Interview with S2Fielding

 As what I got from GameReplay, they had a chance to get interview with S2Fielding, so I copy it to make sure you guys can read it, the bolded paragraph are the most interesting statement.




We had a privilege of getting an interview with the Heroes of Newerth lead designer James Fielding aka S2Fielding, formerly known as Trunks. We asked him some interesting questions that should concern competitive players as well as those who like to follow the competitive scene.

GR: Hey James! First of all could you introduce yourself?

James: Hi, my name is James Fielding - lead designer at S2 Games. I'm ultimately responsible for balance/hero design/general gameplay direction. Idejder deserves an honorable mention here, as my right-hand man he's been very helpful in working with me on the balance and maintaining a lot of open communication with our community.

GR: You are an old member on GameReplays. Could you tell us when you joined and what was the reason?

James: I'm really not sure when I first joined. I suppose my profile might say so somewhere, but I remember being around in the C&C Generals days. I'm pretty sure the reason I joined was to argue with someone who was making some crazy comments about balance :).

GR: Let's get back to Heroes of Newerth. What made you want to make this game?

James: When we started the project, DotA was really the only (popular) game of this type. We saw serious e-sport potential in it and knew that it just needed a stand alone engine and some basic improvements to really shine. We at S2 are big DotA fans and just really wanted to take that type of gameplay to the next level. It's our goal to have it be taken as seriously in the competitive scene as StarCraft or Counter-strike. It's easy to compare it to counter-strike (in terms of how it operates as an e-sport) as it's a similar scenario of being based around teams of players rather than individuals.

GR: In the latest content patch you added the Banning Pick game mode. Are there any plans to allow tournament customization of the BP mode so that the first pick is chosen, not random, and the ability to add additional time to the timer in cases tourney admins feel 60 seconds is not enough?

James: We have no immediate plans to make the first pick non-random. First pick is very much a strategic part of how the bans play out, and if one team knew they were getting first pick it would make some banning choices (for both teams) much easier. Furthermore, there's no fair way to decide which team should get first pick, so a flip of the coin seems most fair. The 1-2-2-2-2-1 distribution does give the non-first pick team an advantage to make up for it. That said, if there's popular demand for certain changes, we pay close attention to our forums and user feedback and are always open to making adjustments if it's what the player base wants. We may potentially add controls for tournament admins to control how much time the picking phase has, but have no immediate plans to do so.

GR: Here at GameReplays we're very interested in the features that will allow us to cast, spectate and commentate. Will the observer mode support delayed broadcasting, so it will be easy to live stream tournaments?

James: We do have some rough plans to include a system like this eventually, but I can't make any promises as to the details. We've already planned out (basically) how it would work, but essentially the system we'd like to implement would not tax the game server itself. The game server would report to some sort of relay server (or cluster of servers) which then broadcast the stream as necessary. This way there could be (theoretically_) no limit to the number of people observing a match and it won't affect the performance of the players in the game. It is very important to us that HoN be playable over internet with LAN-like latency, as those fractions of a second make a big difference in high tier play.

GR: Since the game uses the client/server netcode, would you consider increasing the maximum number of spectators? Similar to HLTV for Counterstrike, a virtual spectator that a huge numbers of people could watch the game through.

James: I touched on this in my above answer, but essentially if we were to make something like HLTV it would be in a way that could allow thousands upon thousands of spectators at once. Plans for such a system are WAY down the road though. It's what we'd like to do, but we have some more basic things to work on in regards to tournaments and leagues before we can approach doing something like that :).

GR: Have you sorted the problem of storage of replays, and are you planning on putting an expiration date on them? There have also been requests for the host of a game to opt out of recording replays for competitive purposes, so that it only allows the players and spectators to download them. Something like private replays.

James: Private replays are something we've talked about, as we do understand some players don't like their strategies being shown off. We have some loose plans to implement something like this, but I don't have any details for you just yet. As far as replay storage goes, we won't be able to store them indefinitely - HoN is just way too popular :). I think currently we store replays on our servers for 40 days.

GR: Will there be any balance security for playing tournaments/competitive matches? Something that will allow us to load a balanced version of the game.

James: Support for this is planned in our tournaments and leagues system (which will be coming eventually after we get stuff like match making in). We totally understand the importance for this. It's important to note that right now in the beta we're putting out patches that are largely untested, relying on the beta test itself to test them. Post-release we'll only be releasing "stable" patches that have gone through considerable testing before hand.

GR: Since we know you were involved in C&C games like Generals/Zero Hour, we have to ask you are you planning of implementing the right-click scroll into the game and/or alternate mouse commands.

James: We actually had something like this working before we went to beta, but we were running out of hotkeys to use it in. As an old school C&C player I always wanted DotA to support right-click fast scroll. Ultimately, in practice, we found it wasn't terribly useful in HoN type gameplay and that it really fit an RTS style game better (where you need to jump all over the map). We were also running out of hotkeys (it was setup as an independent hotkey rather than tied to right-click). We may add an option for it if demand is high enough, though.

GR: Will there be any new features we can expect in the final version of the game that are not yet in the beta and could you tell us something about them?
James: The main ones are match making, the upcoming tutorial, and the new front end interface. We've released details on the tutorial, but details on match making and the new interface will have to wait for now :). There will, of course, continue to be new heroes as well. We've got a skillshot-based hero in the works as well as a few others that we think the community will really enjoy. I will say that we are experimenting with some new ability mechanics that are focused at gank-style play. Unfortunately, that's all the details I can give for now, but we'll make more updates on this in the future.

GR: Let's have 5 quick ones:
1. What's your favorite hero?

James: That's almost like asking a parent who their favorite child is :) I really can't decide on just one. It depends on the play style I'm in the mood for :) I will say that on the quality, I'm really happy with how Panda turned out, I think he's really high quality in terms of production.

GR: 2. What's your favorite hero voice?

James: Hm, probably succubus. I think she turned out really well. She's not released yet, of course - her voice will be in for 0.1.67.

GR: 3. What hero do you hate playing against?

James: It really depends on the skill level of the game. If I'm playing with players of a high enough level that the game is coordinated, there aren't any heroes that bug me, as you can usually adapt for a wide variety of circumstances. I'm not really the type of player to rage at specific heroes or circumstances though.

GR: 4. Can you reveal why we should fear the Chiprel?

James: Because the Chiprel is mighty.

GR: 5. What do you think is the coolest ability sound in the game?

James: Probably puppet-strings. Although the most satisfying ability sound is probably Witch Slayer's ult.

GR: Do you have anything you'd like to say to the people out there reading?

James: Thanks for all the support and for enjoying HoN! We really love making it, and your guys' passion and enjoyment of the game is what makes it worth it.

GR: We would like to thank you for your time, we know you have a very busy schedule. Good luck with HoN and all future projects.