Conclave Interview

[Ghostbear]

A few days ago, I asked if you had any questions for the Conclave guys. You gave me plenty to ask and the gentlemen at 10x10 Room were kind enough to answer. So, without further preamble their answers.

You're building an interesting fantasy world, with unique races and themes. While I've picked up a lot of information from quests, it would help to have some kind of reference material, like a short story or history lesson. Is that being planned?

Glad you are enjoying the world. We've considered building a Conclave Codex for some time now, even beginning work on one some time back. What we'd like to do in the future is not only create a Codex, but link it into the narrative so that, as you are reading about what's going on within your game, you can easily click on a place name or a historical character in order to learn more details.

While there is the occasional decision to be made, nearly all of the gameplay seems to be combat based. Is this the intention, or are there any plans to expand on the out of combat roleplaying aspect of the game?

Expanding out-of-combat decisions is a major part of our focus post-Kickstarter; as we've begun to lay out our project schedule, we've made sure it is one of the first topics we address. Combat will likely remain the part of the game where you spend most of your time, simply because any given combat takes place over multiple rounds, but out-of-combat decisions are going to get a lot deeper - and as we make them more interesting, we'll almost certainly use them more within our quests.

Are you at all planning on adding some granularity to the options for email notifications? It'd be nice if we could control when we're emailed, from the current 'quest is updated' to a more relaxed 'they're waiting on you'.

That's a possibility. We are looking at a number of ways to improve the way the game communicates with you, as well as how players can communicate with each other, like allowing players to "poke" each other when somebody fails to act for a while.

Decisions. Majority rules? Can we progress when 3 of the 4 have voted instead of waiting for the 4 (or even the third if the tie-breaker/leader has already voted).

Definitely a change we are considering; many people have asked for this one. Before we commit to this path, we first have to nail down all our plans for non-combat situations, some of which might involve alternatives or supplements to voting (alongside the existing voting situations). But it seems likely we'll make this happen.

Scaling. I would love to see missions scale to our party instead of trying to find a mission that suites our party. Mostly, this refers to 'easier' missions. I would love the ones that say "This mission will be really easy" be bumped up in difficulty automatically. Keep the harder missions though, they were plenty of fun.

Scaling is surprisingly hard to do well; we've had countless discussions about the best way to handle it. One trick is that some players and parties want an easier experience; given the same characters, they may repeatedly fail the quests that you find easy. Our logs show us exactly what percentage of parties fail any given combat, and the results may not be what you'd expect; I know I've been surprised a number of times.

With all that said, I hear you: it will benefit the game for us to do as good a job as possible of giving any given party the level of challenge that they individually crave.

I think I heard somewhere that there would be more drawn out quests? Longer, more involved? There were a couple in the beta that were great fun...but are you considering even larger quests?

We are indeed. While we haven't made any decisions yet, our current take is that quests should probably be a bit longer overall. That might include having a couple that are considerably lengthier.

I also want to know if any further character customization is in the cards?

Very much so; the desire to expand character customization was one of the primary motivators behind Kickstarter funding. I can't tell you how excited I am to get character customization built!

I wrote a blog post recently that talks a bit about our plans: http://10x10room.com/2012/09/09/deve...customization/

Will there be any type of micro-transaction purchases available once the game goes live? If so, will they limit them to items that do not alter game play such as avatars? I wouldn't mind being able to pay a small fee for additional avatar packs.

Possibly. We are trying hard to avoid a business model where people feel like they have to buy all sorts of different little things in order to play the game; we want people to be able to pay once and know they have the complete game in front of them. That said, we are unpackaging guild creation as a separate add-on that you can purchase if you want a guild, precisely because not having a guild doesn't alter gameplay. It's possible we'll explore other a la carte options in the future, as long as they have no gameplay effect.

Will you be allowing user designed quests?

That is probably the #1 most common question we get. The short answer is "not any time soon", frankly. The main reason is effort: we already have a very full plate after the Kickstarter, and the money we raised pays for precisely the features and new quests we promised, not more. (That's also a big reason why we aren't jumping on some of the other topics mentioned in other questions: our responsibility right now is to deliver the features that we told our Kickstarter backers we'd be implementing.) Another reason is that different people have different ideas about what user-created content means. Some people want to create a quest available within Conclave. Others want a quest that they can play with just their friends. Still others want to be able to license the Conclave engine to create entirely different gameworlds. All of these are exciting possibilities! Which is the right focus? Once we complete the Kickstarter-funded development and launch the full game of Conclave, we'll have a chance to step back and give those possibilities the serious consideration they deserve.

I'd like to thank Nick at 10x10 Room for agreeing to answer all your questions. I know I speak for many of us when I say that I am looking forward to playing the full version of Conclave. Make sure you follow Conclave on Twitter and on their website.

[biosc1]

Some great answers. Thanks.

[Lekon]

Man I need some time to play this game. Looks like a ton of fun, and you have to love a company naming themselves 10x10 Room.

[Ink Asylum]

If it does well I hope they do allow for user-generated quests that you can play and share. This is a great system for tactical D&D style combat in an asynchronous way.