A World of Warcraft veteran has addressed how his new MMO will tackle private areas, without them feeling "sad and empty."
Private areas are pretty crucial for an MMO - they let players take a breather when the social element of the game gets a bit too much, and they sometimes even let players express themselves via decorations and such. Just look at Final Fantasy 14's Housing Plots for a great example of private areas used in personal ways.
Greg Street, a former WoW veteran, is heading up the team making a brand new MMO at new studio Fantastic Pixel Castle. In the few tweets below, Street outlines the plain for private areas: "They ideally provide a lot of replayability as you explore different maps with variable combinations and unlock new rules to apply. They let you leave an impact on your world," he writes.
We have a lot to prove to ourselves with the feature, especially that randomly generated doesn’t have to mean sad and empty. In classic games like Civ and Age of Empires, the map variability is key to your strategy, but “omg procedural generation” isn’t always smacking you in the…December 29, 2023
It sure sounds like, from that statement, as though Street's MMO will tackle private areas by letting you have a direct impact on them, much like Final Fantasy 14. In the tweet above though, Street asserts that random generation can't distract from the personal nature of the private areas, and result in them being "sad and empty" instead of vibrant and personal.
In another tweet, Street notes that a tough area with the feature will be keeping them manageable for the development team. You can't have private areas spanning acres of land, because that's just more for the playtesting team and other departments to work through.
It's quite the challenge Street is setting up for himself and others at Fantastic Pixel Castle with the MMO. It's cleat there aren't really any easy answers to private areas in an MMO, but from the sounds of things, it seems like Street is already well aware of how the new MMO can avoid pitfalls.
You can head over to our best MMORPGs guide for a look at the very best the genre has to offer while you wait for Ghost to come around.
