Interview With Seatribe, Developers Of Haven and Hearth

Last week, I sat down with Bjorn Johannessen and Fredrik Tolf of Seatribe to talk about the new version of Haven and Hearth. We talked about what brought them back to Haven and Hearth, upcoming changes, and whether or not they actually intend to troll their users.

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Me: I’m going to start this interview a little further back. What brought you guys to completely revamp Haven and Hearth?

Tolf: Well, that’s a bit of a story. I’d like to say that Salem was a big influence there but really it was that when we were starting to write Salem, I was already underway with a rather major rewrite of the Haven engine, so to speak, because one could say that the foundations had been under dimension from the beginnings.

Johannessen: Yeah, and so basically, that was already underway and as Salem wound down or wound into whatever it is right now, we were figuring that we should get back to Haven. And we decided that, if we were going to do that anyway, we wanted to redo it and do it right, do it from the beginning and basically build it from the ground up. As Fredrik had said the foundations both code-wise and mechanically were “under dimension” for what we wanted to do with it down the road.

Tolf: For one thing, if one were to speak with the 3D rewrite, in particular, we just felt, from having done Salem, that we couldn’t really be without that technology. I mean, just the ability to be able to rotate the camera and rotate objects on the map was worthwhile.

Johannessen: Yeah, I mean a lot of people, and I guess us included, had mixed feelings about going from 2D to 3D because old Haven was obviously a completely 2D engine but as Fredrik, again said, having worked with 3D, we didn’t really feel that we had much option going forward. If we wanted to build a relevant game we felt that we kind of had to go 3D. There are just so many things that we can do in 3D that are simply impossible in 2D.

And also, mechanically, I guess there are a lot of old Haven’s mechanics that feel updated in terms of where we are with our thinking right now as well.

Tolf: Well, there’s that but it’s also the fact that Haven had accumulated “a lot of crap” so to speak. The personal beliefs mechanics, for instance, were one of those things that we thought it was a good idea from the beginning but it didn’t really turn out as good as we had imagined it. And there were a few things like that, so…

Johannessen: Things that we’d just kind of added like half of it, figuring that we’d develop it later and then we had never actually gone through and developed it later. So it felt nice to just rebuild and get rid of a lot of old baggage.

So what exactly happened with Salem that brought you back to Haven?

Johnannessen: Paradox kind of felt that they didn’t want to push development on Salem further. We tried it for a while and the user numbers and all weren’t where they needed to be to be a major ongoing concern for them or whatever. And we kind of felt the same way. And at that point, a concerned party decided that they—Mortal Moments—wanted to take over development and basically continue delivering that game. We were ecstatic about that because we kind of felt that if Salem wasn’t going to be a big thing anymore then we wanted to build our own game and that implied, for us, going back to Haven. We’d always had bad pangs of conscience over having kind of abandoned Haven in the first place. We wanted to get back into that and when Mortal Moments came along and gave us an offer we basically could not refuse said offer.

Salem was kind of free-to-play and Haven was free-to-play. What made you settle on the subscription model with Hafen?

Tolf: Well, to be honest, this was the model we had envisioned from the beginning with Haven, from the very first days we started developing it. It’s just that, originally, we never felt the game was in a condition where we could really charge people for it. And from the outset that was probably a reasonable evaluation, so to speak, but as we developed the game further there was no obvious turning point for us where we could say “now the game is in a condition where we can charge for it.”

Johannessen: Yeah, and we kind of felt that now when we did the relaunch we kind of wanted the payment thing to be in there from the beginning so that we would have that out of the way, so to speak. Because obviously that was a clear fork in the road where we could say “alright, we’ve spent some time developing this. Here it is in its present glorious state. Could someone please pay the fiddler?”

The userbase on the forums has been pretty up in arms about the whole pay-to-play thing. How many people have actually bought in so far?

Johnannessen: 1500-2000 subscribers, maybe. Oh, that’s too much probably, like 1000.

Okay, so even though there are a lot of people that are angry about the pay-to-play conversion there are still a lot of people in the userbase that are paying for it.

