Gamedaily Frontier 1859 Feature Story

Cosmic Origins GameDaily Feature Interview with Pete Gallagher
Posted 11/6/03

It's not often GameDaily focuses its sights on a company that has four employees, an idea for a game and no funding to implement said idea, but something about the way Cosmic Origins is going about its attempted entry into the massively multiplayer gaming genre caught our interest. We recently chatted up Cosmic Origins' director, Daniel McMillan.

Cosmic Origins' big idea is entitled Frontier 1859, which is a MMORPG set in the old west (during the year 1859), with the main hook consisting of a "freewill-based" role-playing game system that is modeled on real life. The system will aim to "help game players of all ages have a better understanding of life (and death) prosperity, and misfortune."

Right now, Cosmic Origins consists of a design team made up of four people. "We are not a full production house yet," McMillan noted. "Until we get the next round of funding, we are a start up obviously, but we are a design team. McMillan sees it as "possible and not unheard of," that, if someone was to fund Frontier 1859, he and his team would manage the game development process."

McMillan continued, "The cool thing will be looking at all those different options with someone who is serious about funding us."

Frontier 1859 was first announced last year. From the beginning, the concept attracted more attention than the genre of the planned game itself. "We want people to think more of a wilderness than the West," explained McMillan, "Because the West creates all kinds of weird things. Frontier 1859 is more about going out into the wilderness and surviving, building a life, finding gold, meeting friends along the way and fighting good and evil."

That being said, Western elements like Cowboys, Indians and saloons will "definitely be there," but, "It's going to be up to the players how they play those roles out." McMillan continued, "Just like in real life, we will have our good people and our bad people."

McMillan expects plenty of "bad guys" to be in the game, "There always are," he stated, but added, "The cool thing is there will also be the other side, who will attempt to fight that. They will create their own towns and laws as they build them together. That society will actually write their own quests and will have a voting system, whereby they will…" McMillan stopped there, saying he didn't want to give too much away yet.

Why then, we asked McMillan, did Cosmic Origins decide to disclose so much about the game before it has even secured funding? The answer is part of the secret to the early support Cosmic Origins has received from gamers. "It's a fine line, because in the past, in terms of all-in-the-box games, we always thought 'we have a great idea, we will keep it hush hush.' That's been good in the past, but in a situation like this, we felt like since we weren't funded anyway, we would like to begin the publishing process ourselves and present it to the public to see if indeed we do have a cool idea. To also see just what would happen if we were to model our development style after allowing the community access to our ideas and going through all of them with them to hammer out an idea that the public seems really excited about and to get what they are missing in other games."

Such interaction with the public has been going for a year already on the Frontier 1859 website and forums, and has resulted in a robust FAQ and community. "The FAQ is what gets people juiced up about the game," said McMillan. "If you read it (the FAQ), you will find out that it is not a lot about the game, but it gives an overall view about what it would be like to play Frontier 1859."

"It's almost like an early Alpha play test, but in the mind," added a giggling McMillan.

Another plus to emerge from opening up to the game community is a "really positive" forum. As any Internet savvy user might well know, the words forum and positive are rarely used together. "A lot of the forum users have been very creative in taking a look at ideas we have presented and offered variables we hadn't even thought of yet," said McMillan. Such an approach helps polish the concept's design, by reinforcing good ideas and eliminating bad ones.

Reading up on Cosmic Origins and Frontier 1859, one senses the involvement of a certain amount of spirituality. When asked how such theology would be worked into the game, McMillan was a little evasive, again, not wanting to give away all his ideas. "Spiritually speaking, we have talked about layering and having a layer in the game, but we can't describe how that exactly affects characters and won't, but we have mentioned that players with certain abilities or talents will be able to see a ghost or something on occasion, or faith will somehow affect the outcome of their game through modifiers. Everyone is accountable for his or her actions, so in order to create a justice system that works dynamically by what the players do, at the same time it's also good to show them what the outcomes of their choices are in terms of how it affects life in this world."

McMillan touched a little on what inspired him to come up with a "freewill" based system, "When I play a game for along time, and spend many hours with other people online, everyone sort of connects in an extremely sharp mental way, and you always wonder who they really are. But the one thing you can be sure of is that you are in this place (a game) at the same time. So, it's kind of strange to think that our senses are getting retuned in sort of a weird way to a virtual reality that is also blending with reality. Some people obviously lose sight of where that line difference is."

McMillan said Cosmic Origins hasn't really hit publishers hard for funding yet, because, "We know that they really look for demos." Technology-wise, Cosmic Origin has aligned with NDL (Gamebryo)and Havoc (physics) so it can demonstrate that the technology it intends to use is "proven and licensable." The next step is to "show how it all comes together in a conceptual way."

McMillan does have a dollar amount in mind for funding, but he would not disclose it to us. He did, however, share his development timeline, which includes three months of pre-production, 20 months of development, an additional four months to realize an alpha and six more months to reach a beta test stage.