IGN: What was your inspiration when coming up with the backstory for Jumpgate Evolution?
Keith Baker: The process of developing the story was sort of like the current version of Battlestar Galactica. We weren’t starting from scratch; we were building on the story from the original game. We wanted to keep the core concepts, such as the three player nations and the struggle between humanity and the Conflux. But at the same time, it is a new game. The classic game didn’t have an especially deep story and much of what’s there evolved over the course of play. With JGE we want the story to be tightly tied to the game from the very beginning.
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So it was a matter of saying, “What is there that we want to keep? What are the core themes that we want to pull through? What do we re-imagine and how do we make it logical for the player from Jumpgate Classic to feel ‘OK, I can still see how the game went from here to there.’” So again, that’s why I said Battlestar Galactica. The new version is certainly not the old version, but having watched both, I can look at it and go ‘OK - I see where they’re going. I see what they’ve picked up and what they’ve changed.’
With that said, it’s different in that there is a direct line between JGC and JGE – a historical path that leads back to the classic universe. But at the same time, absolute adherence to the history of Jumpgate Classic isn’t the primary concern. We want to keep the important core ideas but still feel free to do what’s best to make a compelling story for the game.
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IGN: And what is the backstory for Jumpgate Evolution?
Keith Baker: Around a century ago, humanity, or pieces of humanity, were transported from across one side of the galaxy to where they are now in an event called The Shift. That’s the event you can look at and say that’s where we split from Jumpgate Classic. We grabbed a small group of people from the JGC universe and shifted them across space.
Prior to the Shift, humanity was split into four major nations: Octavius, Hyperial, Quantar, and Solrain. We knew about two alien cultures. The first is Amananth – but as far as we know, the only remnant of Amananth is an automated station in human space. You could trade with it, but there was little information about where it came from or who the Amananth were. The second alien force was the Conflux, which appeared and launched a wave of brutal attacks on the human nations. The Conflux doesn’t communicate, doesn’t explain their aggression. We don’t know why they’re attacking. We don’t know what they want. And then at a critical point in the conflict between humanity and Conflux, the Amananth station sends emits this big energy wave that just zaps certain elements - a battlefleet here, space station here, actual small colony here - and just flings them across the galaxy. Some people believe they did that to try and save us. A sort of Noah’s Ark; the Conflux was going to destroy us, and this was programmed as a last resort to try to save us. While others - Octavian primarily - says no, Amananth feared that we were winning this war and our power was growing too great, and they did this to try and handicap us.
The net result is humanity thrown into this new area, with the jumpgate network broken. It’s a space they don’t know. The nations have lost lines of support, communication networks, access to agricultural planets, and so on. It’s a huge upheaval.
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IGN: So all four nations were flung?
Keith Baker: Yes, but separated. Previously they’d all been working together against the Conflux because they had Jumpgate networks bringing them all together. But now they were scattered: the Solrain planets are here, here, and here in these three sectors, which at sub-light speeds aren’t even connected to each other, let alone to the Octavian sector over there. It took a while for people to rebuild new jumpgates, to get jumpgates connected. And then to reunite with their own people and to rediscover relations with the other nations. So you had some conflicts, and some wars between nations, especially between Octavius and Solrain. And you had some changes in the general flavor of the nations. So with Octavius, which was always a very militant force, most of the people who were brought over in the shift were soldiers. And so today they are even more of a heavily militarized society because that’s what they had as a base to build up from.
With Solrain, which in previous Jumpgate Classic was actually a relatively idealistic society, a very mercantile but idealistic nation, there what you had was essentially major corporations and major criminal organizations, some of which are very closely linked, ended up being the people that had control of the resources after the Shift. That’s changed the flavor of the nation, because now these are the forces in power. Solrain is definitely a darker force, but there’s a factions within them trying to bring back the ideals of the old Solrain.
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What you have is essentially more of a frontier feeling. We’ve managed to rebuild some level of our old society but there’s still so much of this space around that we don’t know. In Jumpgate Classic, we had thousands of years of history. Here we don’t. We’re still creating jumpgates out to unknown sectors of space because we’ve only had jumpgate technology, again, for the last 30 years. And we still don’t know why we were sent here. And what we’re finding are things like ancient wreckage from an ancient war, like perhaps this was where the Amananth originally came from. But if so, they’re not here now. So what happened? Why’d they bring us here? And now, it seems the Conflux is coming back. Have they found us?
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And there’s other threats around that are emerging. Again, it’s we’re on the edge of space. We’re trying to carve out a place in it, but there are a lot of mysteries in this universe. This isn’t where our civilization was born. You can sort of look at it to say Star Trek Voyager, where the point is they aren’t in the Federation. They’re thrown across the galaxy and everything out there is mysterious and unknown. We’ve got some security, we’ve marked out this section of space as Solrain space and this section as Octavian space but we don’t know what’s over here. And when it comes to building jumpgates, the idea is that you find a jump point and you send a ship through and it can then a thread a gate back to that point. You have no idea what’s on the other side. And a lot of times, you’ll send a ship through and it just won’t come back. Who knows what happened.