Johannessen: Certainly. We’re happy with what we’re seeing. If present trends continue we can at least make a living out of it, which is what we feel is the most important thing for the game. Because if we can’t then obviously the game needs to be something much smaller in scope than what we want it to be.

So yeah we’re happy about it as it is. Obviously, there was a lot of rage on the forums. I think a lot of that had to do with, initially, there were a lot of problems on the store. We hadn’t presented it in the most optimal manner and whatever. And those were some of the things we tried to address with the first patch we did. We changed the store around a bit, changed some of the offers and whatnot. We also increased the amount of free time that we gave players.

Our intention was not ever to really introduce a pay-to-play model. We wanted the game to be free-to-play. And we wanted there to be a genuine sense that paying is optional. It’s something that you do if you play the game a lot. We want there to be a meaningful free-to-play mode to the game, so to speak.

Tolf: Yes, very much so. It was always the intention that players should be able to play without paying.

Johannessen: Yeah, and a couple of updates later, I feel like at least the majority of players see what we’re trying to do and feel that it’s fair on everyone’s part, so to speak. I think the forums are a lot happier with everything now than they were immediately upon release.

The subscription tokens. Was that an idea that you had on your own or was it something you saw other sandbox games doing and thought that it might work?

Tolf: It’s a bit of both, I think. We had had the idea previously, actually, even before we had seen what games like EvE and such did but seeing that they do what they do probably reinforced the idea.

Johannessen: I think there’s always been a sense that it would be a good thing; like, if you could buy an item to give it to a friend so that you could provide a subscriber account to a friend through the game.

It’s also interesting to see that the tokens can be dropped.

Tolf: Of course they would. I don’t know. Only time will tell how it turns out but it just feels like a very nice thing. I mean, some people will complain about the pay-to-win aspect for overtradable tokens and I can kind of see where they’re coming from but I think it’s very nice that some people may be able to play the game without having to pay for it.

Johannessen: Obviously, there is the kind of pay-to-win argument and I’m with Fredrik in that I can see where people are coming from when they present that argument. But there’s also, as Fredrik was saying, the argument that one person can kind of get into the game and get a paid account simply by providing in-game value to other people. By actually playing the game a lot.

Tolf: That feels like a nice thing.

Johannessen: There are certainly degrees to it. I mean, even as it stood with old Haven, a lot of the time that we spent on account management was due to deals gone wrong, so to speak, where people had been selling accounts to each other anyway. So there is certainly an argument to be made, from our perspective, that the in-game economy is going to be monetized. The only question is “how?” Are we going to have a part in it? And if it is going to be monetized, I think it would be a fair thing for us to have a part in it. Because we need to make money off the game somehow.

How was the future of Haven looking before you monetized it?

Tolf: Well, the thing is, the original Haven was very much developed on our—or at least my—savings. The only reason we could develop it was actually because I was living with my parents and I had savings. And both of those had run out once we had started making Salem. So that was not exactly viable anyway.

Johannessen: No. And Haven, as it stood, first of all, like the code and support bases were very much like “eroded.” Not just from the initial point where they had developed from but from a couple of years of neglect or whatever on our part. So to keep the game running, every time we wanted to do even the smallest things, it carried a lot of resistance. So maintaining the old codebase and maintaining the old game never felt particularly attractive to either of us, I don’t think. So I would say that without the new version, obviously, we could keep it around in its existing state indefinitely but…

Tolf: That was kind of a zombie state.

Johnannessen: Yeah, exactly. In suspended animation.

Now that you’ve got the new version that you can work on more easily, what are your priorities moving forward? I see that you’re working on adding a lot more in-game wildlife but what else do you have planned?

Tolf: That’s a really good question, actually. Mainly, we’ve just been addressing the obvious bugs and stuff and I expect that that will continue for a little while at least.

