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He’snot worried aboutinvestors or publishers.
The hope, he says, is for the game to be arelaxing escapethatpeople can play idly or actively.
Responses edited for clarity and length.
What have you been doing day to day?
Andrew Gower: That’s quite an interesting story.
I had some really good ideas on how to make it much, much easier to make games.
And I actually started making the game to prove the engine.
Making a computer game is a big, expensive proposition.
No one’s gonna use an engine unless it’s proven.
And then you’ve got a bit of a chicken and egg situation.
So I originally started making a completely different game which I might still go back to one day.
Are you making another MMO?
I hope you’re making another MMO.
Literally every single person who spoke to me said they hoped I was making another MMO.
So eventually, I realized that perhaps I should make another.
But even then, it was quite a slow burn.
Where does your concept or vision of what an MMO should look like come from?
I know you’ve mentioned, for example, inspiration from some MUDs, multi-user dungeons.
I see similar DNA in this.
It’s not just RuneScape.
It’s all the things that I grew up with, you know.
It’s old school MUDs, it’s point-and-click adventure games, it’s tabletop RPGs.
But we started thinking that was going a bit too far and we took that away.
But graphically, stylistically, that sort of thing.
And that’s just because I love, love tabletop RPGs.
We’ve been playing this one behind me every single lunch break for well over a year.
It’s just what we like.
One thing I was very, very keen on with this game was thinking about the starting experience.
Looking at professions like blacksmithing and woodcutting and so on, is this stuff just in your DNA?
When we were making this game, we didn’t look specifically at any previous game.
And there’re certain things that just work really well in that context.
But we’re very keen not to just be the same game again.
Are all the professions available at once?
Do they interact, like with resources from one fueling another?
We’ve tried to make the professions link into one another quite a bit.
We’ve tried to mix it up a bit.
They’re also linked to the episode structure we’ve got.
So you don’t get every single one straightaway.
As you go through the game, more and more become available.
One thing I was very, very keen on with this game was thinking about the starting experience.
MMOs can be quite overwhelming.
But it does in a way where it feels like a reward.
We’ve very carefully designed it so that the most efficient option keeps changing.
And it makes it fairly obvious.
You don’t have to do the most efficient option, you could keep doing the same thing.
I’m very keen to cater to players who want to explore and discover.
I wanted people to have a reason to have more than one character.
It’s always nice to have different characters.
And all three characters can do magic.
That’s one thing I should probably mention.
They can all do range, they can all do melee.
But I did want you to have to make a decision.
What’s the wiggle room for customizing your class versus mastering the abilities assigned to it?
Yeah, it’s more about mastering the class as it’s assigned to you.
We’ve got a lot more work to do on that side of things.
But we also don’t want to make the combat really, really complicated and twitchy.
The whole game is meant to be a fairly relaxing experience.
Tell me more about the open world.
What’s the motivation to explore?
What am I going to find and do?
The rooms all connect together; it’s very easy to move between one and the other.
I’m very keen to cater to players who want to explore and discover.
And each time you explore a new room, it maps it out for you onto the map.
So it does it all automatically.
So you get this lovely feeling of exploration.
So you’ve got the option to’t just walk anywhere you like from one location to another.
And you’ve got the option to choose which way you want to go next.
With the magic system, I’m assuming we’ll unlock teleports to get around faster.
One of the key differences is we’re probably not going to do auto-recurring payments.
How big are the rooms in terms of how much time you’ll spend in one before moving on?
That’s something we mathematically worked out.
They’re all carefully, carefully balanced to be just right.
And just to clarify, looking at the paid premium pass, that unlocks all the areas and content.
Is it more similar to RuneScape membership?
One of the key differences is we’re probably not going to do auto-recurring payments.
But we feel that auto-recurring subscriptions are a very hard sell these days.
It’s not a commitment that you’re gonna have to pay that forever.
It gives you access to absolutely everything we’ve released up to that date.
