 Linus Tech Tips coverage of PAX 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital, Intel and SteelSeries. So we're here with Stephen Baker, the lead sound designer on Strife and we're going to get into exactly what his unique contribution is to this game after we talk a little bit about the general stuff. So you guys got to differentiate from other MOBAs, how are you going to make it accessible for the noob and yet customizable enough for the experienced players? Well there's a lot of fresh design techniques that our designers did. Some of them include the gold sharing mechanic. When you are in a lane with someone and you get a last hit, you actually share that gold with your lane mate and that helps to really reduce player toxicity as well as allow you to collect gold even though you're not last hitting. So tell me about the loadout system. Well that's going to be basically pre-game, before you queue. You're going to be able to select your hero, select your pet and select items that you like to play with. Okay so I'm a new player. My whole thing is okay I you know some pro that I like to watch uses this particular kit usually. So I just set everything up before the game. I don't have to go to the store and shop. No, not if you don't want to. I mean it really depends on how the game is going. You could have a loadout and think that you're going to do really well but if it's not going your way you can't actually go back into the shop and reconfigure your loadout for maybe more armor, magic armor, stuff like that. Okay so if I'm a pro and I feel like the whole loading out ahead of time is beneath me, I can still go full custom. Oh totally yeah. Okay that's awesome. Now let's talk about, you talked about crafting and pets. Are pets a purely aesthetic thing? Absolutely not. They actually serve a great purpose in the game. When you first start the game you get to select a pet and it's very, it's like a baby basically and it has only a small amount of abilities but as you play the game you get commodities at the end of the game that include food. You use the food to feed your pet and the pet evolves and actually develops its powers. It grows stronger, it unlocks new passives and it makes your active ability much stronger. So basically you guys are trying to make anyone who bought a Tamagotchi 10 years ago feel really stupid about it because they could just have played this game, had that experience and they get a game for their money. Absolutely. Speaking of money, you guys are aiming for what 15 heroes, six pets at launch. Now your monetization model, we all know how League of Legends does it where you pay for the heroes if they're not on rotation. How are you guys handling heroes and pay to play so to speak? Well first off the game is free to play and the heroes are free to play. So anytime that we design a hero it will be free to play. The 15 heroes that you'll be able to select from free to play, the things that we monetize will include commodities for crafting and also your skins for your different heroes. So I promised Steven we wouldn't talk about gameplay and mechanics the whole time. Lead sound designer wants to talk about sound. If you guys have been watching me for any amount of time you'll know I do believe that sound is incredibly important. One of my mantras is go buy a bloody sound card, get some decent headphones, not gaming headphones, good headphones, enjoy your games more. It's incredibly important and the conductor which is your baby is going to make what I'm saying right now even more true. Tell me about this. Well the conductor is an adaptive music system that ebbs and flows the music based on what's happening to your hero in the game. So you start the game, you're in the laning phase, not a lot of action is happening, you're just worried about last hitting creeps and maybe harassing the hero a little bit. So it's very low key, very easy to listen to, but as the game progresses say maybe you go into the jungle. It's a little more tense because no one can see where you are and the music really signifies that. And then maybe you're in a situation where there's a team fight happening which the music goes huge there. There's a lot of different layers that are happening at that time to add excitement to the player's experience. So your goal here then is to get the player's heart pumping without them really necessarily knowing, get the adrenaline flowing at the right times without them even really having to think about it. Yeah it is a very unconscious, subconscious kind of thing that's happening to music. I think that's absolutely cool and I think that getting away from games being designed to be looked at while you have your music going in your ears and you're completely ignoring it. I mean the immersiveness is incredibly exciting so thank you for taking the time to talk to us about this. This is absolutely great and good luck. My pleasure. Now we're here with Poo Liu who is the director of monetization for Strife and you do a bunch of other stuff as well right? Yeah so I worked as a lead system designer for Strife and I work with the game design team as well making awesome heroes hopefully. All right so we're going to have some great conversation with you because it's a free to play and as a monetization strategy free to play is anything but mature. There's so much more to be experimented with. What are you guys doing with Strife to make it work for you? I think you're seeing here free to play games popping up all over the place and a lot of them are going with a cookie cutter kind of dual currency. One you earn and one you get for free right or sorry one you purchase and one what you get for free for playing and what we've done with Strife is rather than having that we've developed commodities and commodities are something that you earn still but each of them serves a specific function so this allows a lot of dynamics as far as what trade-offs you have when you earn food you can feed your pets and when you get ore you can craft your items but when you get essences you can either harmonize your items or you can make them better so there's a lot of trade-offs that don't really exist when you only have one earned currency that exists when you have this more higher level of commodity currency. Okay now speaking of crafting items and all that I want to talk about okay it's not related at all forget the segue but tell me about the esports strategy for Strife what are you guys doing to differentiate yourself from the other stuff that's out there? For esports we really want to respond to the demands of what our community wants so we're still pre-beta people haven't gotten their hands on it the only people who played on playdate are like our friends and our families and our co-workers so we