Johannessen: Yeah, that’s one thing. We’ve been trying to catch all of the bug reports that we’ve gotten and we’ve gotten a fair amount of them, though still a manageable amount. You know, contain the bug reports and fix those, that’s been one priority. The second priority, at least from my perspective, is to achieve complete feature parity with old Haven. That is to say, reimplement every object, item, whatnot, that was in old Haven. Bring it into the new Haven. So tonight, for example, we’re going to be working on the little Conestoga wagons that were in Haven (Interviewer’s note: These have since been implemented) that were pulled by animals and what not. And those haven’t made it into the new version so we’re going to fix that first.

That’s my first priority. But after that I hope that we’ll be able to tackle some of the big things that we want to do, like better housing models. Seasons is a thing that we want to do…

Tolf: Yeah, I don’t know. There have been a few things we’ve been discussing over the years. Better housing models, I guess, is one of the primary things. There’s a lot of things. I mean, the sieging model is an ongoing project to say the least.

Johannessen: That’s always going to be a thing, “how does siege work?” But in terms of new things, weather is something I’d love to be working on. Like I said, seasons, the better housing model. Also, we want to add in more abilities for players to customize their characters. Be able to upload little images to be able to hang on their walls. Stuff like that. There’s no dearth of things to work on.

Haven’s a pretty harsh game. Would seasons and weather have any effect on the player?

Johannessen: I hope so. One of the games that really inspired me originally, when we started working on the game, was a small Finnish roguelike called UnReal World. It’s a game I can really recommend to anyone and it’s really low-key. It’s kind of a roguelike survival game. Single-player, of course. I think it’s developed in Visual Basic so it’s certainly something. But it’s a great game.

In that game, winter was always kind of a harsh experience.It was cold outside and if you didn’t wear your clothes, you’d freeze to death. I think that is my ideal for what winter would be and I’d definitely want it to be meaningful. I don’t want it to be a reskin of the trees every so often.

I saw the big list of features from the last version that haven’t been added to Haven yet, including the stalls. Can you elaborate a bit more on how they’re going to change?

Tolf: For one thing, in previous Haven, there was a difference between what we called “vending stalls” and “barter stalls.” And this time we’re not going to do the vending stalls. Only barter stalls.

Johannessen: And the difference between them was the vending stalls used the in-game currencies that you could make. Like you could mint coins from metals that you could acquire from nature. And the vending stalls used solely coins. And the barter stalls used solely items.

Tolf: But that distinction is quite simply no longer meaningful.

Johannessen: Exactly. So now there’s going to be only barter stalls where if you want to trade for coins, you can add those just as any other commodity.

And we wanted to give players better abilities to protect their stands by building walls around them for example.

What exactly do you mean by improving housing?

Tolf: Well, what we’ve always wanted to do is to have a more flexible housing model where you can design your house in various ways, like different shape and things like that. I don’t know how close we’ll be able to get to that but we certainly want to have more modular housing options.

Johannessen: And one of the things we would like to address is right now houses basically operate on a model where they contain a little pocket world and that’s something we’d like to move away from if at all possible.

And move it back into the open world?

Tolf: More or less, at least. The primary aspect of the pocket world that we’d like to keep is that you can’t look into houses without walking into them, for instance. So you can’t see what people have stored in their house without looking into them.

The siege system. What are you planning to improve there?

Johannessen: That’s a really good question. I wish I knew. I think that’s one of the things that we’re about as clueless as we’ve always been. It’s a tough nut to crack. It’s hard to determine what the optimal “endgame” of it is. It’s hard to even have a conceptual model for how you want it to work. It’s hard for us to set along a vision for how it should work. So, it’s a hard thing. I don’t think we have any immediate improvements planned. We’re pretty much gonna wing that one and see what happens.

Tolf: Well, I think one somewhat concrete idea that we’ve been playing with, at least—we don’t have any real view of how to realize it—is to make it somehow possible to track an attacker back to their primary base.

Johannessen: Yeah, but that’s always been more of an ambition on our part than anything realized. It’s always been an issue that the attackers never really risk anything and we definitely would like them to put their own bases and whatnot at risk when they attack another player.

