What resulted was a long talk about the future of MMOs, people in the industry, the Chapter 11 proceedings, changes to Horizons both present and future, and well, anything else that struck our fancy. Below you'll find part 2 of the interview - you can find part 1 here and watch for parts 3 and possible a 4 later this week!

David Bowman: Everybody burns out on their products, but if you keep in your mind that you're building a world and that it can grow and change, you can keep that fresh for a long time. You can make that fresh for a career. I think for a lot of the younger developers the idea is to come in, make a splash and move on to the next sexy thing.

GI.n: They want to make a "game".

David Bowman: I make games, I entertain first and foremost. I'm playing into this world and I know it's going to be here three years from now which is very different from a 10-minute Counter Strike match. Both are very valid, both very entertaining and fun but both very different.

There are two types of developers really required for both of these tasks. In this industry you'll find more and more long term "I'd like to grow a world and make it real for years" feeling.

I think of these spaces as online theme parks. You look at Cedar Point or some of the Six Flags locations and they're the place to be! And then next year, a different place is the place to be because the rides have been surpassed or changed. But places like Disneyland or Disneyworld, they grab the families and they say "you loved this as a child, come back and teach your child to love this, too".

So I think about Horizons and I think about this industry and I think about what we're building - World of Warcraft is going to be around for a long time. They've built it to be around for a long time. What we're hoping for Horizons is that as a company and as a product, we're going to grow. We're going to get better at our craft; we're going to get better at providing services; we're going to get better at being an organization that can support what the players want.

I think we've already been successful for providing the platform for the players to build the world. There's the EQ slogan "You're in Our World Now", and if I were to pick a slogan for Horizons it would be "Build Your World". As we get better at what we're doing and we get the balances in and we keep changing it - our goal is not to make it harder because that's pointless - we're trying to make it the right balance. For example, last week when all the new monsters came in we gave them all schools so they act like players do in all ways - they have these schools and abilities that they get and they go up levels, etc - but the problem was, it's hard to test that within the building here, and it's hard to test it on Blight where we have 60-100 players. So, when it hit the live worlds and suddenly players who are in one school or have gone through different ways of making their character can't hunt appropriate level monsters and that's frustrating for them. We watched what they did, and less than a week later we made changes so that it's better - it's much much better. I believe now there are only a few types that are a little underpowered so that people can power-hunt them but we'll adjust those, give them some special abilities, make sure the values are right; there are a couple of monsters that are still overpowered so that people are going to avoid them except that they have things that players want so we'll adjust those - but we're trying to do it within a role-playing context. We'll say that the Withered Aegis are training their forces and that the indigenous monsters themselves that are adjusting to the movement. So, right now the players are still in flux because of the shard consolidation - but we're going to keep that once we're happy and the players are happy we're going to keep that balance and we're going to add to it.

GI.n: You state that you want to keep the changes within the context of the lore - and you've been making many changes lately - but no matter what site I visit, I find only the changes and no explanation for it.

David Bowman: You're not going to find that outside the game.

GI.n: Ok, but that often makes the changes more "important" than the story and therefore the world less immersive, it makes those people watching the game see it as rather dry. How do you plan on working with that?

David Bowman: As a company we've been hard-pressed to complete the changes that need to be done and though we've been producing more lore now than ever before it's merely a coordination issue. There are too few people doing too much to make it work as we'd like. But we intend to change that.

I think we need to give the list of changes, and that list goes out to fansites and goes on our site. The lore itself has been problematic for us. We know the lore, we know the story, and we know why we're doing what we're doing within the context of the story. I'm not going to call it a "luxury" because it's not - it's one of the important things about creating a world. Even the consolidation we put into the context of the world and role-played the action of the players. All I can say is that we're keeping in mind the context of the story as we make changes.

GI.n: As someone who's had to take time off from the game, that's what I've missed. I've seen the changes listed but no reason. So, in my time off I've lost that immersion. And if you've got a casual player who can't log in regularly, they too, will lose that.

David Bowman: It needs to be available in both. To a certain extent there's a soap opera element to MMO's. I want to see drama, interweaving stories, etc and we're evolving to there. But the problem with doing this is it's resource intensive but it's ok if you've got the tools to do it. And we've got the tools to do it, the community site will help us, but I still see it being several months where we can get that "right". Right now we're trying to get to the point where we can be proud of the game. Once we're proud of the world of Istaria, and people are saying "I want to invite you to my world. I want you to help me shape and build this world", once we're there - and over the next couple of weeks we'll finally be able to come out say we made some mistakes, we've had some successes, we've risked a great deal but we've worked hard through the whole process. We're proud of what we've accomplished but now we're proud of the game and proud of the world, come play with us - and we want to be able to make that announcement so that we can then move on to the other issues that are important to us.

