During our time at PAX we had the chance to talk with NetDevil President, Scott Brown about what the team has been doing, where they're at and when players can expect to play the game.

Back in May we broke the news that Jumpgate Evolution had been officially delayed and since then, further developments have been few and far between. During our time at PAX we had the chance to talk with NetDevil President, Scott Brown about what the team has been doing, where they're at and when players can expect to play the retail version of the game. Unfortunately Scott mentioned that it's probably impossible to ship in 2009, but rather early 2010.

In addition to the fore mentioned topics in our interview, Scott mentioned their commitment to work with the UI modding community to make sure that JGE players will have plenty of choices when it comes to their user interface. Someone remind me to inform Dolby of our sister site, MMOUI.

ZAM: What is the biggest reason you decided to delay the game and go back to the drawing board?

Scott Brown: It's all based on player feedback. We started our focus testing with a few hundred friends and family testers. They came back with a lot of stuff they really liked, like the game ran well and it looked really good, but there were just some certain things about it that weren't immersive; the game didn't feel epic. Of course, epic was really our goal, so we went back to the drawing board on mission systems, special effects, A.I. especially - did a lot of work there - to really bring the level of immersion up.

ZAM: What are some of the things that you improved? I saw that the A.I. had been redone. What specifically did you redo?

Scott: The A.I. is one of the biggest changes. You'll notice when they're flying around now, they fly even better in groups and they act in certain behaviours that way. They also evade better. So when you attack the A.I., you'll see them try to shake your missile off, etc. We did a lot of work on the A.I. The mission system did a bit of a revamp. We started out like most MMOs, where you read a paragraph and go do something, and that was sort of the mission system. And that just didn't flow right for our kind of game, so we looked at other space games and space TV shows and thought about how they flowed. If you think about things like Battlestar Galactica, it's not like "go out and kill two guys," right? It's "We need you to go out on a patrol," and then while they're on the patrol, they might come across something and they'll be like "hey, that's weird, can you go scan that for us?" And following that, it's like "Okay, based on those readings, we've learned the location of the pirate base or something." Then you'll fly over there and fight them, and then it's like "We need you to collect some data recorders from the pirates so that we can bring that information back and we can do something with it." That's kind of more the way it flows, so you'll get little bits and pieces along the way. And it's also a little more interesting; instead of telling you the story of what this mission's going to be in the beginning, you kind of don't know what it is. As you're flying along, you sort of learn what's going on with the mission. And the best side effect of it is that people are actually reading this. Because typically, almost nobody was reading the missions. They were just collecting missions, going off and doing them and turning them all in and not really reading any of it. And in doing it this way, people actually read it and know the picture and stuff, which is really, really cool.

ZAM: What kind of feedback are you getting right now in the beta? I mean, after these changes, are people really receptive to it? Is the jury still out, or are you still getting feedback about where you need to improve other aspects of the game?

Scott: We haven't put most of this out yet. The mission system, in particular, we have put out, and people really like it. And people are saying stuff like, "Oh I never knew there were these guys in the game!" even though they've always been in the game, it's just that nobody reads the text, or so few of them do. We’ve had a little bit of feedback on that. But most of the other changes, the A.I., the sound, none of those have been exposed to them yet.  Fingers crossed that this is the one that gets over the hump.

ZAM: We just had a fan walk by, play the game, walk past us and say, "game looks great, controls are awesome, it plays like Descent." That has to feel good. Is that what you're kind of going for with JGE?

Scott: Absolutely. We want to of bring back the feeling and experience that I think has  been lost from the gaming world, that all of those awesome games like Descent, and Freespace, and Wing Commander and X-Wing versus Tie Fighter all had. You felt like you were flying a spaceship, you were in the cockpit. Nothing has delivered that experience in a long time, and that's absolutely the experience we want players to have with this.

ZAM: Now you've talked a little bit about the UI that you've improved, have you now fully committed to supporting the mod community?

