Asmongold and Ghostcrawler Debate His Upcoming MMO

[Music] Hello everybody welcome to another episode of steak and eggs and as always I'm joined with u and teone and this week we're joined with somebody very special Greg Street uh welcome to the show how you doing thanks really glad to be here of course oh my God okay well yeah I mean of course and and now you're involved with Game Dev what made you want to start your own Studio cuz like obviously you worked previously at Warcraft or Blizzard at Warcraft and then work with Riot on the MMO and probably the League of Legends as well also I believe like what made you want to go and make your own Studio instead I really appreciated all the places I got to work I got to work with great teams and great games and I was really fortunate in this field to not ever like really struggle for funding which is a big big challenge but I feel like all of the three places I worked were slow and they're slow because they're big companies and I think big companies just by definition move slowly and I felt like you know we could make a game a lot faster than this if we just kind of got rid of all of the approval layers in the way so maybe I'm wrong and we'll fall flat on our face but that's the theory is that we can move really fast so how fast are you moving then what what is the exact day that ghost is going to come out July 17th of 20 no I don't know I believe no and you know if there was a date like that it's because for any company it's because like marketing picture sure the devs don't know until you get a lot closer because we have all these assumptions and right now we're in the process of starting to to play test them and to see what's working but but stuff's going to change and we want to have a really open Play test process and players are going to tell us you know this feature sounded cool on paper kind of sucks so we want to have time to to make it good before we actually launch when do you think the first play test is going to be if it was up to me it' be really soon I think the team is a little more conservative they're like wait wait wait let's like have some you know better art in the game c yeah yeah no doubt but it it it will be a lot earlier than a lot of games um let themselves be play oh no I was going to ask a little bit about the art right because obviously you know with league and wow they are very stylized games I saw you did a tweet and you talked a little bit about it is you were saying somewhere in the middle what's your philosophy on art style for a game like this because you mentioned you wanted ghost to be playable indefinitely right for 10 20 years how do you make an art style that last for 10 to 20 years that is an advantage of a stylized an art style is a little bit stylized like I'm not saying we'll go World of Warcraft level or certainly not like fortnite level but when you try to go photo realistic that ages really really quickly it takes forever anyway so we will probably end up being not photo realistic we'll be a little more a little more stylized um if I had to guess a little more mature than kind of the World of Warcraft look but but we'll see okay yeah I guess that kind of makes a lot of sense and you're starting to see other games that are trying to figure out where on that spectrum they want to be on so yeah I do think that I mean especially making those hyper realistic games like I remember seeing a game in 2014 and oh wow these Graphics are so amazing and then by 2018 it's like oh it's another game right and yeah I think you're definitely right about that so uh Greg you talked a little bit about kind of being able to develop things very quickly and you know like the pacing of content development how it's responding to the community and I think like let's be real there's been a huge controversy recently with power world people talking about AI how do you feel like AI fits into game development and how do you feel like you know cuz you've been in the industry for what 25 years now it's such a long time how do you feel like it's going to evolve the industry how do you think it's going to change it and do you think that like you will try to use different versions of that on ghost or are you not sure yet you're waiting to see kind of how the technology evolves there's definitely places we will use AI I think the the big question is around the generative AI where it goes and like pulls text or images off of the internet and you know may or may not violate copyrights or steal artist work or stuff like that so we we won't have any of that AI in um in ghost at least we're not planning on it where we might do stuff is you know things like armor fitting or interpolating animations or maybe even like making the grass on the hillside look random rather than uh placed by an artist but I don't think we're going to go the route of the NPC we don't have to write any dialoges the NPC magically says interesting things like I just don't know if the technolog is there yet well the technology is there for the NPC to say things it's not there for the NPC to say interesting things yeah yeah that's that's really where the problem is and uh obviously like with making a a new MMO with a new studio and everything like an MMO and I'm pretty sure you would understand us better than I do so correct me if I'm wrong it seems like ano is like the hardest type of game to make how do you do that with a small Studio I think you're right I've I've said that before because an MMO has to have almost every every kind of system you can imagine it needs rewards it needs a good camera it needs good Network code it needs PVP combat um what we're doing is starting with like experts in each area so we have someone who's just doing ux we'll have someone who's just doing VFX someone who's just doing audio and then based on that we might be able to Outsource some of the other components but if not we'll just higher up what we need for those particular Fields right okay starting small having really good tools hopefully will let us do a lot with what we have so you bring in an expert in each different area and then that person kind of builds out the team that they need for that section of the game exactly okay I think that makes a lot of sense and and I think that one really big difference between like you know you're doing and with for example like a blizzard or Riot or one of these other big companies and I think the only real parallel that we see to this right now is ashes of creation I'm sure I think that you mentioned them actually on the last video that you did the live stream and uh you're completely open book you're talking about everything like just having an open conversation and I'm I'm wondering cuz like I used to read the dev water coolers back in the day with like you know M Pandaria Etc like did that kind of inform your decision to do that or how did you arrive at the decision to just completely have an open book in terms of development oh 100% like going all the way back to Age of Empires like we're talking about I used to say we're not sure if this I don't know if this civilization bonus is good or not let's ask the community what they think yeah and you know Microsoft and everyone kind of freaked out about that it's like well you can't go ask ask players they'll think we're incompetent if we you know have ask them their opinion but I've just come to believe over time that why would you not want people like poking holes in your ideas or making suggestions or saying yeah we're not really excited about that feature we'd more excited about another feature I mean the reason people don't want to do it is it takes a lot of bandwidth you'll probably get some you know hateful [ __ ] out there who say things that that you know you don't want to hear um but really it I mean if we're going to launch a game game and players are going to not like aspects of it I'd rather know that before we launch the game you know yep so how much of your game kind of like uh obviously I've seen a lot of discourse about the red and blue zones and I'm actually really curious that like how much of that is open to interpretation by the player base like whenever that first play test comes out what do you what kind of information are you hoping to get out of the players I mean it depends on how much you know like how robust everything is at that point but what we really hope to hear are things like a player saying this Blue Zone feels too randomly generated it doesn't feel like there's any any love there there aren't interesting things it feels very um computer made and dead or they don't players aren't sure why they should like migrate from a Blue Zone to a red zone and back because the the core Loop isn't telling them well maybe you should go to a red zone now because it has a a reward you want or something like that I think both of those would be excellent sources of feedback just like kind of like is this how much of this is a guided experience versus how much of it am I trying to like just figure out myself and kind of just you know take a shotgun approach to I guess you could say yeah we really want exploration to be a big thing at the same time World of Warcraft was so you know got so popular because it offers a really directed experience you you step out of you know your your quest Zone and immediately there's a questgiver saying well why don't you go here next there's another quest to follow and you can just scoop up Quest and make it all the way to max level and even Beyond just doing that so if we are asking players to go out and explore a little more and kind of see what's over the next Hill that's a different experience than than World of War crash kind of quest based system it's probably a little more like um um Legend of Zelda the the two most recent games and now a word from our sponsors hi there for tire bomber pilot asmin gold here to tell you about today's sponsor War Thunder featuring over 2,500 tanks planes 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available for new and returning players who are signing back on for the first time in over 6 months the bonus pack includes rewards such as the exclusive vehicle decorator eagle hour 100,000 silver lions and 7 Days of Premium these bonuses are available for a limited time only so check it out soon thanks War Thunder for sponsoring our podcast you play Elden ring yeah yeah t what do you think about the quest in that game I mean it's awesome the parts I don't like