Aion: The Tower of Eternity Game Guides Q&A

Gamasutra had the chance to speak with Aion’s game guide lead Scott Hannus about the recently introduced “game guides”, official wikis that, in the intention of the developers, should help players and improve accessibility while not sacrificing the game’s depth. Here’s an excerpt:

What’s the goal of the Game Guide?

It’s really just to inform players, to provide them with the information they need. You know, MMOs can be very confusing, especially for casual players, so we just want to give them enough information to say, “Hey, you’re this level now. You should go here. You should do this” — just basically to educate them on different things.

That’s one of the things that [about] NCsoft, and the Aion team specifically, is unique. A lot of other MMO companies rely on fansites to provide that information. We have our own team dedicated to doing that for fans, so we try to provide the most accurate in-depth information we can.

Why do it internally?

Well, I think the advantage is that we can actively QA things. We can make sure that we get out the right information, official information. A lot of time with fansites, there’s a lot of speculation about, what it actually does — game mechanics and that kind of thing. So we can work directly with the developers, with production, to understand things that players just have to make assumptions about.