Scott: Yeah what we're doing is making our UI all out of flash, so it should be very easy for players to make their own Flash UI modules for the game and just use them. I don't know if we'll have it at launch or shortly after, but we'll have a whole write-up, like, "here's how you do it and here are the variables that are exposed." We'll have a little trainer, because certainly a strong community mod will always be better than what we do. We're going to build for the best new user experience, a lot like, say, World of Warcraft is, not the best in-game raid experience. So that's where the players can come in, building those higher level, later game mods.

ZAM: One thing I've always been curious about: it's a huge, vast void of space, how many servers will you have? Will it just be one massive server with the entire population, or will you have multiple servers with crazy limits for populations?

Scott: We're going to do multiple servers. How many players per server is what the beta will tell us. I don't think it will be so much of a technical limitation. Certainly one server would be a technical limitation, but what we want to find is the right number of players. I don't want 100 players to every A.I., but I also don't want, "I never run into another player." So far, a few hundred players in a map at the same time feels about right. If we have even numbers across the universe, we'll have at least fifty maps, if not more. If you do the math there, we'll have about 5,000 players or something like that.

ZAM: You mentioned earlier that you're not going to be doing instances at all, and all of the group content will be public questing the way that Warhammer Online did. Can you tell us a little bit about how this will work?

Scott: Sure. The big difference between what we're doing and what Warhammer does with Public Quests is that we don't make a big deal out of it. It's not like "Hey, you're on a public quest!" and "Hey! You guys all did it! You won!" It's more like you come across things. What we call it internally is 'soft grouping,' I don't know if that's a good name or not, but the idea is that you just group up with people nearby automatically. So, if we're on a mission - and it doesn't even need to be a boss - and we're killing guys in the same area at the same time, it will automatically share the kills between us while we're out there. We want seeing other players to be a good thing and not a bad thing.

ZAM: Well, we've definitely given you guys a lot of praise for pushing the game back and listening to players. It's kind of a breath of fresh air as far as MMOs are concerned. But now that you have the feedback and a good idea of what you need to fix, have you either committed to a new launch date, or do you at least have an idea of when you'd like to launch? Q1 of 2010, for example.

Scott: The short answer is that we want to launch as soon as we can, right? I don't think there's any way we can make it this year. It's going to take some time to sort of ramp up. The reality is, as soon as we get through friends and family and they like it, I think the opinion of a few hundred people is probably very similar to the opinion of a few thousand or tens of thousands. So as soon as we get them happy, I think we'll know that we're ready, and we'll just really quickly go through the other stages of closed beta and on.

ZAM: Realistically speaking, would you say Q1 2010 is probably a good time frame?

Scott: That's a good guess, certainly. To be honest with you, there is, literally, not a date, but that's a pretty good guess. It's what I'd like to do, certainly, and it's what all of our backers really want us to do. As much as we want to push and keep making it better, I think developers always want to push and make it better. It’s publisher support that's key. Now that we're part of that bigger company, they get it. Only great games sell, and there are no shortcuts. They want us to launch soon too, but they believe in quality first, so that's exciting.

ZAM: You've taken all this extra time to do development, and I'm sure you've had some extra time to think about business too. Have you guys thought about, or at least come to a concrete subscription model?

Scott: It's going to be subscription.

ZAM: Will micro-transactions play a part in the game?

Scott: Not a lot. We have some interesting ideas about what we might do with that, but I think we're just going to do straight subscription.

ZAM: What about regular versions, collector's editions?

Scott: There will be multiple editions available.

ZAM: Will it be available via digital download as well?

Scott: Yes. I love Steam and I think everybody does, really. The only question I don't know is whether it will be Steam day one or no. It's just retail pressure - they don't want you to do that - but I buy everything on Steam, so I really want our stuff to be on Steam as well. And Direct2Drive, we'll support that too. So, yeah, all the various online services will be supported at some point.

ZAM: Great. Thank you as always for talking with us.

Scott: Thank you!

Andrew "Tamat" Beegle
Editor-in-Chief
ZAM.com