about it are you know keeping a notepad de to me or something to write it all down but yeah the way they're not in your face the way it feels like really woven into the into the world the way you can like Miss Quest and even after your third or fourth playthrough you're finding new stuff like I think that's really cool and like what other games like because obviously bra Belden ring like and you know maybe a couple of other ones so far what other games You' been playing recently that you feel like has really kind of given you insight into like kind of how you want to kind of move your game oh wow yeah trying to think going a little back again um I've played a ton recently um we have a lot of I mean a lot of influence from from valheim because that was kind of the less hardcore survival game that came out during the pandemic and everyone was wanting something kind of cozy to do with their friends so we 300 hours in it yeah yeah we've looked at that game a ton um there's a couple of oh I wish I could remember there's a couple of combat games we've looked at that do a pretty good job of um they're not great games so I don't necessarily want to say they good with combat that we're trying to do so we've been looking at those a lot a big conversation with MMOs is tab targeting versus uh action combat where are you with that we're I mean we're much closer to tab targeting than than actual and the reason I say that is going back to elen ring which I'd say has much more action combat you can be the guy with a pot on your head and no armor and really really tough bosses because you're so good at execution let me to us that doesn't feel like an MMO an MMO feels like you need to like get the good gear to have a chance to beat the boss and if gear feels really optional we worry it it just won't have that that kind of RPG feel so we want to be more action in the sense that you can move around the battlefield a little bit and positioning matters and you're not just going to you know sit there swinging at the Target over and over again but not so action that like you can Dodge everything and take zero damage yeah okay that makes sense I I feel like there was a lot of like classic wow and old school wow bosses that kind of Follow That same Paradigm where it's like you can do it undergeared but you sure can't do it with no gear so I think that definitely makes sense and like obviously with with managing player expectations do you think that this is a a problem with doing the open development strategy or is it kind of you know a double-edged sword basically like you're going have some advantages with some disadvantages oh yeah I mean there are going to be players out right who say oh if it's tab targeting I'm not going to play it you know try they're just going to say that yeah but you know we tried like healing is hard without some level of targeting if you don't Target with healing you end up with a lot of like smart heals or area heals and there's not it's not like super satisfying that way yeah I I played new world yeah I know and uh actually I'm kind of curious about uh you know like obviously you've been in games forever I'm curious what mistakes have you seen games make in the past that you feel like you're trying to avoid with making ghost oh gosh I mean we could talk for hours on a really big one that drove our development philosophy is that a lot of MMOs come out with a great level up experience because that's what the devs focused on and that's what was play tested and then you get to max level and you're like well now what and the Gs are like well give us 3 months and we'll make new content for it and so we really really want to avoid that we want to make sure our end game is solid and the only way to make sure it's solid is by letting players play test the end game and so whenever you talk about endgame like end game is really all about the systems like the systems are the driving factor I feel like for almost all of the endgame like at least experiences that I've had in MMOs and like how do you balance between you know syst and just kind of raw um like just spontaneous gameplay like exploration type type stuff it really is driven to a high degree by the rewards because particularly at at endgame players get very focused on what do I do to get that next power increase whether it's a new piece of gear or or whatever and so whever the rewards Point them is kind of where players go and if you teach players hey wandering around in the open world world is very inefficient they they'll just stop doing it and if you tell them oh Mythic rating That's Where It's At they'll like you know kill themselves doing Mythic rating so we just need a rewards design that says for example rating may be the most efficient way to gear up but it's not the only way and if you want to just kind of um push blue shards or run through the hardest blue shards that is also a good way to get ingame rewards it's kind of like a Timeless aisle back in the day a little bit like that yeah Candace brings that up all the time that is a great example um and I don't say thatly I know blizzard has also tried to recreate essy to great effect but it feels like a good endgame it's and it also it's not too directed A lot of it is I'm just going to kind of see what happens I'm going to try this and and maybe I'll be rewarded for it yeah I think that makes a lot of sense and like obviously like with MMOs MMOs are a very interesting genre because you have such a massive spectrum of people that are trying to play them you have people that are trying to play them like it's an ort and people are trying to play them 3 hours a week and so like how do you balance between making content for pro players versus making content for like casual players and just like in general like you remember like with Wow right it was always pvpers versus Raiders and stuff like that like how how do you deal with that it's it's a bit of a it's almost like a cop out answer because right to have a big enough audience to kind of make an MMO feel like an MMO you need to you need to appeal to a lot of different players you can't just just say we're the MMO for like hardcore pvpers because that may be a very small audience so you just have to think about what is satisfying to different groups of players and how can you deliver an experience that that they will enjoy now again we can't be everything to everyone we're probably not going to be a a professional esport for example but we think we can offer um at least a competitive PVE scene that may be worth streaming we think we can have PVP because that's you know it's important to a lot of players um and just make sure that if all you care about is like I don't know hanging out with your friends and blue shards you're not ever going to run ratings you may have less to do but you'll still have something to do you may just run out of content if you don't participate in in you know whole swaths of the game yeah I think that's true I'm actually kind of curious like what's your philosophy because like it's always good like so I think that MMOs like one thing that's good is to have people be able to do what they want to do but also have like really great incentives to just kind of you know come a little bit out of their shell right you have like for example like a new Wild player they don't really like playing with other people but they really want to kill hogers so they're going to have to get into a group and you know do something or deadmines right and they hit that wall like how do you how do you feel like approaching that friction is like a healthy like where's that healthy balance between allowing people to play the game the way they want and then also creating friction that can feel good to overcome as terms of like being in a big group or you know being able to like maybe do a profession that gives you an advantage or PVP or anything like that I I think the friction is important and I know as devs it's really easy for us to kind of give in to the players players are frustrated because they want to achieve something and and there's a barrier in the way so it's really tempting to say well let's just remove the barrier and maybe they'll have more fun but sometimes it's that you know it's that struggle that makes it so rewarding and the reason you know killing Millennia and Elden ring feels like an accomplishment is cuz she's freaking hard and so not everything in ghost needs to be freaking hard but occasionally you should come up against bosses that you can't solo and yeah you can skip them or you can see if there's other players around who want to jump in with you oh I've got a really good question so like you remember back in Legion where they had the Mage Tower and like you're starting to see like a lot of these other MMOs that have like these solo challenges like run ape has a lot of these for example too and like how do you like do you feel like an MMO needs to have those solo challenges or do you want to have a focus on group challenges like traditional raid content CU I'm starting to see a bit of a Divergence here with different MMOs that are being released I mean My Philosophy tends to be very much on the group side because okay that's the magic of MMOs is there's other players around you know there are great single player RPGs like play you know play B Elden ring or balers gate offer a great single player experience what a massive multiplayer game offers is lots and lots of other players so and you know I may lose the fight on this and and there may be other people on the team or players who really pressure us to create a little more solo content but I worry that's kind of a distraction from the the heart of the game which is either friends or randos just kind of grouping up to um over overcome something well how many people how many friends how many randos do you think it would be good for a raid are we talking about 40 people eight people like Final Fantasy 20 like retail wow where are we at it's funny because there are reasons why smaller raids are more hardcore and there's reasons why larger raids are more hardcore yeah challenge yeah you probably know what I'm going to say here Challen is like everyone has to be on their game and there's no room for like you know your buddy from work who's not great at the game but is really excited to come along like when you did core there was room for people like that because you needed 40 but you didn't need all 40 to be at the top