Intrinsic Interactive

I'm pleased to share a recent interview I did with Brett Belanger from Intrinsic Interactive, who are working on an upcoming "MOBA RPG" called Avengard.

Brett is the Game Director, and shares his thoughts about the team's extensive plans for character customisation, supporting both top-down and third-person cameras, and how the MOBA and RPG genres can entwine.

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Nice to be here talking with you!

I've been a really hardcore gamer for my entire life! That's gone all the way back, from the good old days of Call of Duty on the Xbox 360. I was a really competitive gamer. I got really into MOBAs as well. That's where that started, with DotA.

Heroes of the Storm is especially a very popular one of mine, but I never really liked that top-down look so I started moving into SMITE. And SMITE really inspired me: "Wow, this is such a fun and engaging way to play a game!" It's very strategic, it's very competitive.

I was also a big RPG player: I played a lot of Skyrim, of course, Oblivion, World of Warcraft, going all the way back. I actually started developing a RPG for my brother for his birthday. And so I was going ahead and doing that, and I got really interested in the whole game development aspect of everything.

And it led to, "Okay, well, can I do this? Is this something that is reasonable to do?"

I started learning about game dev myself; got into game design and everything. And since then, it's been developing Avengard. It's really a first title project for us. As I said, I did develop games for my brother but they weren't published for anybody, it was a personal project.

Now we're working with the team here that we got, I started recruiting a bunch of people and have a really talented team working with us trying to make this happen. So that's kind of been the journey, I guess!

It really came down to again, passions with RPGs, passions with the ability to jump into a game and play however you want to play. To me, that was always my favourite game mechanic: that "unlimited possibility".

It happens a lot with Skyrim specifically. You can run around with two axes in your hands and beat people up with those, or you can start shooting magic from a staff, or you can be a thief in the night with the bow and arrow; there's just countless different ways that you can go ahead and play.
When I jumped over to SMITE, that's when I became a big MOBA player.

There's not a single hero inside SMITE that I can really truly say is a perfect fit for me. My favourite was always Artemis, Arachne... those are some of my favourite characters. But there were always just one ability I didn't like, or there was always just some stats that I wish I could tweak slightly, or I didn't like the way they looked.

Then all of that kind of started resonating with "Well, why not?" "Why can't I make them be who I want them to be?" If it's such a popular RPG mechanic, why don't we take something like that and put it into this MOBA world?

League of Legends and other popular MOBAs have such interesting worlds and they talk about so much lore, but you don't feel truly invested in it because it's not you.

I really wanted to dive into that and push into that, that this whole game isn't about mastering heroes, this game is about mastering yourself and your own playstyles. That's why we're pushing so hard into this character editor.

Ideally, the character customization is going to be limitless. As of now we're looking at... it's near infinite, we're looking at over four septillion options so far. That's a big number! We did a lot of math, we googled how many zeros that would be!

It's a lot of options. We're looking at things from being able to choose all the different mechanics of the face, what colour eyes you have, what kind of hair you're going to have, your name, your personality.

All of our characters are voiced. We've removed the MOBA announcer; your character announces for you in its place. There's a lot of different voices to choose from; you can create a happy-go-lucky character with a certain type of voice if you want.

Every single voice actor has voiced three different types of characters. That way, if you like the voice but you don't like the personality, there's always a way to change that.

Then we go down into height and weight, and whether you're a righty or a lefty, this is something that we're working on at the moment. You're able to completely change what kind of armour you're wearing, the different types of clothing options, and then different types of skins on top of those.

From there, every ability is interchangeable so you can pull different abilities out and plug them in.

Stats is another thing that we wanted to really push to people. If you want to be a tank, you can increase your health, you can increase all these all these different variables and statistics that allow you to really play exactly how you want to play.

Yes. Hitbox will change depending on the size of the character. Height less so, only because you know how MOBAs tend to be, they're a little less free-range than a first person shooter would be.

Weight will definitely affect the hitbox, and with it comes a lot of limitations and advantages as well. Both sides kind of balance each other out; balancing is going to be a big part of everything that we're doing here. It's definitely a primary focus.

