WildStar Interview
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RPS: What sort of variety is there in the Explorer stuff? It's not all walking to a node marked on the map, activating it then having a new path appear, presumably?
JG: We try to give you a lot of variety. I'm a good chunk Explorer as well, and often it's. if you just put a flagpole up there, somewhere in the mountains, and tell me I have to go out there and find it somehow, that actually engages me a lot. But it's good to have variety once you've got up there: what's blocking you, what are things to overcome. It's not all jump puzzles or big rumbly things, we try to vary it zone to zone to zone, so you're doing things that you have to interact with on the way. But basic the gameplay we try to keep it consistent, so it's the kind of things you like. So Explorers, even in the first few zones, you're unlocking cliff paths and that sort of thing so you can get to hidden areas; you're getting jump buffs so you can bounce around and do super-jumping. In the next zone there's a low-gravity area where you can float about, try to leap up the cliff walls to get as high as you can to access hidden areas. There are minefields you have to traverse, avalanches you have to get around. So even the low-key stuff, we try to keep it varied enough that you're engaged: it's not the same thing again and again and again.
Also we tune the mix a lot. What we're trying to do is hit the right balance where you feel the bulk of the game is about what you want, but there's enough shared that you're doing it with your friends, so you're not playing four seperate games but one game all tied together.
RPS: What about the end-game? Will the Paths still be in play there?
JG: We involve the paths in the elder game, and we're really committed to elder game because a mistake that's commonly made is '˜hey, it's a cool game, and you level up, and you get to the end, now what?' So what we want to do is make sure we have an interesting and deep elder game for each of the styles of play. Not styles in the Paths sense, but if you're all about dungeons you're all about those in the elder game; if you're all about solo play you want an elder game that's interesting for that. We're trying to hit each of those major groups if you like dungeons, awesome, here's a raid system with new elements. Our goal for elder games is you need to have tons of stuff to do at the end. There's probably not a better way to set fire to a bunch of money than make an MMO and not make an elder game for it.