of their game um players kind of burnt out on that because the logistics of of getting that group together week after week was hard but overall I think I'm personally more of a fan of of larger raids but I think there's a there's an argument that larger raids are actually more forgiving that way and I don't know if we can literally do 40 that is a lot of people but I don't think we'll build a raid size around six well I you know my vote I I I mean to be honest yeah 40 men raids logistical nightmare but damn it's pretty cool to have 40 people in the same place doing the same thing right like there's a certain sense of spectacle to it that I I just really enjoy and so that's definitely good going through these dungeons exact game can offer that experience and like you talk about an army going through like whenever like if you look at a VIN diagram between people whose favorite movie was Lord of the Rings and people that play MMOs there is a huge over overlap there and so you're talking about these like massive battles like World PVP where does that stand I mean I'm pretty sure this is going to be a red shard situation in your game and like what's the scale of that that you feel is fulfilling what's the scale of that that your team really wants to hit the funny thing about those really big battles is they're not super satisfying like even if you can get the frame rate decent you can't balance PVP so that oneon-one is fair and also like five onone is fair so those big battles just tend to be really really chaotic and so where I'm going with that is we may offer it and just not worry about the balance aspect of it and if someone is really good at stunning whole groups of enemies well you know what kudos to that class you're just being really good at that situation um we would love for World PVP to be more about objective control and maybe even like politics like my guild wants control of this mine rather than let's just gank everyone we see who's who's not part of our group how do you feel about territory control because like obviously territory control like for example new worlds use territory control recently uh there's been a couple of other games that use it obviously you know games like rust of course are based completely around territory control like how do you feel like because like obviously this is like another like balancing in a lot of cases like what it defaults down to is like Pro players that are controlling the territories and Casual players that are trying to access the territories h do you feel like that's a integral part of of your game do you think that that could be a good part of it or is it something you kind of want to avoid I think it could be part of it if it works out it will be because resources in our game are valuable and and so players want them the challenge of territory control I think again it comes down to rewards like yeah yeah you have to the first question a player is going to ask is what do I get for controlling the territory it's like well do you get you know a star next to your name or do you get valuable resources or do you get better Loot and then the next question you have to ask is well if someone already controls the territory what's my reward for attempting to to take control back because usually even if you have that kind of territorial control someone wins and then it's a stalemate until there's some kind of like you know reset from the from the game standpoint so I think the question asked is like what do I get from doing this activity and does that make it fun enough to participate in yeah I think it's just that simple like I I I like your philosophy that pretty much rewards Drive gameplay is I I think that that's extremely true it's true in wow I think it's true in a lot of other MMOs where like obviously whoa why is everybody doing this well because it gives the best gear in the game that's why like it's pretty pretty simple right and like ter versus Southshore a lot it was fun like it is for everyone for like an hour and then you're like but am I accomplishing anything it's fun you know I G a little bit when I like kill the you know the tar but then then nothing comes of it I don't like get exper erience or or or Loot and nothing changes in the world and after a while you're like this is pointless you're not going to go and do this for like a month right you'll do it for a few days there's the novelty of it and then after that people move on and it's nice to be able to be able to do that but it's not like that should be a you know the default mode of gameplay I I agree with you um I feel like with with like a lot of MMOs and I don't know if you kind of feel the same way with this but for the longest time it feels like every MMO is trying to be wow everybody every MMO is trying to be wow it's trying to be and recapture the magic that wow had and I find this to be very problematic because you're constantly looking in the past to see what people are going to want in the future you know you're constantly trying to chase after something that happened 20 years ago in a completely different world what do you think is different about an MMO that succeeds in 2024 or 2025 the problem problem from my point of view is that MMOs are ungodly expensive to make so if you're going to ask your publisher to give you $100 million to make of game and then you say well we don't know if players are going to like it or not that that suddenly looks you know pretty risky but if you say hey we're going to make it a lot like World of Warcraft the kids love World of Warcraft that becomes a much easier cell so it's like of course course the reason we think we have a chance here is we're not going to like wait till the end we'll be able to say along the way hey players are really enjoying this game they keep asking us like when's it going to launch when can they play more it feels like we're on to something here maybe now is time for us to launch and and and do big but that allows us a lot more room to experiment along the way yeah I think that makes sense and uh like leading up to launch publisher like being able to get the money for it uh so is your game going to be paid to win yes oh thank God all right finally Tech you'll be able to play it thank God I mean and that's that's the big question right with all of these new games right is like you have everything about this game looks amazing cuz you're totally right like how are you going to recoup these costs and there's been conversation about that with blue protocol recently thrown in Liberty and I think there's another game as well that's an MMO that's coming out that like that's like kind of the uh you know the oh but wait uh what's your philosophy on monetization how do how do you want to monetize ghost in an Ideal World so to start off I was totally joking about about pay to win sorry oh damn next one right now if we had to guess we would much rather do something that feels like a traditional box sale or maybe a sub um and probably not the um freeo playay with microtransactions approach like that's been done I think players are a little a little tired of it it can start to feel like a lot of the development effort goes into new things to sell to players rather than the core content of the game so and and I don't know we'll see what the world looks like when we're closer to ship but that's you know if I had if I had the luck and answer today it would probably be that it is crazy because I I am 1 million per tired of the free-to-play approach to MMOs I don't like it I like being told that like okay you buy the game pay your subscription and you have a complete game no other Advantage can be purchases besides maybe I guess store mounts but other than that I I love just the you buy the game get a sub and you're good go yeah I think Subs started to lose their favor I don't know five or 10 years ago but since then like now everyone has a sub to Netflix and everyone has a sub to Amazon and Game Pass and and again maybe the tide will turn and there'll be some some other monetization people are excited about in a few years yeah I I cannot shudder to imagine what that could possibly be you know maybe maybe finally by then nfts will have caught on and people will have gotten into that definitely I mean well and that's another thing right is like there's a lot of these like buzzword but you talked a little bit about having a game that like applies to everybody and a game that's like uh you know kind of appealing to a lot of different people for different ways and you know this isn't it's not really as popular now because a lot of people brought it up like the whole idea of like a metaverse and whenever I think of a metaverse what do I think of I think of World of Warcraft I think of an MMO right and so like do you feel like a game like ghost can be kind of like that extra like second space that people people can play and like be on in the same way that people use Discord or uh you know like other games like that I feel like the best example of a game that's actually kind of transcended and done a real metaverse is Roblox and I'm curious to see like you know cuz like I could see blue shards having a form of that functionality yeah I think when the magic happens in those games it's because because you you know you finish up work or school or whatever and you say I just want to jump online and see what my friends are doing and you could even do that through Discord or steam or something like that but that's when it it starts to take on a social space when you're like I'm going to go see what my friends are doing let's see what kind of mief we can get into tonight that's a different experience than saying I'm going to you know I'm going to go on to Elden ring and see if I can get a new sword or something yeah I I definitely think so and like one question is like you know talking about Elden ring getting a new sword and I recently noticed this I started playing Monster Hunter recently it was a great game I played Elden ring as well and I I've noticed that games that are subscription based usually it takes a lot longer to grind stuff like I'm going to just be honest right it takes a while and like I'm curious like what is your philosophy on like rare items like how how do you feel like rare items legendary items like in in your game how how would you get thunderfury in your game how would you get ashes of aarm when as as developers I think even as players when we talk about the grind it's