Flying Lab Software on Pirates, part 8
Maginn: So what do players enjoy? Let's do more of that. Players really, really like Fortaleza. Fortaleza is our supernatural dungeon. You go through and fight these voodoo bosses and it's incredibly difficult. And, apparently, it's a huge amount of fun because people always tell us, "I love Fortaleza! Do more of that." So we are.
Remove the necessity to grind. You don't have to grind through the levels in our game, you have to grind for money. Now granted, it's not as bad as some games. I used to buy the seafood stew in Final Fantasy XI and I would grind for six hours to pay for one hour's worth of playing. So it's not that bad, but people grind constantly to pay for their PvP ships. We don't want people to do that so we're making it so you don't have to, much the same way that WoW did with the Shattered Sun dailies.
Acknowledging player successes and making them feel like a hero in the story. Too often there are ways to make you feel the Chuck of the game. There are NPCs in almost every game who will talk smack about you. Talk about how you're not a very important person. And they'll do that when you're at the max level and you can kill them by sneezing on them. The little voice tracks that Blood Elves play in WoW when you click on them drive me crazy. Because I'm looking at these level 56 NPCs who say, "What do you want?" And I'm thinking, "I could kill you. I could kill you so easily if you weren't protected by being green, I could make you dead." So you should feel like a hero when you're playing a game.
This is sort of a summary. We want to focus on low-risk PvP engagements and we want to put a lot of people in them at once because big battles are fun. We want the economy to feel empowering. We want it to feel like when you dabble in it, it's really fun and exciting and you get cool stuff out of it. If you never look at it, you never care. We don't want grinding. We want you to do daily missions that are interesting and reward you with much more, disproportionate to what the amount of time is that you invested. So if what you want to do is PvP, you can do a daily and you have paid for your PvP for the day. And we want to give you a lot more recognition. We want to make you feel like you are an important person in the Caribbean. We want you to feel like you're the governor, you're the hero, you're the notorious pirate, you're the guy who, when they speak your name in Tortuga, everyone shudders.
So what does this mean in the long term, the very long term? Totally new world map. New areas of the world. New fighting schools. New ships and new ways to customize your ships. My example for this is that I want to be able to turn my pirate ship into a Reaver ship from A Pirate's Life. Custom PvP events. We want to create Capture the Flag. We want to create – our favorite of this, and I don't know if we can actually do it but, god, I would love to do it – a ship soccer game where we model a big, floating soccer ball with ship physics and you bump it around with your ships and sort of try to knock it into the goal. I think we could do this. I'm not sure, but I think we can. Social roleplay events. It turns out that the difference between a PvP event and a wedding is not actually as large as you might think.
Real ownership of the game world. We want you to feel like, when you capture a port, it's your port. You own that port.
So that's where we're going. %Gallery-11461%