We've got a lot of Dragon things we'd like to be able to get in for our anniversary around Christmas. We want our anniversary to be very special for the Dragons - we've the Ancient Rite of Passage, Dragon Lairs are coming - but even if the game didn't have those things we could still be proud of it if it's working as we intend, if it's doing the things we want it to do. We'll be able to at least say we're proud.

So, back to the soap opera element and how that relates to this and tying this to the lore and the community site, we'll have the ability to begin to work on that.

GI.n: I imagine that you're probably short on labor for all of this. You've produced more with a smaller team in the previous 2-3 months than you did in your first 6. Eventually, people will start dropping from exhaustion, yourself included.

David Bowman: The team as of last week has been able to start working much more reasonable hours. The majority of the work that we did over the last 2 1/2 months has been to build a sustainable framework. What we had before was good but required intense labor for a lot more people. We've changed how it's structured so that we can now to support it without having to work an 80-100 hour workweek. I would lose any of the staff here - and I don't want to lose any of them, these are wonderful people who work for the love of the product, they believe in the game - it's not my intent to burn anyone out, least of all myself. I think we're in a sustainable position now. If we had kept going the way we were before it wouldn't have worked. Now we have things structured so that we can produce new content, get back on schedule for our events. We interrupted the events in order to take care of this "great" event of combining all these worlds - that was a huge event! We could have made it easier on ourselves by leaving out role-playing and context and just saying "you're all here and you're stuck with it, you lose your property, etc". What we've really tried to do through the whole process, which was a burden on ourselves but an essential burden, was to take a look at all the investments that players had made and try to preserve the investments wherever it is possible.

It's also an opportunity for changes to happen. If we're going to make the changes that we need to make for this game to be sustainable, for the events to return in full force and be able to achieve the goals that all the players want - I think the players want the Ancient Rite of Passage; I think the players want to choose to give rise to other players or not - if we can put these things in the players will say "yes, this is what we were looking for". Players want the ability to put furniture into their structures. I want to be able to paint my walls! I want to have something besides an empty shell; I want functionality in all of these structures.

We had to break a bunch of things in order to mend them. So we've done that, we've broken them at this point where people are shifting from one world to another. But, at the same point we are fixing them coming out of this and coming into it we preserve people's ability to buy property - we've actually increased their ability. Anyone who owned property before receives a token that allows him or her to participate in the auctions. If you owned property in the old worlds you receive a token for the value of the property in Imperial value (not the value you may have paid to another player). That token is now used in an auction - we've more than tripled, I may have to check my numbers because I think we've more than quadrupled the number of plots in the game - players will bid on these plots using a token or cash. Now, a token trumps any cash bid. If you owned a piece of property before you're very likely, unless you choose not to, to get a plot. In fact you're guaranteed to get a plot if you bid. So, if you're to bid on all of the plots in the game you will get a piece of property if you choose to.

David Bowman: You can bid on as many or as few plots as you choose. You can literally bid on every single plot in the game if you choose to, however some of them are Guild Plots and I'll get to that in just a moment.

The token is your trump card. If no token bidder bids on a plot then cash wins. It's possible for more than one player to cooperate to bid a token on a plot. So, if you and I are in the same guild, I bid and our market is a Guild Bid. And you come and you see there is a Guild Bid and you add your token to the Guild Bid. And therefore people can combine. And this is especially important for the Guild Communities where there's a Guild Plot with a Guild Structure on it. Whichever Guild gains control of that plot, they complete the structure that's on that plot and then it unlocks all of the plots around it. Now guild members get to own all of those plots. So, Guilds can control communities now, which is something we didn't have before.

GI.n: When you leave the Guild what happens to the plot that surrounds it?

David Bowman: Right now, if you own a piece of property, we don't take that away from you. We're looking at Guild Communities right now and think that there might be a time factor on when you leave the guild - we don't know exactly how we want to handle this yet but we're talking to Guild Leaders on this and getting their views on them. Most of them prefer for the Guild to maintain control of all the surrounding property.

GI.n: Yes, I can see where they would. If you're booting someone from a Guild you don't want him or her to continue to own property next to you.

David Bowman: Yes. Let's say you're the mayor of a community, you've got that "rights of the individual vs. the rights of the community" conflict. Since we've deemed this to be community structures, we're probably going to go to the Guild side on this. However this goes against one of the tenets we have that if you own property, the government can't take it away from you.

GI.n: Perhaps there's compensation for it. So, if you leave a guild and lose your property you get some kind of recompense.

David Bowman: We're looking at that. That's where we're headed. We've liked to give the tools to the Guilds to manage as much of this as they can themselves because it will become quite dramatic. There is a lot of drama involved in this, we know that. But, that's also part of the excitement! This is a world, here is the property, these are the rules and here are the tools - what you build with it, what you choose to do with it we want to give to players rather than have the developers always mandate.