want to see what our community wants if they want a top heavy system in which there's just one invitational tournament that's the you know the hub of all that then we'll respond to that or if they want sometimes more grassroots more regular automated tournaments that anyone can get access into and maybe the prizes aren't as high for each of them but everyone can participate then we'll respond to that as well so we want to see where our player wants to do because at the end of the day we believe that esports is a service for the community for everyone to gather around the game and to get really hyped up and really amped and excited. Now the word everyone is interesting because you guys don't want to abandon the hard cores of course because the hardcore gamers are you're going to be your biggest supporters but what have you done if you were to pick three things that have made this game more accessible and that are going to help to draw in new players? Well there's as the MOBA genres developed there's been a lot of issues brought forth so four years ago when we were developing Heroes of New Earth and Riot was developing League of Legends and whatnot they we were all focusing on scratching the surface making sure the genre is going to be fun it's going to be successful people are going to play our games. Now that we kind of have the luxury of sitting back and saying okay MOBAs are a good formula we can talk about more the in-depth issues the issue of toxicity and a lot of people have brought this up about the MOBA community people are kind of assholes sometimes and we've really come back and put our fingers on that people are assholes to each other generally when they're on the same team and they disagree about how to win a game so intra-team conflict has been a huge thing for us and with Strife we've done several things to tackle that we've developed the game from the ground up from the game design to try to alleviate some of the tensions within your team as far as competing for last hits who's going to play the support role that no one wants to play who's going to who's going to devote all their gold to buying the wards so there's no purchasable vision there's no supporting by sacrificing instead of sacrificing we allow our support players to still get items and enable their teammates and support that way instead. So tell me about the way that gold gets split when you're either sharing a lane with someone or you're in your own lane and everyone else is all over the place in order to make people not be not behave selfishly. Yeah so every MOBA veteran has probably gone through the argument of I need the last hits no I don't need the last hits and it comes down to this all or nothing whoever gets the last hit gets all the gold and so you're competing with your lane mate as to who gets the last hit and Strife however you split the gold and how this works is if you're solo you get half of the gold bounty of a creep so say a creep's worth 70 gold you get 35 and the other half is split across your team evenly including yourself so you end up with 42 if you're with another lane partner you each get half of the gold so you each get 35 so realistically if you're soloing you might get less of the last hits than when you have a partner helping you out as well so you actually want your teammate there but when they're there you're not fighting over it you're not taking something from them they're not taking something from you you're working together toward an end goal together. I mean the way that I see this is this helps the casual players as well as the more competitive players because this does two things is number one is it makes it so that that one player on a competitive team doesn't have to be the bitch who has no who has no items by the end of the game and it was basically just kind of running around doing everyone else's dirty work and it also means that for someone who's a more a much more casual player they're not necessarily going to get left behind to the same extent I mean as someone who only ever really played dota 1 as as far as the MOBA genre goes I can tell you as someone who kind of played it casually and jumped in by you know 10-15 minutes into the game there was that one guy who was just going to completely dominate the match and then there was me and every time I saw him he was going to just totally kick my ass and what have you guys done to to change that besides just the gold splitting? So another thing we've done is that when you kill a player the gold you get rewarded with will be dependent on their relative effectiveness and power to you so gold per minute is a really important metric for us that basically calculates how much gold have you been earning this game and if you kill someone with less gold per minute than you do you'll get less gold and and on the on the flip side if they kill you and you have higher than them they get bonus gold so this really really incentivizes our top players to go pick on someone their own size and leave the little guys alone a little bit and for for us strife is a game that we don't want and we've all had this experience where you play a game with your friend you're trying to introduce them to to a game you're not really playing with them you're playing the same game as them but you kind of shove them off in the corners like you learn the game while I go and win it on my own we really want strife to an experience where you're playing with your friends with your girlfriend with your with your kid not just shoving off shoving them off in the corner buy you awards whatnot. Well that is incredibly exciting is there anything else that you'd like to add for for the audience in terms of the innovation that you guys have put into this game? Yeah I think the last really cool part is that you get to pick your hero before the game starts so what this allows us to do is not only take the stress off of it a little bit it's like oh god I got 90 seconds I gotta pick my hero or everyone's gonna yell at me no you get you get to take your time pick your hero pick your gear set pick your crafted items pick your pet do everything that you want to do to set up the experience that you have in mind and then the other thing that does is it allows us to assign a hero specific elo so if you have a hero that you're really good with because you played it 150 times we know that we'll know your record with that hero and we'll be able to assign you with teammates and opponents of an equitable level so that you have a good game whereas if you're a really high level player but you're trying a new hero you might not be rated as high so you're not punished for trying something completely new. Very cool thank you very much this has been absolutely fantastic and enjoy the rest of the show thank you