Rekonstruction Interview

2003-04-01

Rekonstruction is a new online game being developed by a new game developer studio. It has set some tentative goals, so when we had the chance we asked Chris DiBona for more info.

RPGDot: Who is Chris DiBona and why is he into developing an online game?

Chris: I am a co-founder of the company Damage Studios, but I should point out that I am only one of the many people who are making this company and this game happen; it's not the Chris DiBona show but the Damage Studios show.

In thinking about why we are doing it, a lot of things come to mind. There are so many reasons for the founding of Damage and the creation of Rekonstruction. Many of our employees and the founders all worked together at a previous company, and we really wanted to work together again, but nothing really coalesced until my partners and I started discussing online games. We thought that if we could bring our large systems background and merge it with some high end graphics and content talent that we could do some pretty terrific online games. We also felt that this was a company that we could attract some funding to. Developing games sounded like a worthy challenge for us.

It was also new. While bored isn’t the right word to describe how we felt about the systems work we had been doing, we were all ready for a change of pace. We have all been playing games for most of our natural lives, with a wide variety of likes and dislikes (with no lack of opinions on that front) which is where the impetus for creating a game came from.

RPGDot: What can you tell us about Damage Studios?

Chris: Well, in addition to what I have already noted above, Damage is a San Francisco based studio concentrating on the production of the MMOG Rekonstruction. It was incorporated in October of 2002 and Rekonstruction (our first game) is slated to debut in fall of 2004.

RPGDot: Could you tell us what Rekonstruction is about?

Chris: Rekonstruction is set on Earth in the year 2404, (take today + 400 years to get the in-game date) 200 years after a near extinction level event has dealt a punishing blow to the human and animal population of earth. I don’t really want to give away too much of the outline, but in short, players in Rekonstruction are those people who walked the earth 400 years ago who are being reconstituted from personality backup to rebuild and reestablish civilization on the planet.

RPGDot: What is Rekonstruction not?

Chris: Rekonstruction is not a twitch game, even though combat should feel immediate enough.

It is not a linear game so much as it is a sandbox.

It is not targeted solely at interpersonal interaction like The Sims Online or There. We do have all kinds of social structures (many of which we feel are quite innovative), but it is a game you play with and against other people first and foremost.

It isn’t fantasy and it isn’t set in the old west, or the Barbary Coast, or in Prehistoric times. (Not that any of these genres are bad. It’s just not what Rekonstruction is.)

There isn’t a facility for leaving earth’s orbit currently.
Also, see some of the next questions for more on what Rekonstruction is or is not.

RPGDot: Claiming to be able to handle 1.000.000 people online at the time is a very tentative goal. Why do you think you will be able to achieve these numbers?

Chris: We believe we have come up with an innovative server architecture that allows for all players to play on one world without fragmentation. Damage Employees bring experience dealing with high-availability large-scale applications to the gaming space, and have actually built systems which are much larger and have many more users than any MMOG (including lineage) currently enjoys. So we are confident we can accomplish this task for Rekonstruction.

The thing about the million number is that it is our way of saying we are designing an architecture without population limits. In reality, it's not as if we are going to have 1m signups the day Rekonstruction goes gold. What's interesting is that since we are not going to have shards that artificially limit world size, players will start feeling the impact of this architectural advantage nearly immediately. On EQ, for instance, you have some 32 shards, of which a simultaneous cross shard population record of something like 110k users was recently announced. The simple division applied would give you a shard population of approximately 3.5k players at any one time. Eagle eyed gamers will recognize this as the population estimates for each of Star Wars Galaxies 10 worlds. (see http://www.swgalaxies.net/articles/article.php3?article_id=5)

For Rekonstruction, this means population-wise we will start having a world that will have more simultaneous players once we achieve approximately 30k signups, a population we should reach pretty much immediately. That said, since Rekonstruction is a one to one representation of earth, this will be felt mostly in the cities and other population centers.

The bifurcation of worlds introduces all kinds of problems affecting not only population but also social interactions, the online economy and narrative. This is not to say that games like EQ and the rest aren't fun, as we think they are, but we can only imagine how much more fun they could be if their simultaneous in-game populations were measured in the tens or hundreds of thousands and not the thousands.

RPGDot: To be able to have this amount of people running around you will need a BIG world. How will you scale the world to keep them all happy? And how do you make sure the lag isn't killing them?

Chris: Lag is something we always talk about, but honestly it's more a last mile problem for Damage. We really believe that we have the lag problem on the server licked, and we're now looking to address the geographical problems upon release. This will likely be a bigger problem for players in different countries at least in the beginning. The lower bound for speed of light terrestrial global transmission (furthest interaction from Sweden to Australia for instance) is around 130ms, which does not take into account router delays and such. This would be a big problem in a twitch game, but we’re not that, so we have a little more wiggle room there. Until we have session servers and leased lines to foreign countries it’ll be not as fun for a Swede to interact with an Australian, but that will get better with time. When we officially launch in the EU and Australia, the game play for those countries and amongst those countries should be pretty snappy. We’re very good at this kind of planning, though, so it’s not a huge problem.