usually when the treadmill is kind of too in your face when it feels like I need a thousand shards whatever to complete this legendary and I pretty much can figure out that I get a Shard an hour so I'm looking at a thousand hours of grinding ahead naturally players you know we all know how these games work behind the scenes there's random drops and I think it just depends on how in your face is it if it's the kind of thing where I play and occasionally I get some shards but I can't kind of math it out to oh the drop rate is X I think it tends to feel a little better I think there's a lot of room in our game for really rare drops um you know Chase items um Invincible you know ashar are like super rare drops compared to um um Shadow more which is like oh I have to like get these number of items and I pretty much can math out how many of those it's going to going to take yes I've gotten both of those and all of the above and it was oh my God getting Shadow warn was a hell of a lot easier it definitely was so I I definitely understand and appreciate that and I think that yeah it's kind of like whenever you can see The Man Behind The Machine people start to lose interest and they're like oh I'm actually just on a I'm actually just a rat in the cage oh my God I can't believe it happened again we all know that there's a man you don't want to see it like I'm on the the Caribbean ride I know it's fake but that doesn't mean I want Disney to like turn the lights on and let me see all the you know the strings and wires and exit signs and stuff oh yeah I recently saw there was an add-on in in like I think it's like wrath the L King where people have the dollar amount of how much gold is worth right next to the trade window and like that leads me to another question is like obviously with a lot of these uh with a lot of these games you've got botting you've got cheating how do you deal with that because I feel like this is a play it's happening with like every game especially now that things are being automated I see people running like 72 instances of one game on one PC it's crazy it's a yeah it's a really hard thing to combat because on the one hand you want the player economy to mean something like a very easy way to stop it is to say well players can't trade anything then maybe the only Bing would be do you want to buy an account or something the reason botting often occurs is because things have value whether it's gold or stones of Jordan or or whatever so if it could be automated now it's has a monetary value and someone's willing to to pay real money for it um it it is hard to combat there's not easy ways to do it um freeo playay games tend to be a little worse at it there's very low barrier to just like making a million accounts than um at least something we have to like sign in with an email and put down a little bit of cash to start a account yeah no I agree with you I mean like and also I think it's about how much people are able to interact with each other have you ever played Poe path of XO oh yeah I've gone in on that game so much and it's like I know there's people rming in that game but like it never really affects me like I never really see it or feel it in the same way that you do with other games that have like large scale economies and stuff like that so I kind of see what you mean and like you mention it's like the seeing The Man Behind the the curtain if you see a lot of bots running around or you go to the auction house and you see that everything is massively inflated it kind of breaks that suspension of disbelief that this is kind of virtual economy and it also makes you feel like man I'm going to farm for like 6 hours and then somebody else is going to bot for 6 hours and they're going to be sleeping I'm going to be working and we're both going to have the same item you know it kind of makes people feel like their time is uh worthless and I think that's like that's like one of the worst things to happen in like an MMO is like whenever you you feel like the time that you've invested in the game doesn't matter anymore like that's the worst thing and you mentioned earlier about like kind of Publishers and you know like trying to make sure that you hedge your bets and I've seen a lot of Studios like obviously uh you know your studio with making ghosts and you know you see ashes of creation and there's a lot of these like very small Studios that are coming up and they're not going through the traditional means of you know big publisher like they did in the uh the the Xbox One or the GameCube era right uh what do you why do you think that's happening there's I mean gosh it's such a big topic yeah there are strengths and weaknesses to like signing with a big publisher that you know the strength is you get all of their expertise whether it's you know things like marketing localization like I think players sometimes forget how critical good localization is meaning you want to you know get the game translate in all these different countries a small Dev team does not want to like stack their team with this is our expert in the Polish language this is our expert in French um even though those are super valuable to the gab being successful so signing the publisher gets you all that but then it also gets all the overhead of well now the publisher has to say yes to everything down to like what's the name of our game going to be and how do we Market it and when can we launch and what platforms are we on um but traditionally the alternative to that was you sell fund either bu you know Kickstarter which tends to have pretty small budgets or you get um investors usually in the form of of um you know someone gives you a little bit of money and they want a return so if you take very long to make the game they start to get impatient and those startups are always kind of in um funding mode and that's not something I'm great at or very excited to do like I want to make a video game not like constantly be getting seed rounds so the you know the opportunity we had was getting um a company that basically said look we'll we'll completely fund your your development but we're not going to be a traditional publisher kind of telling you what to do you you still have full creative control and I was like this sounds great yeah yeah I think that I mean and and really like it is a bit of a selfish question I asked because obviously like we started our Publishing Company Mad Mushroom and I'm curious like kind of you know from being in the space for so long like what do you think is the best thing for somebody like me or for us to do in order to like enable Indie and small developers to do their best work that's a great question um I think anything that we can do to kind of take care of the crap that those smaller Studios really don't want to deal with like certification for platforms for consoles is is awful things like localization accessibility like all of that is important but not traditionally the way a small Studio wants to staff up so I think thinking about you know offthe shelf solutions for stuff like that or ways to um Outsource or or crowdfund even um we're talking about this the other day I have a LoveHate relationship with with add-ons um like UI add-ons because I the arms race aspect but one of the things we really love is how the community can kind of Step Up and add accessibility options for like different types of color blindness or font size or anything like that um a small Studio really struggles to offer all of those options but once you kind of unlock the ability for end users to mastera of UI you get a lot of that stuff um not not quite for free but certainly um you get some of it you think uh ghost is going to have add-on functionality again who knows we're a long way from ship but if I had to guess today I would say we will allow a lot of add-ons that let you customize things the way you want but not a lot of add-ons to kind of make combat rotations easier like you know if we do anything like a week or us it would be built in and not you know a mandatory add-on that you have to have because the game doesn't give you enough information about what's really going on oh that's so good to hear I watch people that raid and they have the we cor on and it's like some sort of like a torture thing where they're like playing air horns and they're saying different words constantly like what is this so yes I'm I'm very very happy to see that and uh know shade to we oras it's it's awesome software and you know I think solving a need that the game by itself isn't solving and that's not to say ghost just needs we ORS built in I think it's more about can we build Ghost in such a way that the combat Isn't So dependent on oh that debuff just dropped off you better freaking get it back on the boss or you're you know you're going to wipe yeah I mean people wouldn't use it if it didn't work I mean that's really what it comes down to yeah I well I think that like one really big indicator is like there are certain fights where there are things that are internal timers and then there's also things where there is like an external timer that you can see that is just like visual like for example the boss having an energy bar or something like that that you don't really need a third party resource for and I feel like that's something that games used to do a lot of and now we're finally starting to see them do more of it where there's like more just blatant visual indicators that a more observant player can kind of pick up on I think like Final Fantasy even Destiny do a better job than in World of Warcraft about hey you're standing in the fire get out of the fire right um and I can pick on WS I worked on for so long some of that's a limitation of the of the game some of it's just the the you know the taste of the game makers to not be too overt about I you could take it too far I think um gosh was it oh I'm blanking on the game now um they would put like just red target indicators like don't stand on the red target indicator well L St has that um and also Final Fantasy has well they have uniform Target indicators and it's like yeah I I I think that like yeah giving people too much information can kind of feel like you are in a uh you know you're on a on a ride at Universal Studios or something like that and now a word from our 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is in the description and thank you vessie for sponsoring our podcast what have you learned from