In the newest OPM magazine (May 2006) they had a sit down interview with the producer of SOCOM, Seth Luisi. The interview was two pages long, so I am posting some of the more interesting things that he had to say during this interview.
OPM: What's been the biggest hurdle for online play, and SOCOM specifically?
Seth Luisi: To us, it's been cheating. Detecting cheaters [and] preventing cheaters has been one of the biggest challenges. [And another challenge is] just really reacting to the community. I don't think we do community management in SOCOM very well, and that's something I'm really starting to focus on now and trying to improve. But it's hard to convince other people that we actually need people to manage it. We have this huge SOCOM community, but if you leave them on their own, they're all just going to sit around and complain about the game.
So cheating, reacting to the consumers, and trying to be responsive to the community are some of the biggest challenges for us. Implementing specific features was difficult, but at least it was sort of a known factor. We knew in SOCOM 3 that we could get to 32 players. It [was going to] be hard work to do it, but we knew we could get there.
OPM: If you could change anything about the way Sony approached online for the PS2, what would it be? And how does the HDD fit into all of this?
SL: We did use the HDD; we released the maps. We had much bigger plans for the hard drive, but there was just the same issue of how to get content to the HDD, [which] was never really worked out in a satisfactory manner, so it wasn't really worth it for us to continue to develop for the HDD. But to me, if you're going back to, like, what is something Sony could have done differently for online and not really related to the HDD, I've always been a proponent, from day one, since we first started working on SOCOM, of just having a basic unified login and friend's list. It's something that is extremely beneficial. It's really difficult to manage the communities and manage the people if they can just create an alternate persona at any time and just create an unlimited number of accounts. Then they sort of lose persistence across the service. To me, that's always been the biggest issue that I've had: We [haven't had a] unified login and friend's list.
OPM: What would you say is the next big step that you see for the SOCOM series?
SL: Well, I can't go into too much detail there. With our game on the next generation, we're looking to do a pretty drastic departure from the current game. So I can't really go into too much detail, because I don't want to give anything away too early. But it is going to be pretty different from what we have now. Like I said, I always have so many ideas for different things that I want to do with the game, the game experience, and the direction of the game. There's never a lack of ideas. A lot of people are starting to ask me, "You've done three SOCOM games! Aren't you tired of going SOCOM games?" You know, I still have all these ideas I want to do! We're always limited in how much time we have and how many resources we get to do this. There's still so much more! This is just a fraction of what we really wanted to accomplish. I think we've made some good games, but we still have tons of ideas for things that we want to do.
And now my hands hurt from all of this typing... read the rest for yourselves... should be on news stands shortly.
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