Linus Tech tips coverage of pxs 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel
and steel Series so we're here with Steven Baker the lead sound designer on
strife and we're going to get into exactly what his unique contribution is
to this game after we talk a little bit about the general stuff so you guys got
to differentiate from other mobas how are you going to make it accessible for
the noob and yet customizable enough for the experienced players well there's a
lot of fresh Design Tech techniques that
our designers did uh some of them include the gold sharing mechanic when
you are in a lane with someone and you
get a last hit you actually share that gold with your lane mate and that helps
to really uh reduce player
toxicity as well as uh allow you to
collect gold even though you're not last hitting so tell me about the load out
system well that's going to be basically pregame before you queue you're going to
be able to select your hero select your pet and select items that you like to
play with okay so I'm a new player my whole thing is okay I you know some Pro
that I like to watch uses this particular kit usually so I just set
everything up before the game I don't have to go to the store and Shop no not
if you don't want to I mean it really depends on uh how the game is is going
like you could have a load out and you
know think that you're going to do really well but if it's not going your
way you can actually go back into the shop and reconfigure your Loadout for
maybe more armor magic armor stuff like that okay so if I'm a pro and I you know
I feel like the whole loading out ahead of time is beneath me I can still go
full custom oh totally yeah okay that's
awesome now let's talk about you you talked about crafting in pets are pets a
purely aesthetic thing absolutely Ely not they they actually serve a great
purpose in the game when you first start
the game you get to select a pet and
it's very it's like a baby basically and
it has only a small amount of abilities
but as you play the game you get Commodities at the end of the game that
include food you use the food to feed your pet and the pet evolves and
actually develops its powers it grows stronger it unlocks new passives and and
makes your active ability much stronger so basically you guys are trying to make
anyone who bought a tamagachi 10 years ago feel really stupid about it because
they could just have played this game had that experience and they get a game for their money absolutely speaking of
money you guys are aiming for what 15 heroes six pets at launch now your
monetization model we all know how League of Legends does it where you pay
for the heroes if they're not on rotation uh how are you guys handling
Heroes and and pay pay to play so to speak well first off off the game is
free to play and the heroes are free to play so anytime that we design a hero it
will be free to play uh the 15 Heroes
that you'll be able to select from freeo play you know the the things that we
monetize will include uh commodities for
crafting and also your skins for your different Heroes so I promise stepen we
wouldn't talk about gameplay mechanics the whole time lead sound designer he
wants to talk about sound if you guys have been watching me for any amount of
time you'll know I do believe that sound is incredibly important one of my
mantras is go buy a bloody sound card get some decent headphones not gaming
headphones good headphones enjoy your games more it's incredibly important and
the conductor which is your baby is going to make what I'm saying right now
even more true tell me about this well the conductor is an Adaptive music
system that es and flows the music based
on what's Happening to your hero in the game right so so you start the game
you're in the laning phase not a lot of action is happening you're just worried
about last hitting creeps and maybe harassing the hero a little bit so it's
very lowkey very easy to listen to you know uh but but as the game progresses
say maybe you go into the jungle it's a
little more tense you know because uh no
one can see where you are and the music really uh signifies that um and then
maybe you're in a situation where there's a team fight happening which the
music goes huge there there's a lot of
different layers that are happening at that time to to to add excitement to the
player's experience so your goal here then is to get the players heart pumping
without them really necessarily knowing get the adrenaline flowing at the right
times without them even really even having to think about it yeah it is a very unconscious subconscious kind of
thing that's happening to music I think that's absolutely cool and I think that
getting away from games being designed to be looked at while you have your
music going in your ear in your ears and you're completely ignoring it I mean the
immersiveness is incredibly exciting so thank you for taking the time to talk to
us about this this is absolutely great and uh good luck my pleasure now we're
here with P who is the director of monetization for strife and you do a
bunch of other stuff as well right yeah I also worked as a lead system designer
for strife and I work with a game design team as well making awesome Heroes
hopefully all right so we're going to have some great conversation with you because it's a free to play and as as a
monetization strategy free to play is anything but mature it it there's so
much more to be experimented with what are you guys doing with Strife to make
it work for you I think you're seeing hero uh free-to-play games popping up
all over the place and a lot of them are going with a cookie cutter kind of dual
currency one you earn and one you get for free right or sorry when you
purchase and one what you get for free for playing and what we've done with
Strife is rather than having having that we've developed Commodities and
commodities are something that you earn still but each of them serves a specific
function so this allows a lot of Dynamics as far as what trade-offs you
have when you earn food you can feed your pets and when you get ore you can
craft your items but when you get Essences you can either harmonize your
items or it can make them better so there's a lot of trade-offs that don't really exist when you only have one
earned currency that exists when you have this more higher level commodity
currency okay now speaking of uh of crafting items and all that I want to
talk about uh okay it's not related at all forget the segue but tell me about
the orts strategy for stri what are you guys doing to differentiate yourself
from the other stuff that's out there for orts we really want to uh respond to
the demands of what our community wants so we're still prea people haven't
gotten their hands on it the only people who played on played it are like our friends and our families and our