like working on League that would give you insight into an MMO a big one is the um the champion design like those those characters have a lot of depth with relatively few abilities like traditionally four abilities it often creeps up a lot larger than that today but that's still a lot fewer abilities than your average MMO has and you can still make a lot of interesting combat situations you know really high skill check and a lot of um a lot of depth with relatively few abilities I think not to say that our classes will be as as you know as small as League champions but I think there's hope there that you can do a lot with less so is that something cuz like I I think about that a lot that's a really good point because like you think about a game like elen ring for example think about how many different things you can do in that game but how many things basically come down to left click right if you want to do an attack it's like you're doing a situational left click right and like how much of that are you going to implement into ghost like in terms of uh you know attacks that are modified by let's say if you're moving or not or attacks that are modified if you're jumping or not or something like that uh is that a philosophy that you want to see added into the game or do you want to have more traditional abilities like you know World of Warcraft well especially like with classic right where it's like you just use the Ability and then it happens this is I mean this is we're talking about this right now I hads on this today of um can we do more with like Combos and and and you know positional and situational attacks so it's not just hitting the buttons as soon as they come off cool down like uh Brian hinka our our league gameplay designer talks about world workcraft just kind of Stand and Deliver like you stand there and you hit and you hit and you hit it doesn't feel like a real Combat or even a you know doesn't feel like a a combat in a lot of games where there's some movement around and you're dodging and you're charging and you're getting behind the target you're just kind of sitting there and and whacking it with your weapon and looking for um my buff fell off so I need to like hit it again to get the bu back on again is a lot of the wow gameplay I know and like I'm it it's I remember I watched like there was this one guy and he did a series of of like going through classic wow and he was a league player and he said all wow is is standing and hitting and it was like yeah yeah exact and like I'm sure that like people would think that and like yeah sure there's more nuances to it than that but at the same time yeah it does have an element of that and I think that it's like how do you create that V responsive combat that something like Monster Hunter something like elen ring something like any of these other action combat games devil make cry uh has that everybody wants to have but in an MMO it's like well you can't have the boss get staggered by every attack when there's 40 people hitting it right so like how yeah how do you how do you balance that we talked today about is there um you think of and again I I'm not trying to bust on wow it's a wonderful years it's just a good point of reference um things like blood lust in wow you generally hit the second the pull starts unless the there's some boss mechanic that tells you really should save it for another time but there are other games that'll do like a stagger mechanic or you've got youve got you've got the boss in a weaken position right now so now is when you really want to kind of pile on the cool Downs um that's something we talked about just today do we want a a combat that's a little more about get the boss to the vulnerable state and that's where when you really want to pile on the damage yeah and it's like is the vulnerable state I'm kind of curious what your Insight is on this too because you have certain games that it's like it's everything is scripted in terms of like the vulnerable state will occur at 4 minutes and 34 seconds into the fight so you want to make sure that you're using your 1 minute and 30 second Trinkets and so it's like it's very formulaic in that way and then you have other games where like for example lost Arc you have a stagger bar stagger meter and poe2 for example is adding this too so like how much of that do you think is good to have it be dynamic based off of how players are doing the fight in real time versus having it be kind of programmed because if you have it be dynamic then you can have a bunch of people try to like game the fight and you have it be programmed then you can have it be boring they're they're testing different skills and I don't know that one is necessarily wrong right or wrong the you can test game knowledge and timing and and that sort of thing you can also test reflexes and the ability to detect um new information I tend to be a little bit as a player I enjoy the more Dynamic situation rather than someone saying Okay the key to this fight is waiting till minute 4 and then pushing this one button again it is a skill check it's just in my opinion less interesting yeah have you have you played lost Arc at all MH oh yeah okay cuz like yeah a lot of these examples you're giving me like these are things that lost Arc has and they've tried doing and like you know that game has some really incredible raid en counters I mean obviously it's a it's a very different experience because it's an isometric game and like camera angle I think is a a a big component and like is uh is Ghost going to be a freelook camera same as like you know World of Warcraft Final Fantasy or is it going to be ismetric or fixed like lost AR or Le probably it will be a free camera like Final Fantasy that AR does a lot of things right and that feels a little more like quotequote modern MMO and something we're trying to learn from oh yeah absolutely I remember doing vaon I feel like vaulton is probably the best arpg fight isometrically that I've ever done it was incredible yeah and so I'm really happy to hear that cuz like you have a lot of these games that you know really get the combat right it's just man if if only the game wasn't pay to win you know and and like you know a few other things that would be nice and so yeah I'm I'm really happy to see that and what is your like so you have like this is kind of a weird thing right because you're talking about like uh you know having things certified for consoles how do you feel about crossplatform compatibility with like you know a PC player being able to play with a PlayStation player and you know even as far as mobile cuz wow had a mobile app but that was it overall we're fans of the idea that you could play crossplatform you know maybe your buddy has an Xbox and you have a PlayStation or maybe you have both and tonight you know you don't have the big TV so you got to go play on your PC it's nice to be able to just kind of move your character over and and start playing I think where it gets dicey is if you dictate the experience has to be exactly the same and within like the world first raid if there's not 25% of people on switch and 25% people on Playstation you failed so if players decide PC is the way to do Cutting Edge combat that's fine um we're not going to try to make everything exactly equal as long as it is playable and feel like you can you know make some progress right now mobile is not something we're investing in if you know if the game is awesome and people love it maybe we'll consider it but right now it it just mobile is really different you have to worry about things like how do I add dialogue to these characters when I can't have a big download and things like that yeah I think that makes a lot of sense and uh yeah mobile games definitely have like a bad R and so it's kind of hard also like and this isn't an issue right because like especially as a smaller Studio you're managing expectations and I feel like expectations have changed so much this year like the biggest example like last year it was Elden ring this year it's balers Gate 3 and like how much do you think games like that these like massive Blockbuster Mega games kind of shift the expectations because you look at something like for example Starfield Starfield I think was it was an average game right it wasn't great it was wasn't it was the worst game ever it was just kind of average but people perceive it as being a lot worse for example because you're comparing it with balers Gate 3 at least in their mind right I know there's a lot of people that like Starfield I'm not trying to [ __ ] on them but you know it's just that's just how people see it and so how do you manage those kinds of expectations and do you think that like these big games coming out are like AFF those expectations in a positive way in like a negative way or what because I've I've heard a lot of discourse about this with game developers over the past couple of years I think you just have to be very clear about where are you where are you really trying to make an impact on players where are you trying to be Best in Class like balers gate did really really well on the on the The Companions and their interactions and things and then I think secondarily with the like bazillion different paths through through the game like do you want to kill this NBC or or save them um you know that's that's kind of it like it's a Well executed game but no one looks at balers gate and says what I love about this game is it has like I don't know the combat's okay right it's it's good it's not you know I even think that the um the previous Umar games probably a better combat yeah I think the Divinity games sightly a better combat but where balers gate is really Best in Class is is the Companions and where Elden ring is really Best in Class is like this you know gigantic open world and this feeling like I can just hop on my horse and go anywhere and kind of find something cool there um so I think as long as you really blow it out of the water in a couple of places players are kind of willing to be forgiving of other aspects of the game so it's like you you talk about like the branching story lines and I remember seeing your Tweet about that exactly and like those are the two points that I think that you brought up and I I definitely agree because if you ever and like this is not really a very great way to look at it but like if you look at Tik toks there's a lot of Tik toks of different characters saying