But I think that one thing that can certainly be said for the present world is that it is a lot larger than anything we’ve done before, so there are better opportunities than ever to stay away from other people, which I think is at least going to change the siege paradigm and perception of it and whatnot. Not sure if for better or worse but it’ll be different.

I remember hearing that Haven didn’t have as much of a PvP community but it still was there.

Johannessen: Yeah, the siege system has always kind of worked better in Haven than it ever did in Salem.

Tolf: For some reason.

Johannessen: For some reason. It’s a bit unclear why. I think maybe the battering ram worked better, quite simply, than…I don’t know. It’s a long story.

Were the bats really all that bad or were people just hiding in places where bats spawned?

Johannessen: I think the problem was precisely that. There were a lot of people that had settled in the caves. You know, put all their earthly belongings inside the caves and kind of built up their entire little existence revolving around their ability to live in caves, which obviously caused a bit of problems when bats came out of hiding.

They were probably pretty bad. People were probably legitimately complaining about them. But now we’ve just nerfed them into oblivion. So now I don’t see how anyone could reasonably complain about them.

I remember reading that a lot of people were convinced that you were just trying to troll them.

Johannessen: Yep. We get that a lot. But that’s actually not true. I’d like to emphatically deny that. We’re not trying to troll people. We are legitimately that stupid. We really do push updates with that little thought.

Tolf: Well, let’s say that the intention was not necessarily to drive people out of their caves, as such. The intention was just to make caves a bit scarier.

Johannessen: Yeah, a bit scarier but also a bit more interesting. Before, there had never been anything in caves at all. Well, not much. Very little. We just wanted there to be some sort of permanent fixture in the caves. So we figured, let’s add lots of bats, let’s make them a little scary, and yeah. Turns out that there are things in those caves.

I’ve seen conflicting reports about it. Is there a way to indefinitely keep them at bay?

Johannessen: Not right now, no. They respawn every time the map reloads, basically. And we don’t normally reveal anything. We kind of like the fact that players create their own little mythologies and whatnot. Right now, for example, everyone seems to be convinced that torches and fireplaces and whatnot have an effect on bats. This is not the case. [laughs]

Are you guys planning to push the supernatural elements even further with the new version?

Tolf: Good question. Our relation to the supernatural in Haven has always been…I think there are a lot of preconceptions to how we treat the supernatural in Haven. I mean, some people consider Haven a very realistic game and laud it for that virtue. But we’ve never considered Haven a truly realistic game that way. We’ve always had conceptions of the supernatural in Haven. If anything, we’ve always tried to keep it low-key.

Johannessen: Yeah, I think that “low fantasy” is a term you could bandy around. We’ve always wanted it so that the normal day to day experience in Haven should not be crawling with goblins and strange otherworldly things.

Tolf: The thing is if the supernatural becomes normal, then it’s no longer the supernatural. It’s a game mechanic. And that’s what we want to prevent. Not keeping away from the supernatural, as such. But adding it in a way that it doesn’t become normal.

Johannessen: Wanting it to remain magical, rather than mundane. Because if any idiot that joined an hour ago can throw fireballs, then you may call it magic but it doesn’t really carry the weight that magic might otherwise carry. It becomes mundane, and commonplace, and frankly, not very interesting.

We’re trying to implement it in ways that preserve the obscurity and mystical feeling to it.

So it’ll never be as obvious as it was in Salem?

Tolf: Yeah, definitely.

So, you’re in “eternal alpha” right now. Once you get closer to a release state…

Tolf: Well, there’s a reason we call it eternal alpha. We don’t actually plan to ever get out of alpha.

Johannessen: Honestly, the concepts alpha, beta, release, whatever, have never carried a lot of weight with us. The reason we called it “eternal alpha” was that we wanted to convey an image that we may, at any point, decide to change something from the ground up and we don’t want players to get attached to either their in-game variable data or a specific mechanic because we may whimsically decide to change it.

Tolf: Yeah, it may not be very likely, but we may decide to rewrite it completely again.