David Bowman: What you're describing is 100% accurate and what has occurred but let me first say it's not a "leak". It's memory accumulation. I just want to clarify that we don't have a leak, we have a problem with accumulation because the game takes all the available resources and uses them. I run the game on 256 MB of memory but if I were to say the one thing you can do to improve your performance it would be to increase memory. However, we've worked to fix a lot of the problems in the past. Logging in and out is much faster. The only time now you should see a delay when portalling is the first time you go somewhere because you have to download all of the information for that area.

We do still have memory accumulation occurring. The problem is we didn't and don't have it occurring on every single machine. So each time we'd get good data from a consumer we'd fix that one. That person becomes happy and maybe a dozen more with the same configuration - that motherboard, combined with that memory card - we have issues that come down to that arcane of a problem. We don't find the issue to be related to the quality of components or else we'd simply say "upgrade". In fact, in some cases we find the higher quality components are where we're running into the larger problems. What we're finding is specific motherboards with specific video cards cause an issue. So each time we get the information we fix the issue. We've been able to fix 95% of the reported cases - it's just so arcane that we would have never found it without the information.

The 5% I'm leaving as unfixed is related to the source code for our core rendering engine. But, it's not the source code that's it's currently compiling on because that company went out of business. So, if something happens, there are still a few examples of this, where it goes down into that core rendering system and it makes mistakes in that core rendering system - the code itself makes the mistake - it's hard for us to make workarounds for that until we can get either a new core rendering system or get the core source code. We're actually in the process of migrating to the core source code that we have. That will be the methodology that we'll solve this with. In the meantime, there's about 5% of these crashes that yes, if you are portalling between one location and another location and then a third location you'll have that issue. One of the things that aggravates the issue is textures; the more textures that we add to the world the more problems that 5% sees.

We share the players' frustration in more than one way. One, because you're a customer and you want to the play the game and we want you to be happy and you're not happy because you can't trust the game; secondly, because it is inconsistent we can't say "fix x", but the problem is these arcane interactions with such a complex system and we'll get most of them and we'll keep plugging at them until eventually they will all be gone. We'll replace that rendering system. Eventually, we're going to replace the entire client over time, we're just going to do it by module. We want better graphics performance for better machines. Ok, let's get this module - the character system has been re-written, the combat system was re-written - we seen major changes in the client side of the system. It's very stable for many customers.

Today it's a very pretty game. If you can turn on all the bells and issues it's an amazing visual experience.

David Bowman: We're talking right now with a number of publishers to see who is interested in reintroducing the product as an anniversary edition into the retail channel with all of the upgrades and we'll be adding some new content special for that. I'll let the publisher determine the retail price; however it will not be at $49.95. We know we're not going to get a lot of new customers, especially dial-up, with the download method. Our goal is to put this back into the retail channel with a nice boxed set, remastered.

GI.n: But, you'll be launching against World of Warcraft and The Matrix Online...

David Bowman: We are launched, for nearly a year!

GI.n: Ok, re-launching. But, you're not in the public consciousness.

David Bowman: Nope, we're not.

GI.n: As I mentioned before, you're hook is the Dragons and people ARE looking for that.

David Bowman: When we have a product that we don't have to apologize for; when we're proud of it to the degree that it's worth hitting customers that we would lose in the condition it's in, then we'll begin marketing. This season we're not going to compete against World of Warcraft because that's not what we're trying to do. And there are so many games delayed or even cancelled now that players will be looking for a good, unique experience.

GI.n: Speaking of cancellations, I saw Warhammer Online at the Austin Game Conference and it looked fabulous. Climax has made significant improvements in the game since E3 and were there to a) look for a publisher but b) if they can't find one, show off the engine they've created.

David Bowman: The problem is going to be if too much money is spent up front for a product, and people are looking for a fast return on that product, that will kill a lot of projects. Because it takes a long time to establish an audience - more and more it's going to take a long time to establish that audience. I look at Warhammer and think "there's a product that will launch and will attract whatever it does, and retain a percentage of them, then over the years with word of mouth it will grow to a sizeable audience. If the company is able to sustain that growth then it will survive and the audience will be happy. Customers are happy because they get a good experience they can't get elsewhere, Games Workshop is happy because they get exposure for their products - it crosses over. That's a win/win situation, if the businesses that run these understand that model.

Technology is not something that is stagnant. One of the reasons that Blizzard is so successful is because they started with their technologies and they built upon it each time. Every time they build and build. Mythic - 10 years, they build. Turbine, they build. It's surviving childhood that is the tricky part and you can take advantage of this - because you don't have to reinvest the 10's of millions that it takes to get off the ground. I wish good luck to everybody who is trying to do this; I hope every one of them succeeds because it will be better for everyone when there is more choice. And it will be better for the industry as a whole when there is more variety of both companies and developments styles/strategies.

Continue reading with Part 3 of this interview...