different things in balder's Gate or different things about shadowart or aaran or something like that or with Elden ring I think that you're right too with like people finding you know this serendipitous oh my God this is a huge new boss I've never seen before or you know like doing some cool combat thing and so with these kinds of games obviously like a lot of them you know they're built around kind of like these best-in-class experiences like what you're saying what is your best case scenario what is the best-in-class experience that ghost is trying to deliver we really hope it's the concept of the blue shards offering you something new every time we think a lot of games I'll you know pick on on on Starfield or or no man's Sky they what they're promising is infinite replayability like we're going to have infinite planets and everyone is going to be unique I don't think that players actually care about that as much as when I go to a planet it's really really cool so what we're trying to do is say we'll have a lot of planets maybe it won't be infinite but we'll have a lot of planets but they'll all be cool and they'll be interesting things to do and stuff you haven't seen before and you know cool combat it's not super fun to go to a a new planet you haven't seen before and you go explore it and there's there's kind of nothing there there's one like pirate base that you've seen before so that is where we hope that we really really make a difference while still bringing that Within the you know the overall design of an MMO it's not just a game about going to these different shards it's a game about doing that and then kind of bringing all the loot you've got and everything else into the traditional MMO um endgame with with large Z you know Timeless aisle type zones and and d and raids so we talked for just a couple of minutes before uh we actually started and uh you mentioned about some of the survival aspects of games and how much of those survival aspects because this has been like a big thing recently like obviously you mentioned valheim this is massively popular p uh you know po world just recently came out massively popular a lot of these games have come out and they've had these survival elements to them and people have really enjoyed it and I think that everybody is trying to hone in on like what is the what is that perfect middle ground for how can you make a game that has the perfect amount of survival elements and so how much survival element is Ghost going to have for us we think of what the survival genre brings are kind of it's a very designery way to speak about it but new verbs for the player to do because you're not just killing bad guys you're also trying to like eat and and keep yourself warm enough and build a shelter and things like that there just things to do in in a traditional MMO you never look at the trees cuz the trees are not interesting the trees are just there to kind of block line of sight um but in a survival game now that the trees are a source of of resources like you you want that tree you want to chop the tree down um so I think that's what it's about for us it's less about oh you're probably going to die and then you know next game in in a Rog likee way it'll be a different experience like I can't imagine you're really freezing to death much in ghost that's not the point but we could have a Zone where it's chilly and so you have to make special protective gear before you can go out and explore okay a lot like valheim yes the mountains yeah I mean and I I think that like for example like the food and drink right a lot of survival games have this and I feel like this is very vestigal like why do we really have just simply a bar and you look at how much valheim innovated that with like the types of food that you can have and how they change what you do so you can have food that now like you know with the Mist lands it gives you the a or Mana or you have stamina or health and you can choose that dynamically so it's like turning kind of like a checkbox into a mini game I think that that's that's one element that I I'm really happy to see some Survival Games actually starting to innovate on and change blizzard talks a lot about the design of of make it a bonus they took rested XP and they made it a bonus rather than a penalty and I think valheim was really clever with food of making it feel like a bonus like when you're well fed you feel awesome rather than oh you're going to starve to death you're like ticking off health or something like like you know don't starve or or other earlier survival games that do yeah I mean there's a lot of kind of that same mindset going into it even then and if you're talking about like kind of the blue shards what is the spectrum of experiences somebody can expect to have like give me two completely [ __ ] different games that you can still play in a blue Shard and ghost how how different can it be um that's a great question we're we're trying to poke at like what are the extremes right now so I'll just make something up yeah imagine in this one blue Shard you have to find five pieces of this crown and assemble the crown okay and a couple of the pieces are just scattered you know in in treasure chests or guarded by monsters but one of the pieces is held by these knights in a castle so you're going to have to like either invade the castle or somehow bribe the knights to get that piece of the crown back so that's kind of a a more standard um RPG experience um a totally different blue Shard might have um a vast desert and it's really really hard to cross the desert so your focus is on what is the transportation mechanism I'm going to use do I do I build a glider to fly across the desert do I capture some type of like giant Beast that I can ride across the desert to kind of get to the other side of so there it's less of exploration and looking for a monster I mean you monsters to kill and it's more of I have this one big obstacle what's the what's the right way to try to overcome on this obstacle man any time that somebody starts talking to me about how to K across a desert it just gives me PTSD from King's Quest like I I the little Oasis yeah yeah and did you did you have it like written down on a sheet of paper the squares oh my God yes two up and three over yes yes exactly this is a guys this is a 1995 Meme and so yeah it was it was a really great time back then I was thinking of Ocarina time where you have to cross the gudo valley desert because I have no idea what the [ __ ] y'all are talking about I haven't played that in so long it's a good game yeah but no I think that's uh that that's that's very insightful and so yeah giving people different kind of obstacles to overcome and also like kind of and this is one thing that I I I always really liked about wow is that sometimes you didn't want to play WoW but you could log on and still play WoW and I think a great example of this is pet battles like this is a totally different experience totally different gameplay but you can still go back and do this exact same thing same with like certain types of reputations like nether Wing eggs and like the more different types of varied gameplay you have I feel like it gives people more reasons to log on and less reasons to go to like other games too yeah like I can't do Mythic dungeons with my friends tonight because of you know I'm waiting for a phone call or something but I can log on and like Chase down some transmog or some achievements I don't have yet and maybe still have my friends on in Discord so we can we can chat yeah I think that makes a lot of sense and like getting people to like if you have like a guild right are you going to have Guild housing because I feel like this is something that most games don't don't they either don't do it or they don't do it the right way so the thing that annoys me as a I guess both a designer and a player about player housing in a lot of games is again like what's the point like making an awesome house to show off is cool and that's great and like genin or or Final Fantasy but our vision is more that within the blue shards because you're building up bases you can just decide one of those is going to be either your house as a player or your Guild's house but still there are monsters out in the world maybe your place gets attacked you know there's a lot more it's it's more integrated the gamepl rather than just being this like oneoff thing that you you know you you can decide to engage in or not well a lot of times like housing and crafting like you go back to Val and you have for example like the type of housing that you have and your comfort level increasing your uh rested experience and like how long it lasts and you have other games where it's like you know the bigger your house is you're able to have different types of crafting options available do you feel like those two things go hand inand to try to like incentivize people to build things like that or is that just kind of something that could happen but it's not that important no I think it's absolutely important that's why when I said before you have more verbs in those games like that's one of them is in order to craft I need this type of building and to build this type of building I need to build this other thing and so you have this this um this progression that feels good when it's when it's tuned well yeah I feel like that's always the uh that's always the difficulty right is like a lot of times with MMOs and I think this is what happens is that people will find the most optimized way of doing something and like optimizing the out of the game which like in my opinion I think is the developer fault because they made the game that way it's like if you don't want people to farm the worst resource a million times and have it be super boring but that's the fastest way then why did you make it give the fastest experience per hour it's just that simple yeah we also a lot I mean speaking as like one half of bad developers here we listen to players saying well I'm bored I need more to do so the developers like well here I'll give you something else to do here's some daily quests here's a grind here's here's some reputation to get I think sometimes it's okay to say you know what there's not a lot you can really do right now to optimize why don't you go like have fun go find something like you said whether it's pet battles or whether it's going and chasing down some titles you don't have yet you see