Wish Interview
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Q: One of the unique selling points of Wish will be the live event team. As far as I know it will be the first time a MMORPG heads that much into this direction. As of beta 1.0, I have seen more online roleplay in Wish than in any other game before. One of the reasons was that the live team did a great job in motivating the players to do so, in direct communication as the lords of the cities. Do you think it will be possible to keep that up even with thousands of players after release? And how do you think you could motivate players to roleplay - that means, if you intend to do so?
A: The events of Beta 1.0 were fun, but they are not really practical with tens of thousands of retail players. Beta 1.0 taught us a lot, and from this we designed Live Content. The difference between Live Content and what you saw in Beta 1.0 is basically efficiency. What you saw in Beta 1.0 was a lot of one-on-one interaction and micromanagement of events. Through the creation of a robust toolset, and a slightly different approach, we will create a very similar environment to Beta 1.0, but on a much larger scale.
Rather than being individual actors, the Live Content Team are the forces that drive the world. Let me give you an example: in Beta 1.0, there was one situation where a necromancer had been raiding towns, killing citizens. Four town lords all sent their people off in search of items to help defeat this evil. Eventually, after much searching, several battles, they met their foe and destroyed him. This took four people to play the lords, as well as people to play the bad guys and set up the encounters. It was not at all scalable.
In Beta 2.0 and beyond, we can do the same series of events with one person and a lot less time. They simply set up the quest, and deliver it through NPCs, with new parts of the quest being triggered as players make decisions and pick specific forks. Furthermore, it does not need to have someone sitting over it and watching it unfold. This means that rather than 4-5 people spending several hours to entertain a hundred people, we have one person who can entertain the same number with very little time invested, freeing everyone up to put more content into the world.
Finally, it was not the interaction with the (Town Lords) that facilitated the role playing of Beta 1.0, but rather the close knit communities that were forged through common goals and story. This is where town and society guilds come into play. These are elements of the world that players can join in addition to player guilds which help forge a connection to the world of Ganedan as well as to players of similar mindsets. They provide common challenges and goals, which, in turn, facilitate a strong sense of community and role playing.
