NCsoft Europe Interview
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How does NCsoft build from the ground up?
I can't speak for NCsoft as a whole, only about our development strategy in Europe. What we're looking to do is to create novel game experiences, not to make copycat games in any way. While we totally appreciate games like World of Warcraft, that is not our starting point for developing new products. What we do is to identify a number of game concepts at a very high level that could be interesting, and we put them through an incubation process which we use to prove the game mechanics before even considering pre-production. We do that through a series of iterative processes.
You're not just taking an iterative approach to development, then, but design as well.
What we're doing is taking the agile approach to development and then applying that to the proving of the design concept. Obviously, nobody has a crystal ball and you don't really know what's going to work until you've proven it, so step number one is proving that a certain set of game mechanics actually works and is fun. Is it actually fun at its core? Incubation isn't even pre-production because we're not trying to take the end user or the visuals into account, we're only looking at it from a game mechanics point of view. If it's not fun, it goes in the bin.