This is backstory; at the moment, we aren’t planning to have players establish new jumpgates through in-game action. But the general flavor of the universe is that there’s dangers out there that we don’t know about and we’re still finding that out. And meanwhile you do have tensions between the nations and within the nations. So within Octavius, you have a faction who feels that we should be conquering the weaker forces. ‘For the security of all, we need to establish our Octavian order.’ You have a force that feels no, we should defend ourselves, that’s important, but right now we need security and if that means working with other people, that’s what we need to do. There are more dangerous threats out there. And you have the reliquarians, who are basically just historians who are trying to find and preserve the relics of Octavian society, because again we don’t have much of our history, it’s been lost in the Shift. So trying to preserve that but also in a sense, trying to explore the history of the Edge here. What is this wreckage we are finding? Who was here before us? Why’d we get brought here? These are mysteries that will be uncovered as you go through the game.
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IGN: You mentioned four factions?
Keith Baker: Solrain, Quantar and Octavius are the three player nations at the start. There is a fourth nation called Hyperial and essentially they were a more major nation in Jumpgate Classic but in Jumpgate Evolution, they are just sort of present. A Hyperial station was brought through in the Shift, but not as much of the Hyperial people were brought so they are no longer a major faction at this point, but they still exist as sort of an interesting little side-piece, a minor player. You have the Conflux out there. You have a few unknown forces that I don’t want to name just yet. You also have pirates. You have aggressive factions within the nations that exist.
I look at the Quantar as something akin to the Jedi, something akin to the Fremen from Dune. They are a very spiritual culture. Octavius is a very militant, disciplined culture, based on the Romanesque model, the legion structure. They are all about order, discipline and military force. Solrain is more of a corporate society. They’ve gone from being the carefree, mercantile swashbucklers to this darker, more sinister corporate/criminal organization. But then they have, within that, on the edge of that, the people who are trying to live outside of that and fight against it – smugglers, rebels, and other independents.
The Quantar are the most mystical, spiritual and, again, I say Fremen or Jedi, because while they pursue a spiritual tradition, they aren’t religious fanatics. They try to attune themselves to the universe. They are very individualistic and they don’t like to actually live on planets. They believe that humanity is mean to travel among the stars and that the Shift is actually a sacred event. This is the next stage of human evolution bringing us to where we need to be. The Octavians are all about squad tactics, stick together, work together, whereas the Quantar are very much the independent, follow your own path, find your own destiny sort. But you do have Quantar who do believe that they are made to be predators, and that it is their destiny to fight other nations. You have Octavians who are the aggressors, you also have Quantar who prey on other people and even in Solrain, you have the criminal factions that are more aggressive.
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IGN: So the idea is that no matter who you want to align with ideologically, players can play the style they want to?
Keith Baker: That’s exactly the idea. The general philosophy is a role-playing hook, but we’re not going to come to you and say, hey, you’re an Octavian, you shouldn’t be going off alone. But we’re saying that this is sort of how they fit in that, and it will somewhat be reflected by their ships. Each nation will likely have things they are the best at. If you absolutely want to have the heaviest weapons you can possibly get, that’s an Octavian thing. So it’s a roleplaying guideline with some long-term mechanical impact. But within that, we do want to say, within that basic concept, you can still choose ‘Am I a hero? Am I a villain? Am I pursuing more of an exploration, academic path? Where do I want to be on that spectrum?’
Similarly that means, if I’m a Solrain, I have to worry about Octavian attacks, because even if not all Octavians are aggressive, the aggressive factions will be sending forces against us that we’ll have to deal with. And all of this set against the backdrop of the Conflux and the greater threats out there.
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IGN: How much of the whole experience is going to be scripted?
Keith Baker: I should emphasize that I’m the story designer, not a mechanical designer. With that said, we’re walking a path between having certain scripted storylines where major things play out and ideally, where each player does get to feel that they are playing through their story. We’re not necessarily saying that one player gets to change the universe for everyone. But when you play through a path, I’d like you to like you are the hero of the moment. And to that end, we have certain storylines that are fully scripted.
Then we’re also working on making a very flexible, dynamic system to generate ongoing events and activities. And there are also mechanisms being set up for player conflict. So resources to compete over… if that’s something you want to do. If you are interested in PvP play, there’s a whole sort of arena, and by that I don’t mean a literal arena, but there’s a whole level of the game for you to get involved in that will give you benefits and enhance your play but at the same time, someone else can just say “I’m just not interested in that. I’m staying away from those sectors.” You can still play the game and not have that be a problem.