co-workers so we want to see what our community wants if they want a topheavy
system in which there's just one Invitational Tournament that's the you
know the Hub of all that um then we'll respond to that or if they want
something that's more Grassroots more regular automated tournaments that anyone can get access into and maybe the
prizes aren't as high for each of them um but everyone can participate then
we'll respond to that as well so we want to see what our player wants to do
because at the end of the day we believe that Esports is a service for the community for everyone to gather around
the game and to get really hyped up and really amped and excited now the word
everyone is interesting because you guys don't want to abandon the hardcores of
course because hardcore gamers are are going to be your biggest supporters but
what have you done if you were to pick three things that have made this game
more accessible and that are going to help to draw in new players well there
there's um as the mobile genre is developed there's been a lot of issues
brought forth so four years ago when we were developing heroes in new worth and R was developing League of Legends and
whatnot they we were all focusing on scratching the surface making sure the
genre is going to be fun it's going to be successful people are going to play our games now that we kind of have the
luxury of sitting back and saying okay mobas are a good formula we we can talk
about more of the in-depth issues the issue of toxicity and a lot of people
have brought this up about the mobile Community people are kind of
sometimes and um we it's we really come
back and put our fingers on that people are to each other generally
when they're on the same team and they disagree about how to win a game so int
team conflict has been a huge thing for us and with Strife we've done several
things to tackle that we've developed the game from the ground up from the
game design to try to alleviate some of the tensions within your team as far as
competing for last hits who's going to play the support role that no one wants
to play who's going to devote all their goal to buying the awards so there's no
purchasable vision there's no um supporting by sacrificing instead of
sacrificing we allow our support players to still get items and enable their
teammates and support that way instead so tell me about the way that gold gets
split when you're either sharing a lane with someone or you're in your own lane
and everyone else is all over the place in order to make people not be not
behave selfishly yeah so every mobile veteran has probably gone through the
argument of I need the last hits no I need the last hits and it comes down to
this All or Nothing whoever gets the last hit gets all the gold and so you're
competing with your Lan mate as to who gets the last hit in strip however you
split the gold and how this works is if you're solo you get half of the gold
Bounty of a creep so say a creep is worth 70 gold you get 35 and the other
half is split across your team evenly including yourself so you end up with 42
if you're with another Lane partner you each get half of the goal so you each get 35 so realistically if you're
soloing you might get last of the last less of the last hits then when you have
a partner helping you out as well so you actually want your teammate there but when they're there you're not fighting
over it you're not taking something from them they're not taking something from you you're working together toward an
end goal together I mean the way that I see this is this helps the Casual
players as well as the as as the more
competitive players because this does two things is number one is it makes it
so that that uh that one player on a competitive team doesn't have to be the
who has no who has no items by the end of the game and it was basically
just kind of running around doing everyone else's Dirty Work and it also
means that for someone who's a more a much more casual player they're not
necessarily get left behind to the same extent I mean as someone who only ever
really played DOTA one as as as far as the mobile genre goes I can tell you as
someone who kind of played it casually and jumped in by you know 10 15 minutes
into the game there was that one guy who was just going to completely dominate
the match and then there was me and every time I saw him he was going to just totally kick my ass and what have
you guys done to to to change that besides just the gold splitting so
another thing we've done is that when you kill a player the gold you get rewarded with will be dependent on their
relative Effectiveness and power to you so gold per minute is a really important
metric for us that basically calculates how much gold have you been earning this
game and if you kill someone with less gold per minute than you do you'll get less gold and and on the uh on the flip
side if they kill you and you have higher than them they get bonus gold so this really really incentivizes our top
players to go pick on someone their own size and leave the little guys alone a
little bit and for for us Strife is a game that we don't want and we've all
all had this experience where you play a game with your friend you're trying to introduce him to to a game you're not
really playing with them you're playing the same game as them but you kind of shove them off in a corner it's like you
learn the game while I go and Win It On My Own we really want stri toam an
experience where you're playing with your friends with your girlfriend with your with your kid not just shoving off
shoving them off in the corner buy you Awards whatnot well that is incredibly
exciting is there anything else that you'd like to add for for the audience in terms of the Innovation that you guys
have put into this game yeah I think the last really cool part is that you get to
pick your hero before the game starts so what this allows us to do is not only
take the stress off of it a little bit it's like I got 90 seconds I got to pick
my hero everyone's going to yell at me um no you get you get to take your time
pick your hero pick your gear set pick your crafted items um pick your pet do
everything that you want to do to set up the experience that you have in mind and
then the other thing that does is allows us to assign a hero specific ELO so if
you have a hero that you're really good with CU you played it 150 times we know
that we we'll know your record with that hero and we'll be able to sign you with
teammates and opponents of an equ equitable level so that you have a good
game whereas if you're a really high level player but you're trying a new
hero you might not be rated as high so you're not punished for trying something
completely new very cool thank you very much this has been absolutely fantastic
and enjoy the rest of the show thank you