2 worlds 2 mp interview!

Admin Posts : 1585 Join date : 2009-06-04

During the recent CD-Projekt Spring Conference held in Warsaw, we had a chance to sit down with Reality Pump's head, Mirek Dymek, and talk a bit about Two Worlds 2, regarding its combat, multiplayer and magic system in detail. We were especially interested to learn what improvements the upcoming sequel has in comparison to its predecessor. Mirek talked in a frank and open manner, so much so that we've learned a lot of things you usually wouldn't hear from a developer - and from a CEO of the developer studio, at that! Read the full interview below...

^{We sat down with Mirek Dymek, CEO of RP Studios, and talked about TW2's Multiplayer}

TWVault: Multiplayer has been a major selling point of the game, and it’s most likely what kept the game still popular among quite a few people, even got it a cult status. What can you say about the mulitplayer in console versions? Will Xbox version support, as previously, Live connectivity? Have multiplayer lag problems, that drove many players away, been dealt with on all platforms?

-Mirek Dymek: The console and PC version will retain its MP build-up, but without the lag, of course! Previously, we’d taken the RTS multiplayer and adapted it to the RPG realm. It has been heavily basing on player-to-player synchronization, to the point of making situations in the game identical from every player’s viewpoint. Right now we’re rather focusing on fluency; the worlds are actually separate [even during the same match] and we use dead reckoning algorythms to approximate positions and events all the time instead. This means that if someone has ‘lag’ of some sort, the game doesn’t freeze, but the player who’s ‘lagging’ might be shown as standing still and then, on retaining connection, will simply be ‘teleported’ to another position as if not having had lag at all.

TWVault: So is it safe to assume that p2p connections that plagued the fluidity of the game are gone?

-Mirek Dymek: Yes. At this point we’re moving everything via the servers instead. Also, we’ve minimized data sent between server/client drastically, to the point where only the crucial parts are transmitted, like position, direction, and – in some specific cases – an animation frame if there’s something unusual to be send. This is cause we tied animation in such a way, that it can retrace and reproduce player’s movements in the online realm to reflect player’s input even if that input is lost due to network issues. Of course, as this is not an MMO, totally identical player viewpoints are not really necessary. This is also implemented in combat - info on player’s strength of hits and his stats is transmitted “hit by hit”.

^{Online and offline environs and battles vary greatly}
TWVault: How does that translate into the game environment?

-Mirek Dymek: This works very good in regard to an active blocking. The typical combat is transmitted in a ‘hit packet’ manner, where every hit is transferred to another player, and if that player then uses active blocking in that split second – regardless if its shown on your screen or not (due to animation frames being just sent) – the hit may not come through, and you’re safe. Of course, you can still do a backjump to completely avoid the hit altogether. And this actually works, even if latency goes up to 500 ms – which is pretty high! If you set the two screens next to one another, you’ll see that there are minute differences in positions, but the actual experience is always fluid – you attack, block, counter, dodge in real time as it should be.

^{Combat system is very responsive in the online (and singleplayer) mode.}
TWVault: Lag not being an issue, what can you tell us about the size of the multiplayer games in numbers? On Xbox version, it was up to 8 players, with no lobby system involved. On PC versions, this was a 50 person lobby, with instanced games limited to 8 people. Each instance was a rough copy of some region of singleplayer. Do you plan on retaining that system, or maybe expanding it?

-Mirek Dymek: The basic scheme has been retained. Console users will not get the interactive 3D lobby, but will avail of all the other content. PC users will still get a fully interactive lobby system with instances opened on demand. But, and this is the best news here, the server system has been completely redone. For starters, unlike TW1, the online mode doesn’t totally rely on one physical server. There’s now several servers in place for logging on, authentication, players’ characters and actual gameplay. Multiple redundancies, something you would expect in an MMO.

TWVault: Does that mean there’ll be no more cheating? TW1 was rife with cheats, hacks and edits, and that drove a lot of the population away, what’s been done to combat that?

-Mirek Dymek: Yes, the ‘hard plug out’ and many other ‘techniques’ used to duplicate items or cheat are gone. We’ve devised a very intricate in-game items/actions verification system. Imagine a situation, where you drop a sword on the ground in the instance. Now, the system first logs that you don’t have it anymore. Then, the system logs that it’s now “sent” to server. Until the server acknowledges the fact that this item (in this case, a sword) is gone from one player’s inventory, no-one else is able to get that sword. The server then ‘knows’ about the item, and then – and only then – displays the sword for all others to see. Now, if the other players were to try to pick up the sword simultaneously, their actions are queued, and only the first one to get through is recorded as the one “taking” the sword. Others will just grab air – even if it’s just due to lag or slower reaction. It’s a much fairer system, as it also disables item duping, hex-editing and many other nuisances (such as losing player’s progress due to randomly losing connection for whatever reason).

^{Epic fights can continue past finishing singleplayer campaign in an online co-op mode!}
TWVault: It might sound silly, but what about GUI and user-friendliness of the online mode? It took players a long while to get used to the system, or even find out its basics... Players often couldn’t even find a way out of the starter lobby. Will TW2 cater more to the online community in this aspect?

-Mirek Dymek: As you have seen during our presentation, GUI is now a really polished element, specifically designed to be readable and fully informative. No more disjointed information, or lack of any hints. Everything you need to know about the interface, game options, etc.. – is communicated directly in context of that activity in a clear manner. This is also used in multiplayer mode. We’ve even had a specialist brought in to assess usability, accessibility and ergonomics of the system, to streamline it for both console and PC use, with a goal of having our game fun and easy to use.

TWVault: Can you tell us something about the PVP aspect? Will there be balancing involved, allowing e.g. a pure melee player to defeat a mage-oriented character?

-Mirek Dymek: New modes, as I said, may come in time. For now we have three basic types of online activity, with guild village, PVP and co-operative mode, and some unusual stuff like horse racing. The balancing… that is the hard part. Frankly, you can’t really balance out an archer vs. a warrior, simply due to the archetypes’ designated strengths and weaknesses. We did an astounding amount of mathematical balancing, excruciating spread-sheet analysis for months on end, just to balance out PVE. And it was a daunting task, believe you me. We have 3 classes of NPCs, monsters, what have you – they all have different paths of development, strengths and weaknesses. We started out with a goal of making typical fights here last for 6-7 hits to kill an enemy, but the player vs AI dynamic has been further complicated by the inter-AI combat as well… I’m telling you, this was no small task, and to take it into PVP realm… Just boggles the mind. A simple archer may damage you for a small damage, that already depends on an immense amount of factors. Now, take Multihit skill into account, this damage grows (or lessens) depending on targets chosen and arrows physically landing on a target. That adds a whole new layer of complexity towards the real-time PVP combat. PVE killrate (or amount of hits to kill a typical “mob”) is quite stable and level-based, but amount of additional skills and abilities that can play into that makes it a much more intricate system – and an unlimited system when those skills are rolled against one another. We’re currently just starting multiplayer balancing and it’s going to take us a while.

^{Will Orcs be a playable race in Multiplayer? Too early to tell yet...}
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