One of the things tied into that goes the idea that these people can help each other. There will be certain types of resources and such that are more useful to PvP players than to other players. And so the idea is ‘Oh, if I’m a non PvP player going through these sectors, I can try and acquire these resources and sell them to PvP players because they are of no use to me, but they are useful for you.’
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IGN: What will the individual player’s experience be like? How will it begin?
Keith Baker: I don’t want to get too specific, but we’re really trying to make you feel like you are part of the story right from the start. The beginning is a scripted experience. So perhaps you find the wreckage of a station that was your home, but was recently destroyed by pirates. Now you got to track the pirates and find out where’d they come from, who is backing them, and can you get vengeance? Along the way, learning more about the Conflux, and essentially to have it feel like you’re the hero of the movie. And the fact of the matter is I’m doing this, you come in an hour later, potentially if you are the same faction, you are going to get some of the same story, but we still want it to feel as compelling for you as it does for me. Yeah, the fact is we both did it. But it’s a starting point – and it sets up the choices that will make a difference in the future.
If you can solve the initial problems, you’ll get some of the major factions within your nation contacting you, saying ‘you’re showing some promise.’ Looking to Solrain, you’re going to have the major corporations saying, ‘you know you could make good money working for us.’ The crime lords are going to say ‘yeah, you look like you could handle yourself; you want to break some heads, come over here.’ And the rebels say ‘do what’s right, you know what’s best, come on our side.’ And you know at that point, you are going to have to make a choice that will then affect what sort of missions and things you are going to get from that point on. Which of these groups, if any, are you going to sign up with? If you sign up with the rebels, now you are setting yourselves against the corporate forces. And vice versa. While everybody’s up against the Conflux and groups of pirates and things like that.
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IGN: How much of the backstory is finished?
Keith Baker: We have the skeleton and we’re still fleshing it out. We’ve planned the backstory and we’ve planned sort of the story arc through what could easily be, look to the Burning Crusade for WoW, 2 or 3 of that style of expansion. New threats that will appear. As I’ve said, we’ve got the Conflux returning, we’ve got these other mysteries to find. Each of these things are things that could serve as a critical expansion point. Here’s the expansion at which we discover this, we uncover the mystery of what this is about and have deal with the threat that it poses and in the process, dealing with new sectors of space, dealing with new options that become available at that time. I know exactly why the Shift happened, what’s going on here, what the Conflux are about. Some of that hasn’t been completely written down on paper yet; that’s what I’m doing now.
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IGN: So somewhere down the line, we’ll learn why the shift happened?
Keith Baker: Yes. And again, the goal is to set that up so it’s interesting, even if you are not there at that exact moment; you can come in on later and still find it to be a compelling story. The way I look at it is Babylon 5, where each season had a sort of new flavor. The second season, you get the Shadows lingering and the tensions between the Centauri and the Narn and then the third season is all about fighting Shadows and the fourth season is all about fighting Earth.
It’s sort of like that. We’ve got our major acts drawn out. Here’s this act and the conclusion of that will logically open up the next one. When we get to the bottom of one mystery, it gives us the information to open up the next mystery, but at the same time, this danger is still there for the new players who come in. They still have the path to follow, so it’s not just ‘you missed out on all that good stuff.’ And part of the thing that makes it easy with Jumpgate is that it is a space game and sectors are connected by jumpgates. So it’s very easy to say that if you don’t buy the expansion, you can’t go through these gates and your section of the universe makes perfect sense.
This is a frontier universe. We’re expanding the universe as we go. Oh, we punch through into what we think is a new area and discover it’s actually an inhabited area with its own network of jumpgates that has all these things going on that we didn’t even realize. The Conflux, they are coming to us and they have their own home sectors that we just haven’t found yet. That’s the kind of thing where stumbling into that could certainly open up a whole new plot line to run through.
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IGN: So talk more about the Amananth and their space station that starts all of this.
Keith Baker: There was an automated station that was sort of a relic of the Amananth. You could buy things from it in Jumpgate Classic. It’s sort of just an oddity. What we’re saying is at some point, it triggers this event and brings us to what appears to have once been the center of a huge Amananth civilization that has now collapsed. You’ll find these ghost sectors with Amananth relics. These are things that people want to acquire and also those are the sectors with the highest concentration of Conflux and things like that. So the question is what is the relationship? Did the Conflux destroy Amananth long ago? If that’s the case, why did they bring us here now? Did the Conflux bring us here now? Why did the shift happen? What’s up with the Conflux and is this a threat we can deal with? If it is, what happens next? We’ve got multiple acts planned out.
IGN: Sounds exciting! Thank you so much for talking with us Keith. lord of the rings gold
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