Scale is a different kind of problem for us. Rekonstruction is -big-, Earth big, 40,000 km in circumference. This means that gathering points like cities and the paths between cities become hugely important from a population perspective to maintain the interactive aspects of the game.
Luckily a lot of room means a lot of room to explore, to homestead and to seed quests and lots of space for the players to modify as they see fit. I personally can't wait to see how large scale inter-guild siege warfare turns out in the game.

RPGDot: "Rekonstruction will allow players to interact and shape the world in real-time..." That sounds great. Could you give some examples of how this is done?

Chris: Building, mostly. We'll give players the ability to create unique (and/or canned) buildings and constructions. This creates some unique problems, mind you, especially when you consider the vast differences in how different countries censor their populations (swastikas and other Nazi symbolism in Germany, anything Falun Gong in China, DMCA violations in the US, etc...) and what this means to online carriers.

We're still working out the finer points on earth moving equipment and where players will be allowed to change the earth in this manner, this is trickier than you may think as our world will not segregate pk and non-pk players and keeping pkers from intimidating non-pkers is non-trivial. Luckily we have a healthy representation of both ideologies in the company.

RPGDot: At the time of release, Rekonstruction will have to get its share in a 'maybe' already crowded market. What will set the game apart so that it will stand out?

Chris: Well, we think that a lot of things will make Rekonstruction more interesting to the MMOG player than both current and upcoming offerings, and it's not any one thing. We'll have great graphics, a very advanced rendering engine and a very customizable character creation process and all that. I could give you a laundry list if you like (cool combat mechanics, great technology and science models, and terrific client/server technology to maintain the playability of it all).

Our narrative too is quite interesting. Currently we've planned the back-story in detail to about three years post launch. We'd ideally want to have 3 years of detailed significant events (or 4 if you count prelaunch years) designed to drive the games plot forward, thus making the world more interesting with each passing day and ensuring that the game continues to feel fresh to the established player and that the newcomers don't feel like everything cool has already happened.

Designing a game that can stand the test of time is very difficult, as you have a great number of constituencies to satisfy. But we’ve got a good handle on a balance that will attract and retain paying customers.

RPGDot: What aspects of other games do you like and will 'probably' find its way in Rekonstruction?

Chris: You name it and we've likely considered it. It's our goal to steal as much as we can that is cool and leave behind as much lameness as possible. Specifically, Rekonstruction will be set in near future (400 years) on an earth beset by global catastrophe. You can look back as far as you like in the annals of science fiction and fantasy and find similar stories and plots. When going over some of our back-story docs with a good friend of mine, he mentioned a recent science fiction story that resembled one of them. I was surprised (I should not have been) but I was resigned long ago that this would happen.

In fact, I have little doubt that we will be the only game that launches that is using earth as its model. I'm honestly shocked that other games have not launched with the full earth as its world. Of course just by saying that I deny the history of games like nuclear war, civilization, the Seven Cities of Gold or, looking to board games, everything SSI ever produced, Diplomacy, etc. That said, I'll be shocked if we are or remain the only earth based MMOG. Considering that, the only thing that really matters is this: Will our game be distinctive and fun to play in the long term for the player. We think so and we are designing it to be so.

From a global perspective, we expect to be the game that will have the most distributed global audience as we are going to actively court and have local, low latency links in the EU, Japan, South Korea and Australia within a year of domestic launch. We want Rekonstruction to be the first truly global game and we have the expertise to make it happen world wide.

RPGDot: In contrast what aspects of other games will make you throw up and will never make it into Rekonstruction?

Chris: Throw up is a strong world, but here are some things we're trying to avoid:

• We won't have shards.
• We won't have separate worlds for pk and non-pks.
• We will not be integrating real money into the game.
• You will not be able to buy Rekonstruction money with real money. Nothing personal against Entropia or others but I'm not interested in being a money launderer nor am I interested in paying our lawyers to cover international banking laws for our game. You don’t need to involve real money for people to feel very strong personal feelings for their characters’ virtual items. We wish Entropia and There well of course, but I think that they are insane for adopting this approach. I just can’t picture people wanting to open a Federal Reserve account and install SEC, FTC, DOC, and Fair Lending compliance officers to legally run a MMOG.
• We will not impede extra-game commerce of in game goods. We will not offer pre-leveled characters for sale.

I could go on forever, but I won’t…

RPGDot: What points of view will the player be able to choose from?

Chris: Rekonstruction will support both first and third person views.

RPGDot: And what kind of graphics will the player look at? Are you using your own engine or will you purchase one? And what hardware will the player need to have to play the game?

Chris: I cannot answer this fully at this time, for reasons that will become clear soon enough.

RPGDot: When will we see the first piece of artwork?

Chris: Next month we'll be posting some concept art for people to check out. We'll also start leaking out the back-story as well at that time.

RPGDot: What is the current status of the development and are you still on track for a release in the fall of 2004? And how big is the crew working on the game?

Chris: We are still on track for release in the fall of 2004. The crew is still small right now, as we're in the design/early coding phase of the game. The art dept. is also fairly small right now. Growing a game company is tricky as we're trying to balance both funding and measured growth.

RPGDot: Do you have anything else to add?

Chris: If your readers would like to be kept abreast of our activities, I'd suggest that they visit http://damagestudios.com/form.php and sign up. Joining that mailing list is the only way they can be guaranteed a spot as a homesteader.