Johannessen: Yeah, which is obviously not what we’re looking to do right this instant but it could happen. I guess it’s about managing expectations and whatnot. We don’t want people to think we’re in any way, shape, or form delivering a full AAA release whatever game experience. We want it to be an alpha experience continuously. Albeit a good one.

Are you ever looking to push for major platforms like Steam?

Tolf: It’s not off the table. I mean, I question how much value Steam has to us.

Johannessen: My perspective has always been that I’m sure Steam is a great platform for distributing what is fundamentally a single-player game but Haven is fundamentally a multiplayer game. Like, we need our own platform anyway for distribution. So for us, it’s kind of unclear what value Steam adds apart from the very specific marketing channel, venue, thing, whatever. Technically, from our perspective, Steam adds very little. It doesn’t give us any ability to distribute that we didn’t have before. We can still distribute the game online, for example. That is not something new. Intrinsically, we have to be able to do that and whatever. So I am not particularly super keen or excited to run off and implement Steam or whatever. Just using that as a specific example.

Tolf: It’s not off the table. If nothing else, we may decide to use Steam just as a marketing platform or something.

Johannessen: We haven’t really looked into it, truth be told.

Tolf: It just seems like a lot of work for very little output, so to speak.

Johannessen: We’re not really concerned with it either way, I don’t think. I mean, it’s on our radar, we’ve considered it. But it’s never seemed like a bandwagon we were super eager to jump on.

As far as the endgame goes, once you’ve got your settlement, and you’re not PvPing, how are you planning to advance that?

Johannessen: Well, we haven’t implemented dragons yet, so that’s still a thing. I’ve always had this picture in my head of a dragon settling down on a village idol, roosting on it, and demanding tribute from a village. So that’s certainly something I’d like to implement at some point.

Apart from that, obviously the player versus environment runs out at some point in Haven. You get the trolls, and then you kill trolls, and at some point they become mundane. We’re not happy about how we implemented trolls last time around. I think we can do it better. That’s certainly something on my radar. Something I want to add: bigger, better, scarier creatures. But obviously still maintaining what I spoke about earlier. Keeping them around as low key elements or making them very rare or whatever. But there’s certainly more to be done about the PvE experience.

Tolf: Yeah, that’s one thing. I’m not sure if this is ever a goal we’ve managed to hit but one thing I’ve always wanted to be a part of the endgame is to have more variability among items, so that even players who don’t actively engage in PvP directly could, perhaps, have things to contribute to the PvPers by way of trade, if they manage to craft, or discover, or create uncommon items.

Johannessen: Yep, so that’s certainly something that we’d like to develop further. Like the ability to create cool artifact-type swords or unique items or whatnot. Also, one of the things we want to work on is the ability for players to just mess around in the game and build funny, cute things. For example, what we’ve mentioned in an expanded building system…

Tolf: Yeah, it would be great if you could build castles and stuff.

Johannessen: Yeah, to get more of a kind of tabletop wargaming feel to it where you can create little landscapes or cityscapes. I think that’s one of the things that I think is one of the more fun aspects of the game. Building and creating nice things. It would be really cool if you had more options with that.

Are you ever planning to implement NPC guards?

Johannessen: I mean, we’re in eternal alpha so I shouldn’t exclude it completely, I suppose, but we have been reluctant, at least in the past…

Tolf: …to add human NPCs, at least. That being said, NPCs like guard dogs have been under discussion from time to time. Constantly. The main reason we haven’t implemented guard dogs thus far is that every animal AI is being exploited anyways so it would add very little to the game.

Johannessen: Which, incidentally, is another one of the reasons we haven’t particularly rushed into implementing big, scary creatures, because as it is, our bears are getting kited from a boat by guys wielding arrows and never really engaging with the bears the way we want them to. So we feel every AI creature we implement is being exploited anyways so we don’t want to implement the really good ones until we can actually be sure they have the proper levels of lethality.

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You can play Haven and Hearth now on the official website. It can be played free for a limited amount of time every week or as much as you want for $10 per month.