This is a competitive game, whereas World of Warcraft can be very PvE. We do want to make sure that everything stays fair and balanced.

When you see a character from down-lane approaching you, you really need to understand: "Is this a tanky character?", "Is somebody who can do high damage?", "Is this a fast character?" You really need to understand exactly what to expect, just like you would with any other MOBA.

When you see, for instance, Artemis or any of these other characters you immediately know their abilities, you know how to counter them.

Everything we do appearance-wise is actually connected to the stats. So while stats are customizable, there are going to be some limitations as far as what you can and cannot do. The heavier you are, the heavier armour you have, and in turn you're giving up some stuff as well, such as movement speed.

Exactly. Right. We really wanted to make sure that's as readable as possible, we think that's a huge part of a MOBA, being able to know what to do and how to counter it.

We are anticipating inclusion of a top-down camera as well. There's a lot of design and balancing things that we're still working out, but we do very much think it's possible and we do very much intend on doing that.

As I said, Avengard is really going to be the game where you can play however you want to play. We want to give people as many options as possible. We think we have a plan in place where we can essentially make both camera angle decisions fair.

We don't want to limit the League of Legends fans, and we don't want to limit the SMITE and Paragon fans, we want to really bring everybody together in a way that has never been done before.

We've tried to stay pretty close to what the MOBA genre expects: the three lanes, two jungles, the jungle creeps and everything.

One major change is when you enter the jungle, we've designed the jungle paths to lead you into these larger areas that are in the center of the level.

We're strongly encouraging team fighting; we want to make sure that's something that can happen frequently. So we've designed the level in a way where there's a lot of choke points, there's a lot of pinching going on, everybody's pushed into these particular areas.

But as far as taking direct inspiration, we don't have anything specific that we're trying to learn from the other MOBA games. We think the level design itself has been tried and true in the last decade, plus.

We've definitely taken heavy consideration into making this as true of an RPG as possible while keeping it an online competitive game.

One of the inclusions is actually quests, it's going to be a way to quickly level up your characters and your players. You can accept different quests from NPCs, these will allow the player to kill 10 of this jungle creep, and then you're able to return to the NPC to gain experience, gold, things to help further level up your character. That's something that's very common and almost required inside of an RPG.

On top of that, one thing we didn't really love about MOBA levels is that when you're running through the jungle, the game really feels like you're in an arena. We wanted to limit that, we wanted this game to feel as real as possible.

Within those out of bounds areas, we're including scenes. Just like if you were to play Skyrim, or Oblivion or anything of this nature, once you start straying off that main path, you start running into things that you didn't expect. Maybe bandits are attacking a house, maybe you're finding some ancient temple that's been there for 1000s of years.

None of them affect gameplay, they're all out-of-bounds and preset scenes; things you would otherwise witness in an RPG.

Every player is actually given the option for several characters they can edit.

We think it's really important that players stay versatile. If you only have one character and that's a DPS, then you could only ever be a DPS unless you change up your character, and now you lose that sense of identity in that relationship with the character that you're building up.

So there are several character options, and you're more than welcome to explore any option within any of those character slots.

There are a few different things that we have in place to limit how aggressive the customization can get, one being counters.

Every single ability inside the game has a counter to it. Whether that's an accidental counter, or something we intentionally designed to counter a specific ability, everything should be designed that there is a way to stop it.

If a team decides to jump into a game where all five characters are the exact same, there should be a way where the other team has an option to alter that.

Readability is very important and sometimes there may be situations where you can't read your opponent. During the character selection screen, you can kind of understand who's going to be where and who's doing what... but it gets murkier when you're considering character customization.

So what we're trying to do is very similar to Overwatch; you're able to change your character out in the middle of the game.

Overwatch experienced that same situation where yes, sometimes you just need that little bit of a character switch to be able to keep the game balanced and keep it in your favour. That's something that we've incorporated.

So that way, if completely by chance your entire team is getting countered everywhere, and you are unable to do anything efficiently, you can always just change out your character to somebody inside your roster that would work better in those situations.

Towns are one of our major gameplay points! We've actually removed defence towers as you understand them from a typical MOBA.