like I I love that because like that's one thing like for example Final Fantasy 14 does so well it's like you come in you do the content you finish the content you're done modern wow has actually started going more in that direction which is really nice to see you even see like season of Discovery the New Classic version like yeah they're doing that they're like okay yeah after you've already leveled all your characters up and done the raid you're done buddy hope you had fun right and like I do you think that's okay for an MMO to say because for so long I think that people were kind of wanting that endless grind I think that now that's maybe a bit shifted yeah I agree again the risk is that if you're a subscription based game and players say hey it's Fe February and I've gotten all I can out I'm going to unsub for the next 3 months you know that starts to hit your bottom line so then the developers like well what can we do to keep the logging in because then they'll keep paying the sub how do you uh how do you feel about the fomo aspect of games like games adding in fomo in terms of like seasonal rewards login rewards for oh I was here for this time and this place and I did this activity how much of that is too much and it's like would you want that in the game because like personally like I see fomo being kind of like it keeps people engaged into a game but like after people fall out of favor or fall out of like the habit of it then it keeps them from coming back as well so like yeah like what's your philosophy on fomo in terms of games it's a really I think it's a really it's a really good tool to get players to kind of stay engaged I mean that's that's literally what it is is my friends are going out tonight if I don't go out with them I'm scared tomorrow I'm going to hear these awesome stories of what they did so maybe I'll just go go ahead and go out with them now and because MMOs can be demanding I think a little of that is okay like well I wasn't going to log in tonight but I really want to see my friend so I might as well do that I think where it gets to be the problem is when again like we're talking about the grind when it's so intense that you feel like you can't take a break at all because people have lives and people want to play other games and stuff like that so when it's so bad that oh I missed a couple of weeks so I might as well you know peace out I think that's crossing the line yeah it's like people kind of at that point they almost feel like they can't keep playing because they're already behind yeah like I I have people all the time they'll ask me like it's a week into an MMO is it too late to start the game now like I mean like should I even bother yeah it's nuts that's unfortunate and like so like with the The Meta chasing and obviously like how do you feel like you know what I do or what tekon does or what Emy does or any any of us like with making content about games like how much do you feel like the way that people make content about games has changed the way that games are developed oh geez like 100% I mean I don't know 10 years ago or something like that maybe more we would all the developers would all be like chasing like how do we get an article in like PC Gamer or how do we get on stage at E3 and now sex and now it's how can we get like people talking about the game how can we get Buzz how can we get people who are excited to stream the game and then they bring their followers in because you know talk about the fomo it's a great way for people to stay engaged with a game without even having to play it like you can't log in tonight but I can watch someone's stream or I can you know catch up on on what someone was saying about the game in a video or something like I think it's huge yeah I think so too I mean it it's one of those things where I think it's just a mode in which games have evolved I think that the only kind of like and this is more so perceived because I think that you don't really have to do this but like people feel like obviously metas are way faster developing in the year 2024 than uh you know 1998 I mean I I think like the best example like look at Age of Empires like people are still making new metas in that game now which is crazy and now a word from our sponsors there's nobody on the planet that spends more time on their computers than us and that's why we are the perfect people to tell you about the best PCS in the universe star Forge systems we love our star Forge systems PCS and we know you will too star Forge systems has computers for everyone from entrylevel Gamers to content creators like us you can find a PC that is perfect for you not only that but their custom cases plate lights and limited edition PCS are out of this world keep an eye out for early next week for their most ambitious limited edition PC Today head to Star forg systems.com and get yourself a new pc today yeah I mean I I I feel like how much is it to where how much do you worry about a meta forming and then just people are constantly only playing that one type of way versus having people kind of play the game the way that it's like you know meant to be played can be a little bit patronizing right but you know in that same uh spirit I think there is a big problem around kind of the the self-fulfilling prophecy because players players hate to be wrong like players hate to be ignorant they'd rather be accused of having bad skill than kind of not knowing the current meta or the right classes to play or the right items to use so if you're a streamer and you say well I'm going to like I mean freaking open up any kind of you know YouTube videos and all of it is about the new broken build for blah blah blah because that you know that gets them hits and then people don't want to be wrong so they kind of adopt that that strategy and pretty soon it feels like well there's only one real class in the the game all the others are are Garo um which often isn't the case the commun would just try it they're like oh yeah this is actually pretty effective too but no one wants to be brave enough to uh you know to be the person who's who's wrong or experimental oh yeah I understand that I have a friend that continues trying to play a rep Paladin in classic W and uh hasn't hasn't worked for 15 years and you know it makes him happy yeah pretty soon it'll come around so yeah it's always a it's always a way to balance that and how much do you think that development should take into account those metas developing and player perception because like let's say everybody thinks that this one thing is the best thing and you see you know 71% of players are all playing this one way like you know you know Poe has this sometimes wow has had this for years like pretty much every game has this yeah we we've actually debated this because there's kind of as a developer there's two strategies to take one is we're going to patch constantly and anytime anything's out of whack we're going to fix it like that was League of Legends every two weeks there's a balance patch to like oh too many people are playing Jana okay we're gonna you know we're gonna we're going to Nerf Jana um the other way is like you look at a game like smash they don't balance it at all like there's it's entirely up to the community to make the meta unstale and and then that Community Embraces it like they they wouldn't want it to be patched they're like no the community will find a way to kind of of of counter of this this really dominant strategy oh I love we know where we're going to land on the like let's balance really really frequently to kind of like keep things moving or or wait a little longer and see if the community can kind of solve it themselves yeah I think that's definitely true I mean I would have never expected in 2007 that Jigglypuff would be a legitimate competitor in Super Smash Brothers Melee I I had no idea right but hungry box here he is he comes in how can you possibly imagine that and like so I'm I'm curious about like obviously like gear treadmills because you have like in classic World of Warcraft you would have to do let's say bwl to get into next or to get into AQ to get into next and so uh like Lost Ark is another example of this where you just kind of have a continuously growing gear treadmill that sometimes it's hard to catch up with and you have games like for example World of Warcraft kind of resets this gear treadmill every patch now it used to be every expansion but now it's every patch how like what is your philosophy on gear treadmills is it good to how often should you have resets should you have resets is this an expansion type thing time frame I'm actually really curious what your philosophy on that is I prefer kind of the expansion level because I definitely get the sense of oh I had to I had to tap out early this particular tier so I'm way behind my friends and I kind of want to get back into it and if someone says well you're going to have to do like these four raids before you can go to the raid we're all in like that's unreasonable like people aren't going to do that but if the catchup is too quick it it just takes the wind out of the sales the people that that did the hard stuff they're like why did I wipe on this boss 30 times when if I just waited a week it would have been you know we would have onot it so I think around a year seems fine if someone has to to catch up a little bit before they can jump back into The Cutting Edge stuff that seems fine as long as it's not like I said unreasonable back when back when ax came out it felt like oh you want to join us in Max well you better start in Molton core and then go to Blackwing lir and then you can finally join us um yeah I mean like and there are advantages to that right because like at least then they go through all the different content but then there's also the disadvantages they can't play with their friends and it's always like you're it's not like there's really a right answer for it and I think that's why it's like it's so insightful to see kind of like what different games do and like what their philosophy on it is because I think that also like player interest is changing a lot like where people were much more optimization driven I think that recently with games that are a little bit more longer formed require you to do a little bit more and that have that you know deeper texture to them I think that there has been a renewed uh sense of I guess appreciation for that I think that you see