GameDaily has an interview with Rend’s Jeremy Wood this week that covers a bunch of meta topics of interest to MMO players and watchers of this oddball hybrid title. While Rend has no plans to suddenly become a battle royale title, Frostkeep is very much watching what the MMO subgenres and companies are up to in order to “fill the same psychological needs that are being filled by those games in [Rend].” Specifically, Wood says his team learned a lot from Blizzard and the MMO genre.
“Our biggest takeaway from our Blizzard experience is you can make a fantastically unique product without really inventing anything new,” Wood explained. “Blizzard got where they are by taking inspiration from all sorts of different great pieces of games in different genres.”
“When we started looking at how do other games solve [survival and RvR game problems,] we saw a lot of interesting stuff from the MMO space with the Dark Age of Camelot, even PlanetSide where you put these three factions together and you have pre-built social structures that way, and then you pit them against each other in this long-form style battle. That seemed to fit really well with the survival side as well, so we stuck that in there. Then we borrowed all sorts of inspiration from other RPGs, MMOs for just, how do you progress your character. That’s one of the things we always love playing MMOs is having multiple avenues for character progression. Having it so every character ends up being very different from every other character and that was something that we hadn’t seen in survival.”
The interview also touches on how the whole studio prepares for dealing with community interaction, how to handle toxicity on a studio level, how not to wallow in early access forever, how to make best use of streaming, and why the game is buy-to-play.
