A new studio made up of Blizzard and Riot Games veterans is taking more cues from World of Warcraft than Final Fantasy 14 regarding characters and alts for its new MMO, but that doesn’t mean the team isn’t building something that “fits into your life.”
Following on from the reveal of a new MMO – currently codenamed Ghost – and a fresh studio to make it, Fantastic Pixel Games have held a question-and-answer session to give curious onlookers clarity over what’s coming.
One fan asks if Ghost will allow them to make one character who can learn any job like in Final Fantasy 14 or if we're going the way of World of Warcraft, where class and character are tied together and an alternative character is needed if you want to try something different.
For gameplay design director Brian Holinka – previously WoW's lead combat designer – an RPG is about creating a character. As your class has a lot to do with that character's identity, the team wants the two to be "tied together."
"But we also want to have this ability to progress your alts or play a lot of alts," Holinka says. "And so your progression will probably be more about you, the player, than your individual characters. There's a balance there – it's a tricky problem to say 'how much do you make time investment worthwhile, so it feels like you've made this character more powerful, but at the same time is not a hindrance to you making multiple characters?"
Content design director Candace Thomas – another veteran of World of Warcraft – chimes in to say that one of the things the team likes about Final Fantasy 14 is how seamless it is to swap between classes and how it makes sense. All you have to do is swap your job stone and you're there.
"There are things we could do that are inspired in that vein," Thomas says. "But, ultimately, the thing we like most – and the reason we chose this direction – is embodying the entire fantasy of the character," Thomas says.
"We want to give you the full breadth of that fantasy, and I think the best way to deliver on that is to let you play a lot of different races – play a lot of different fantasies to explore."
Making heaps of accounts to play a range of classes isn't everyone's cup of tea. The developers behind Final Fantasy 14 have said several times that the MMO isn't designed to dominate your life, and the approach to seamless class switching backs it up. While Fantastic Pixel Games isn't following Square Enix regarding character and class flexibility at the time of writing, there's a shared appreciation for not demanding all your time.
"One of the biggest challenges that we're going to try and figure out is that we want the game to fit into your lives," VP of product Kristina Swanenburg says. "We know you have busy lives full of other things to do, but also, we respect how meaningful it is when you've played a game for thousands of hours, and you want to be able to say, 'you can see all the love and devotion I've put into this game.'"
Also, Ghost draws a "big influence" from the classic Planescape CRPG setting.
