A group of Blizzard and Riot Games veterans have come together to create a new MMO with the benefit of years of working on World of Warcraft and a League of Legends spin-off, though some of the harder design questions facing the genre have yet to be riddled out.
As part of an introductory Q&A session to introduce the studio putting the MMO together, the Fantastic Pixel Castle team addressed whether they plan on supporting UI mods and, if so, will they be “curtailed to not create the arms race present in World of Warcraft” or if a more Final Fantasy 14-like approach will be taken?
"You've astutely called out that there's a pretty big risk to doing something like add-ons in the context that World of Warcraft does them, where you can get to the point where you've got all these interesting fights with great mechanics, and then you have people who are in this arms race with the developer to build add-ons that play the game for you," user experience director Ed Altorfer says, before shouting out someone from the WoW community who creates add-ons that he and his pals use.
- A 13-year WoW veteran formed his own studio to make an RPG that plays like "World PvP: The Game" and feels like a mini MMO channeling "early Blizzard"
- World of Warcraft and League of Legends MMO veteran says he saw Riot and Blizzard "seemingly abandon" approaching development "from a place of humility instead of arrogance"
"And so, I think that's something we don't want as much of. I think the combat-modifying add-ons world is probably not one we want to live in. But, while we don't know exactly what we want to do, there are probably some great use cases for exploring add-ons and I'll try to talk about a couple of them."
For Altorfer, the standout is accessibility features the team hasn't been able to prioritize or other, smaller UI preferences. "That could enable new people to play who wouldn't otherwise be able to play," he adds. "I think that's awesome."
"I'm not exactly sure where we're going to go. One thing I can say is that I think we know we have a responsibility to ensure that a player can download, pick up, and play our game without using add-ons. We've all probably experienced that thing where we're trying to onboard a friend and it's like 'Okay, download the game and then install these 80+ add-ons.' And then six hours later, after you've configured them, you're tired and don't end up playing."
At the time of writing, it would appear that Project Ghost is shooting for something less busy than World of Warcraft but perhaps busier than Final Fantasy 14, at least in terms of what's permitted.
As Altorfer alludes to, add-ons are a pretty common thing in Warcraft – you can check out our favorite WoW Classic add-ons here, for one – though it's a different beast in Final Fantasy 14. Square Enix's critically acclaimed MMO is happy to shut the door on their usage – not that players follow the rules. You'll likely remember the time when one of Final Fantasy 14's world-first raid races garnered some controversy after it was discovered one team used plug-ins, something even the director and producer Yoshi-P weighed in on.
Heck, one of the many changes coming to Final Fantasy 14 in its next expansion, Dawntrailer, is essentially a popular tool that players use to organize raid encounters, now made official.
From the sounds of it, Ghost won't be coming down that hard on add-ons, though they'll likely still be more sparse than what you're used to in World of Warcraft.
Ghost is more World of Warcraft than Final Fantasy 14, but the team wants it to "fit into your lives."