that with something like balers Gate 3 or even something like valheim where you do have to do a few annoying things but the few those few annoying things like you know sailing around because you can't move or like that does create like I'm sure you probably remember the first time that you're sailing around that shitty little raft and you see a sea serpent and it's like oh okay I'm dead right and then you lose your stuff out in the middle of the ocean and now you're spending three hours getting it back right and it's like this is extremely annoying but at the same time it creates a memorable experience so like where's the middle ground between creating those special experiences people have and just annoying the [ __ ] out of players what Riot would say that I learned a lot from League of Legends and valerant is you need the low lows in order to have the high highs and so if you have a totally terrible experience like you're running back in Elden ring and you get killed and you lose all of your souls that's miserable but we're going to offset that with sometimes you're going to like beat a boss that you thought was going to be really hard and you're going to just get you know tons and tons of of reward for that so it's okay if the sea serpent knocks your raft down you lose all your wood as long as there are other moments when you feel like you're you're on top of the world you know you're you're giggling because you came up with some kind of crazy build and you're you're trivializing stuff it's all LS that's just you know why would that's just torture why would you put yourself through that and that's one of the cool things right and like every game I feel like there's a lot of games this is kind of like a metaphor I I've I've used before and like a lot of games I think the best game tell you to get to the number four and they don't ask you know do 2 plus 2 but you can do 3 + 1 5 - one 10 minus 6 whatever you can to get to that number four and like the open-endedness of it is what makes the experience special it's kind of like what you were talking about with balers Gate 3 and like the massively branching story lines and how much of that like cuz in my opinion I think that having the more a story game like that and a game just in general branches out like the first thing whenever I start a game is like can I break this rock what happens if I shoot this can I kill an NPC right I just try doing every crazy thing and like each crazy thing that you're able to do I think builds immersion because like now you're doing whatever you want in that virtual world and I'm curious like how much of that is a focus with ghost in terms of allowing the game to be like a branching experience with like the narrative or with like just the gameplay like how much different can a person's endgame experience be you know depending on the person or what they like doing yeah I can kind of think of three categories there branching narrative is very hard to do in in an M it's hard to do in any RPG and it's amazing that you know games like Mass Effect let alone balers Skate 3 really really pull it off um the other two ways where I think we have more ability is one in on the simulation side of things part of the joy of having these blue shards is we can let players kind of break the world in a way that doesn't impact other other players like maybe you can lure a dragon in to the Bandit camp and if you do that the dragon like kills all the bandits like that may not work in an MMO but you could totally do it in your own like private server area which is what kind of what the blue shards are and then the Third Way is almost gets back to where we're talking about the gear treadmill gear treadmills feel like they're their most shallow when there is clearly a best in slot and everyone kind of agrees on the best in slot and the best in slot is very easy to prove because it's just bigger number Warcraft it's yeah what gives me the highest DPS against a single Target like that's that's the end all be all if I can ask a question it's not that way in in Elden ring because the weapons are very very different and they're very situational so you don't just say oh I'm just going to like grind my way up to this one you know moonlight great sword or whatever and and that's the only weapon that matters um and so I think if we succeed in giving our combat a little more depth and texture it'll also make the rewards a little more interesting where the answer is more often well it depends on how you play and not just you know o plus three Agy well that's that's higher DPS there's really long answer if there's something I can ask something that I've never really understood is class and balancing and games like League of Legends where like some of your most popular characters fall off and they're not to be used for years to come I don't really understand that because in my opinion when designing a good class to be like okay this character gets to 100 now how does this character get to 100 it gets to 100 by doing 25 times or doing 10 10 times or doing one 100 times um and like for games with have like a heavy gear system I understand that once they get to max level or they'll do more damage than the character who's at mid-level why do you think class balancing is so difficult for game devs to do because I see this in almost every single game that I play or MMO there's always a best class to like some absurd degree like Demon Hunter doing 80% more damag in other classes at the launch of Legion why do you think class imbalancing is like such a huge thing in almost every video game I mean this was my life for a long time in World of Warcraft yeah um part of the answer is because it depends on what the target is and the community will often decide well it's the third boss on this raid that matters because that's the one everyone's stuck on or whatever that's the patchwork that is gating everyone's progress and so let's just say on that fight demon Hunters just have a you know have an advantage and so all of a sudden it's like demon Hunters are overpowered but if you look at the other seven raid bosses that may not be the case it may not be demon Hunters it may be you know it may be hunters and then players like well that doesn't count because that's not you know that's not the boss we care about and it also depends on at what gear are you talking about are you talking about someone who just steps in the raid with just a few Blues I mean blues and a few purples or is this like with every good you know best in slot gear at which point you should be like one stuff anyway like you really care totally maed out so it it's complicated and then it you know gets to be like well the Demon Hunter is really really good if you have an evoker and if you someone is power infusing you or whatever but in a different comp you know that that effect doesn't happen I think the problem is for in my life at least on wow it was hey we did these Sims and then we have these world of logs parses and those both say that this class is great and this class sucks and then that just kind of became the accepted truth oh yeah it definitely is and like you know as soon as people decide that something sucks then it sucks and that's it whoa why are you playing the class that everyone sucks what's wrong with you yeah nobody's inviting that guy yeah exactly red Paladin yeah yep that's the example 100% well anyway I I I want to say thank you so much for coming on and like talking about this like I've had a million questions obviously and so uh yeah thank you so much for your time if people want to play Ghost or keep up with it what can they do um right now it's very hard to play Ghost because we're not giving out um you can follow along our studio is is fantastic pixel Castle you can you know you can follow our website or whatever we're calling Twitter these days right um we have just hired a community manager and as soon as that person starts we will have a lot more information out like one of their first jobs is going to be setting up a Discord for us so that we have a a better way to kind of engage with people who are who are interested again at this early stage we understand not everyone's G to be interested this early but hopefully enough people out there are that's great and and do you have any sort of insight or time frame of when we can actually see some gameplay from Ghost I again if it's up to me I mean I guess it kind of is because I'm the boss but I would love to do it as soon as possible kind of pull the Band-Aid off and get players used to like oh yeah this game does not look like a game that's about to sh like there's gray boxes and there's standin art and stuff like that like I kind of want to just get that out there and have all the memes start about how terrible the game looks so that we can you know just start having a conversation anchor anchor it low and then go higher yeah I I get it I I see what you're doing yes exactly well thank you so much Greg for coming on the show we really appreciate it and uh guys who are watching thank you all very much for watching make sure to follow Greg make sure to follow fantastic pixel castles Fant Fant God what is it yesc we say we say a lot fantastic pixel Castle okay there is only one Castle gentlemen yes yes thank you so much for coming on make sure to give them a follow and guys I think that pretty much just about wraps up the episode so thank you a Greg uh thank you again Craig for coming on and uh damn I think we pretty much got it thank you guys very much for watching and we will see you all in the next one [Music] peace there's a little glammer that I can see the sparkle in your eyes it makes me realize all we need is you and me a light shines from your eyes it brightens and a cloudy day and I find your sh again don't forget to check out War Thunder for free on PC Playstation or Xbox today check out our Link in the description or in the pinned comment below new or returning players that haven't played in 6 months can grab some massive bonuses which include the exclusive vehicle decorator Eagle of Valor 100,000 silver lions and 7even days of Premium all 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Channel: Steak and Eggs Podcast

Views: 161,809

Keywords: asmongold, emiru, tectone, steak & eggs podcast, steak and eggs, steak and eggs podcast, ghostcrawler, ghostcrawler mmo

Id: 8Qcw9t9swPQ

Length: 84min 35sec (5075 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2024