and walk across, shoot an arrow at you, and walk back across.

What kinds of skills are going to allow people to influence the loot they get?

We don’t have an exact word for it yet, but basically, think about it like stones that you can equip and then it’s another collectible item. So you can collect these stones that would influence the loot that drops. The loot is all procedural, as well, so we have a base item that everything is based off of. We’ll have a base item sword, a base item bow, and then, when the item is actually looted, procedural stats get assigned to it based on what the user wants.

If the user has a stone on it that says “I want +Intellect gear,” then whatever type of modifiers have +Intellect on them could be one of the randomly chosen modifiers, like “of the Monkey” or “of the Wizard” type things.

So then, as you level up these runestones or whatever they are, you can increase the percent that they’re going to be effective to get you the type of item that you want. It will allow you to equip a few of them so that if you wanted +Intellect and +Spellpower, it’s just going to increase the chances that you get the gear that you want instead of having to just keep grinding for useless gear.

Are you going to have multiple races or just humans?

Right now, for launch, we’re planning on just having humans and it’s strictly just because of the cost reason. We’re not a hugely funded game by any means. The word’s starting to get out and we’re starting to pick up, but for us to develop animations and base models and then modify all the armor to fit all the different races would just be a huge undertaking for us.

Is it going to be one base model? Customization? Male/female?

It’ll be male/female and then we’re going to have customization on top of that. We’re looking into a few systems for that that would allow some pretty extreme customizations. But as of right now, what we have is just swapping out heads, skin color, and just different base models that would all fit the same armor types.

But we’re looking to expand upon that for sure. We want as much customization there as we can get.

What inspired you to set up the skill trees the way you did, where they’re separated into distinct classes, but players can use any of them at any time?

We don’t think of them like classes, per say. More of like skill trees. The reason being is that, when I was playing World of Warcraft a lot and you level up, you spend so much time leveling up a mage or something and, if you want to play something else for the day, your only choice is to reroll a level 1 toon and level the whole thing up. We wanted to design a system that would allow players to, once again, just play the game however they want to play it for that day and have the effectiveness of your character be based on your skill and your use of the skill trees rather than just leveling up a character and getting the best gear possible, that sort of thing. Just to be able to add in a lot of customization there to where we can have some really cool hybrids. If you’re playing solo, you can have a build that’s really effective for playing solo, but, if you’re in a guild and you need to be a healer, you could spec out an entire healing tree.

But just really to be able to get the mix and match style so you can play exactly however you want and never have to worry about having more than one character to split your time up. Unless you want to. You can have whatever toons you want.

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You can find more information or buy pre-launch access on the official website.