Q&A: Ted Price CEO Insomniac on online gaming

GamePro's Vicious Sid recently sat down with the CEO of Insomniac Games, Ted Price, to talk about Resistance: Fall of Man and the state of online gaming.

For more on the state of online gaming, check out GamePro's 7 Ways to Save Online Gaming with extensive interviews from the industry's leading developers in online gaming including Bungie, Insomniac, Treyarch, and DICE.

GamePro: What would you say the biggest problems plaguing online games on consoles are today?

Ted Price: Controls are something I think people complain about. We spent a lot of time making sure our controls were good and solid because when you go from a PC shooter to a console shooter it's such a different paradigm, and people expect the kind of fine control you get on a PC in a console first-person shooter. As a result, we did a lot of analysts, we did a lot of test, and we ended up with control that we think is conducive to a fast-paced multiplayer game and works well. It's also completely customizable. So if you want to change the speed at which your camera moves or remap all your buttons, you can do that to your hearts content.

Number two, lag and frame rate. It's always challenging to create a complex online fps with a lot of moving parts in the environment and make sure that everything is synced up, and I think our online team did an amazing job of getting it right without lag or frame rate problems. That was also the result of many, many months of testing where our QA and Sony's QA played 40-player matches all the time. I mean they did crazy things like get into corners and all fire the same weapon at each other at once for 20 minutes at a time just to isolate the problems and improve the frame rate so it would remain solid for normal games.

GP: What is the natural frame rate at which Resistance operates online?

PRICE: It runs at a consistent 30fps, and if you are playing it in progressive it looks really smooth. What we did was start at 60fps and slowly added breakable stuff in the environment, more special effects into the environment, we pushed the player count up from 32 to 40, and we knew that if we did that we wouldn't be at a consistent 60. We might be at 50 sometimes, sometimes 40, but we wanted to make sure by all means we stayed at or above 30.

GP: For online shooters, Deathmatch and Capture the Flag are still the standbys, do you think developers should focus more on coming up with new, creative modes for online games?

PRICE: I think that people clamor for the old favorites, there's no question about it. Because they're easy to get into, they don't require any manuals to figure out what's going on. Deathmatch, I can't imaging that in the future any big first-person shooter will not contain deathmatch because, at its very core, it is just fun to go out and shoot your buddy and not have any overarching goals. But at the same time to create different flavors for players is important if you're going to be putting out new games, and that's what we tried to do with the Conversion, Breach, and Meltdown modes in Resistance.

GP: So you'd advise developers to come up with some interesting twists and new, creative modes?

PRICE: It depends on the game. A lot of franchises have survived on the meat and potatoes of online gameplay simply because they have great level design, balanced classes, in our case, we've put really cool weapons in which makes any mode fun. So I wouldn't want to give advice on one way or the other, every developer has his or her way of designing.

GP: Another thing we hear a lot of online games is they are not accessible enough, what do you think developers can do to make things more accessible?

PRICE: That's kind of a nice lead in for me in terms of matchmaking. We spent a lot of time making sure our matchmaking would work well in that if you are someone getting into the game for the first time and don't want to get your ass kicked, you go into a ranked game and it will match you against other people with the same rank. If you are an expert you don't want to play against people who are just getting into the game for the first time either, so you are going to get matched against people with the same level. That was important to us from the very beginning. We aren't the first developer to do it, obviously, but it's a great way to equalize things for players.

[Insomniac's marketing director, Ryan Schneider, adds more detail]: It's one thing not to want to own n00bs, but how we try to discourage that type of behavior through the way we structure our ranked games.

PRICE: People can see your stats, so if you're the type of guy that quits out of games because you get frustrated when you're behind and say, 'Screw these guys, I'm outta here,' we track that and it's very visible on your stat sheet and anyone can go check out your stats. And so if you're the kind of person that does that all the time, people are going to know it, it'll be very clear. We don't allow team kills in ranked games, so that's not much of an issue. But, we also let people set up ignore list, so if they're frustrated with a particular player who is mouthing off, they can self-regulate.

[Insomniac's marketing director, Ryan Schneider, adds more detail]: One of the other important things to online gaming is community, and it's about extending your experience. In general, it's important you create an environment that extends the experience. I think that's where online is heading in general. It's not just about what you do inside the console, it's how you extend that out into your regular world and the friends, and connections that you make as well. So that's what myresistance.net is. It's the essential franchise, community-gathering point for all things Resistance. So in addition to it being a place where you can track stats and view all the stats that Ted was just talking about. Eventually, you'll be able to blog there, clan-blog there, manage your own photo gallery, and custom manage content. That's what everyone wants now, they want to be able to customize there experience and share it with there friends. So that's what we are doing with myresistance.net, and I think that will, hopefully, encourage how people play the game because not only do you get to show off what you are doing with the ribbons and your profile, but at the same time if you are a putz in how you play the game, people are going to see that too.

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