MPQ Developer Q&A #1 October - Answer Time!

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

Welcome to the first Marvel Puzzle Quest Community-Developer Q&A!

Members of the MPQ community had many insightful questions for the development team at Demiurge. Here now are the answers to a hearty batch of questions. We hope you enjoy reading and that you find many interesting bits of information below. If your exact question wasn't addressed - please remember that we'll be holding these Question and Answer sessions on a monthly basis for the foreseeable future. You'll have the opportunity to make further inquiries for our November session very soon.

Thanks to everyone in the community who submitted questions and thanks to the team at Demiurge for taking time out of their busy schedules to let us probe their minds. Read on!

Q: When will Loki, Doom, Ragnarok, and Bullseye get third covers?

A: “When” questions are super tough question to answer because they’re often out of our hands. We have first parties that need to approve our game, we have external events that pop up, and many other things that will constantly force us to shift priorities around. We love being able to directly answer questions, but “When” is a hard thing to stick a pin on, and we hate to disappoint.

To go back to the original question, they are on the list, but we’d rather make new characters instead of adding to old ones. Adding third abilities is difficult because it often requires reducing the effectiveness of the character in some other way to compensate for the improvements, and that’s not fun for the character.

Q: When will there be an event with times more fair for EU players?

A: We have a feature in the works that will hopefully address EU players’ concerns, and go even further than that to help out all players. Stay tuned.

Q: Can the AP costs of the most overpriced powers be lowered? Some powers in the game are almost impossible to use.

A: Part of the fun of making a live game is that you learn a lot about the game as you are still making it. Back when we were designing characters before the game went live, we thought that truly powerful characters like Iron Man (Model 40) would benefit fictionally and strategically from having expensive abilities that could turn the tide of battle even if they were used once per fight. Over time, we’ve learned that’s it’s not as fun to have to save up large amounts of AP to use a power compared to faster, more interesting powers. However, we think that there’s a place for “overpriced” powers, though we’d like them to be more spread out.

Rest assured that these lessons learned are taken into consideration when designing new characters and powers, and when considering which characters needs adjustments. As always, we appreciate hearing from our players which powers they think are over- and under-costed.

Q: Will Daredevil get a buff? I really liked the X-Force buff. When can we expect to see the same treatment for Invisible Woman? Will the characters that most need a buff get any help?

A: We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on characters people think are over and under powered. When we’re making characters we try our best to ensure they’re all about the same power-level, but there’s no way to tell 100% for sure until it’s released to the players.

Right now we’re prioritizing making new characters, new events, and other new content for the game. But yes, we’re aware that certain characters could use some attention and we’ll try to get to them soon.

Q: Are there any new game modes planned for the future?

A: Yup

Fine, fine, we’re not going to spill the beans but we’ll provide a few more details. Our next game mode will premiere alongside a new storyline this year, and it’ll really test your mettle.

Q: Is there any plans on the table for a Windows Phone version of MPQ?/Will MPQ ever be available on the Amazon app-store? I'd love to play this on my Kindle.

A: There are all kinds of considerations here. Each first party has their own certification process. We like everybody to be on the same server, which means that everybody needs to have access to new versions at the same time. Adding new platforms makes that more complicated; it’s a shame to have to hold up platforms X and Y because platform Z hasn’t been approved by its first party. This is not a great reason to withhold the game from players on certain platforms, but it’s an unfortunate reality of the industry. We’re doing our best to bring the game to the most people.

Q: Is there landscape mode or more tablet friendly option on the horizon?

A: Making video games is really hard, and sometimes, it’s for stupid reasons. You may think that a tablet landscape mode would be easy because we have landscape mode working on PC. But there are some tricky problems. For one, making a game for mice is very different from making a game for touch. We rely on mouseover tool tips on the PC version; how do you do that with touch? For another, most people who play tablet games expect the UI to flip from portrait to landscape orientations on the fly. Our screens can be initialized to one or the other, but they aren’t designed to flip between them on the fly. It would take a considerable amount of engineering effort to reprogram all of our screens to do this.

I, myself, am an avid tablet user, but the amount of developer effort into making a tablet friendly version of the game is frustratingly great. Frankly, we’d rather give our players a new game mode or a new play mechanic. So, it is on our giant list of things we’d like to do, but there are other really cool things ahead of it.