In a lot of RPGs, namely Skyrim, they have this whole civil war going on. You're either battling for or against these towns to earn their favour. A lot of the mods I know, specifically within Skyrim touch upon this to make that civil war more immersive.

That's something we wanted to also incorporate here. There is a lore behind where you are in Avengard, there is a story that we're telling and it starts off with a civil war between many, many factions.

So when you're playing the game we've removed the defence towers and replaced them with what we call Towns. We have a single town within the centre of each lane that's on a neutral stand-point. This took direct inspiration from Skyrim as well.

Towns have several buildings that can be destroyed, or rebuilt by spending gold. They'll provide different buffs to the team that holds them. For instance, we have a teleport, and this teleport allows you to teleport to other active ally teleports within the game.

Minons are directly controlled by the towns as well. There's a building that sends out the minions; if all of your towns get destroyed you'll have no minions on any of the lanes.

We're really encouraging wanting to invest time in defending the towns, whereas I feel oftentimes with defence towers within other MOBA titles, they're more of an obstacle in your way than an actual objective to attack and defend. We really wanted to make them feel more important.

We started off as just a couple of people, and we've slowly been building since. Now we're up to a little over 40 people, we're a complete volunteer project and everybody is from all over the world.

We've been trying to get as immersive as an experience with the team as possible as well. We didn't want to lock ourselves into one particular way of thinking, as far as Western people are concerned with how they like to game compared to the EU. We really wanted to get a very diverse and broad idea of exactly what everybody would like.

It's really helped us out a lot. The game is constantly being developed 24/7, we have many voice actors, game artists, programmers, we have everything essentially that we need.

It's really exciting to work every day with people. I spend all day working with the Western team, and by the time I go to sleep and wake up again, I get 20 messages from the EU team of all the progress that they've been making.

It's exciting to see that no matter what time of day it is, there's always work being done on the game.

It's the mindset we're going into this. We could all be creating indie games separately. There's no way I could complete Avengard without my team; there's no way I could complete anything to this scale. That goes along with everything.

All of us individually can create small, cheap, simple side-scrolling indie games and that'll be cool for experience but is it really developing careers for us?

Our mindset is "let’s create an absolutely incredible MOBA that people can enjoy and it's fun and innovative". It's something we can really put on a resume and lock in careers for ourselves in the future; if not, create careers simply off what Avengard is doing.

Given the right amount of funding and revenue, this can turn into something which we can focus on for the rest of our lives, and that's exciting.

We're very much a game for gamers, and we're coming together to try to make that game for the gamers. We came up with a really great idea that we think people would love, and we want to try to bring that to the MOBA genre so all of us who enjoy MOBAs can enjoy that to the full nature.

Definitely the lack of a salaried team; we all have real lives outside of what we're doing. I have a new-born baby! We have to try to juggle all the time to continue development on Avengard.

The character editor itself has been a nice challenge for our development team, trying to figure out how to properly incorporate it into the project. It's something you don't see everywhere as far as mechanically inspirational sources. It's something we have to create ourselves, and how to make them balanced with the MOBA genre and readability.

Definitely a sense of family. We're doing a lot to try to limit the toxicity of what unfortunately tends to come with the MOBA genre.

We want this to be a game for gamers, a community, a place where you can come and feel at home. We're a very close-knit group as a team and want to transcend that into our community as well.

The character customisation. For many people we've spoken with, people who have no idea what Avengard is, the idea is very interesting. People have been very receptive to wanting something like this. The only concern they'll consistently bring up is "how are you going to balance this?"

We want to clarify that we've addressed many of these issues, a lot of them are complex internal tasks we've been handling and we do have a plan for everything in terms of how we want to keep this thing balanced. We have stat caps so your health can only go so high. There's a lot in place... it's a lot to describe off-hand!

It really comes down to having a sense of identity inside that competitive situation. You can never get your RPG fix inside that MOBA where you're trying to compete against other players where you can win or lose.

Those are two very stimulating mechanics for people: being able to have that freedom to explore who you want to be, and that competitive feel at the same time. Those are the players we're planning to draw in most, who would find intense purpose in this game.

Thanks so much Sean!

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You can follow the team at Avengard's official site!