HeroEngine Interview

The MMO Gamer managed to corner Simutronics CEO David Whatley for a lengthy discussion about their HeroEngine suite, which you may recall is being used to power BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic and Zenimax’s untitled MMORPG.

The MMO Gamer: So, you mentioned storytelling in that last answer, and to drag you off topic a bit here, that’s a subject very near and dear to my heart, being a writer.

Storytelling, from my vantage point, is something sorely lacking in MMOs these days. What does HeroEngine bring to the writer and designer to allow them to tell a story within an MMO framework?

David Whatley: Well, we’ve worked really hard in our Hero’s Journey design to create a method for developing unique storylines that are personalized to your character. One of the ways we do that is first we have quests that feature elaborate branching story lines, so there are always decisions to be made.

Do I go left? Do I go right? Do I give the item, do I not give the item? That kind of thing, rather than just following what you’re told to do. And whether you do something, or don’t something, or one of three or five different choices, they’re all valid. Or as I like to say, failure is an option.

It’s okay to fail a quest because that just leads down a different road. Now, the problem with that is that that creates a need to develop way more content than if you just have a linear quest line. Or two or three linear quest lines. Because every branch means that you now need to develop that branch.

To get around that we built a way of branching quests that tie back into themselves. And HeroEngine gave us the tools to be able to do this sort of thing. On top of that, we layered a special system which we call (quest tokens) it’s kind of an inventory system but you never see these items.

They are things that are recorded on your character that have influence later quests. One good example of that is the (nemesis quest token.) What happens is in some point of your life you’re going to come across a boss creature, and you’ll start fighting it, and there will be some randomness about it but it will decide that guy is your nemesis.

From this point on, you’re gonna be seeing him over and over again. And what’ll happen is later on there’ll be a quest that says (Insert Nemesis Here, if he has Nemesis Token) and what’ll happen is he’ll show up in that quest, and every time he’s more powerful than he was the last time, and he’ll be calling you out and stuff like that, and he’ll always make this grand escape right before you kill him.

Then, somewhere near the end of the end game you’ll get an opportunity to take him down or not in the final confrontation. That’s just one example of the things we do with the quest tokens.

It also does Fable-like stuff where you know, it’s keeping track of characters’ predispositions towards you and can cause quests to branch one way or the other.

I think there’s a fair amount of innovation in this system but really its the gestalt that matters, the gestalt of all these things that makes it interesting.

The HeroEngine is really great at allowing for this kind of innovation because as a tool set it allows you to develop specialized tool for your game and your game only, and what we did with Hero’s Journey is we created a very elaborate quest system that lets designers go in and specify stuff at this level of detail, all parametrically with dialog and drop down boxes and never have to get their hands into scripting, because it can all be done with very elaborate specifications.