Q: How do you determine which characters you plan on creating and releasing? What factors go into deciding which character the development staff chooses to focus their work on?

A: We look at a number of things: fan demand, current events, and what we think would be most fun to play. Everyone on the team here loves Marvel so it’s always a mix of those things that informs which characters get selected.

Q: I'd like to hear the developers' thoughts about characters with only two powers. Were they intended to be less powerful than characters with three powers, or just different? Most of them are villains. Is there a thematic reason for this?

A: They were intended to be just different.

In the early phases of the game’s design, before we ran our first events in internal testing and discovered how much more fun they made everything, we were building a more linear experience. We gave some characters, mostly ones who were slated to appear regularly as enemies earlier in the game, fewer abilities as part of tuning the game’s learning curve.

Even as the game shifted toward being more event-driven and open-ended, and we relinquished control over exactly when you’d first encounter a character, we thought that this could be an interesting wrinkle - some characters with a lower level cap and fewer, typically somewhat stronger abilities alongside other characters with three somewhat weaker abilities and a higher level cap.

Our opinion after playing the game this way for a year and a half, and watching others do so, is that this wrinkle adds more confusion and complication than it adds awesomeness. So when we have the opportunity to, we’ve been very slowly adding third powers to characters.

This is slow going because, for many of these characters, like we saw with Daken, the two existing abilities often need to be rebalanced in order to make room for a third, and we want to be cautious when we’re changing things that players have already earned. And when deciding how to spend our development time, it’s often the case that putting effort into a new character or feature adds more to the game than revisiting an existing character.

Q: Will you revisit the trap mechanism?/ Any thoughts to reworking traps?

A: Yeah, Trap tiles are one of those features that we think have unrealized potential. We’re in the paper design phase for a new character, coming out in December, who uses traps in a fresh way (though that design isn’t final).

We’re also hoping to revisit Daredevil and his traps while he’s out of rotation. (All the usual caveats about schedules being hard to predict apply here - it’s not the change on our to-do list that does the most to make the game better, so we can’t 100% predict the timing at this point.)

There’s an implied question here about whether the way Trap tiles work will change in order to improve their balance and feel. We usually try to adjust numbers first, the behavior of powers second, and fundamental mechanics last - it’s very hard to effectively communicate to players that the way a tile type works has fundamentally changed, and the engineering necessary to change the behavior of a tile type is more risky and requires more lead time than changing the data that drives powers. We’re hopeful that it’s possible to use numbers and changes to powers to make Daredevil’s traps more satisfying without changing the way Trap tiles work, but since we haven’t actually done the work yet, we’re not 100% sure of that.

Q: Are there any plans to change the mechanics of PvP so that it's not all about who can repeatedly win 2-3 battles in the shortest amount of time? Instead of it being all about speed, speed, speed, I'd prefer to see you put the "puzzle" back into Puzzle Quest.

A: It’s really difficult to make games for people who can only afford to spend a little bit of time, and people who can play all the time. We don’t think we have this balance perfected; we’ve tried a lot of different methods to make it fair, from matchmaking to “rubber banding” to instanced leaderboards. We know it doesn’t work for everybody, but we think it works for most people. We pay a lot of attention to the reports from players who aren’t happy with the current situation, but there are no easy fixes out there. Suffice it to say that we know it’s not perfect, and we always want to make it better.

Q: Has there been any thought given to forming a test group on a dedicated test server of players to playtest changes before they go live?

A: Yes, we’d love to do that! Being able to harness the enthusiasm and feedback of the community would be a great help to our development efforts. However, anything that involves server work raises a big red flag in our risk-aversive brains. It’s hard enough keeping a live game running without adding complexities like a test server. We’re a small, agile team, and we’d rather focus our efforts on adding value to the game for all players. It’s true that the added benefits of playtesting are great, but it’s a hard tradeoff to make when we can spend that developer effort in making the next game mode or feature.

If ever comes the time when our servers are running perfectly and we feel that our players are totally happy with the game as it is, we will start building the infrastructure needed for a test server. Until then, we’re going to be taking creative risk to try to make the game better, even if it means we try things that might not work out. And if it doesn’t work out (trap tiles), we’ll try to make them better on the next go around!