WildStar Interview

VG247 has published a rather interesting interview with WildStar’s executive producer Jeremy Gaffney. Here’s an excerpt:

Within reason, you’re trying to remove as many restrictions as possible in order to the let the player go as wild as they want to base building, customisation.

Jeremy Gaffney: I think that’s a pretty true statement. We have a mantra to let players play how they want to play. We know the MMO market is made up of a couple of different types of players. Richard Bartle did research back in the days that said some people really love exploring and play games to hunt down the hidden things. Some people are socialisers. Some are all into achievement. So we took that and basically made the path system where you choose what type of thing you like to do and build the world around you.

About 25 percent of the content is scavenger hunts, unlocking the map, or more combat for soldiers. That also applies to the fact that we know there are different brands of people for different leveling some want to play entirely solo. In the US and Europe around 65 percent of people play MMOs primarily as single-player games. Are there fun things to do for people who like to solo, those who like PvE, those who like to kill their friends, PvP, do they like small group play or larger groups? You have to make sure you satisfy as many folk as possible without diluting the whole experience.

If you’re trying to build something for everybody you have to focus on the great experiences, not the mediocre ones.

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Since you’ve had the beta running has the game changed significantly or has the feedback been a refining process?

Jeremy Gaffney: The thing is we do huge changes every month. We’ve been training ourselves to do monthly updates because we think the era of waiting 3-6 six months and then doing a big update is kind of over. We’ve been training ourselves to do large updates every month. We’re in tuning mode right now because we want to be fixing things. But still within that it’s 71 pages of patch notes for last months’ worth of work. But this is important. You not only want to fix the things that are important but we’ve set ourselves up to be churning out large amounts of content so there’s new stuff for people to do, and we’re also refining what’s in there.

We’ve been doing that for the last six months although we haven’t really publicised it too much as a thang because as we get closer people before launch want to have the game proven. As intelligent games designers you have to be thinking to the future. We are not a business where you go out and sell 100,000 boxes and you’re done. We’re a game where you hopefully attract millions of people but then the real question is how long are they going to stay? We’ve seen MMO after MMO that has moved 1, 2, 3 million boxes but how many of them keep those players for any length of time? That’s really the challenge of our industry.