How exactly did Dead Island become such a big franchise? And how did it become a MOBA? Epidemic is now the third spin-off game from the original Dead Island and it’s a surprising change of gear from the first-person sandbox experiences we’ve seen so far. We caught up with Matthias Trumpfheller, community manager at Deep Silver to find out what the thinking is behind Epidemic, how it’s handling microtransactions and whether it plans to get the attention of the pro gamer circuit to compete with Dota 2 and LOL.
The game has been through a fair amount of testing so far. What have you been looking out for and what key things have you learned?
Even though our PvPvPvE mode Scavenger was the main focus from the beginning we quickly realised that our player base was split 50-50 between our PvP and PvE (Horde) mode. Since the development time to create new Horde mode content didn’t justify the time players enjoyed the maps for, we decided to fundamentally change the PvE part of the game. We wanted to create a mode that provided high replayability while requiring moderate resources to create new content for it. You have to keep in mind that Stunlock Studios consists of ‘only’ 24 developers. We came up with Crossroads, which not only offers randomised tiles with randomised events but also scales the difficulty according to your performance and removed the time pressure between events thus creating a more enjoyable experience for everyone. Crossroads had the additional benefit of educating players for the more complex PvP mode by having Scavenger mechanics as isolated events.
Will you be looking to get attention from the pro gamer circuit?
We definitely see a lot of potential there. Our core group is very strong and dedicated and some spent over 1000 hours in the game. It is challenging to teach players how to play Scavenger the right way. There are lots of decisions individuals and the team as a whole have to make at any point of time during a match. Do we try to get more flags than the rest of the team and try to defend it? Do we go for the special zombie that yields more supply points but risk getting attacked while fighting it and leaving our flags unprotected? The three-team-dynamic is also something not many games offer and seems to be new to many players: do we split up and risk getting into a 2vs4 or 2vs4vs2 fight? Do we team up with the second team to dethrone the first placed team? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Temporarily. We are of course listening to the community and we received a lot of feedback stating that a straight team vs team mode might entice competitive play more. We are working on such a mode but it is a lot more work than just removing a couple of flags and one team, but we are getting there.
How are you approaching the thorny subject of microtransactions?
This is a very delicate topic and we are aware of the risks but rest assured, we are all gamers and absolutely hate pay-to-win. Everything that can be bought in our shop is achievable through playing the game, too. In fact, the strongest weapons can only be crafted with the currencies you earn from playing the game.
Will paid-for items give players a noticeable advantage?
The difficulty of a match and the level of the opponents is determined by the weapon level you have. So while you are able to buy a weapon that might be stronger than the one you currently have you automatically fight against equally strong opponents and they might have more experience in the game if they got to that tier without taking the shortcut.
What sort of variety of weapons and gear should we expect from the final game?
Creating more content like additional weapons, modifications, characters etc. is currently the main route. Additional to that, we are constantly thinking of alternative systems that might give the player more choice or make the game more interesting. Just in the last months we added weapon modifications and gadgets and they work out very well – we also removed or streamlined systems that didn’t work as intended. That’s the beauty of developing a game as a service and being in a beta phase. You keep what works and remove what doesn’t work with the help of analysing our data and listing to our players.
So tell us more about customisation.
While we have subtle differences in our classes, our weapons, modifications, and gadgets can be seen as our variation of a talent tree. But contrary to character specific talent trees you are able to form every character in every way you deem fit – do you want to turn your ranged support character into a crit-heavy melee character? Not a problem with the right gear.
For more amazing interviews check out our Games Masters collections featuring Hideo Kojima, Ken Levine and more
Related Articles